Take a good look at this billboard.
It cost $56,000.
That includes over $38,000 for the board itself, another $16,000 for “planning” and another $1,130 for “services.
The money went to a company called Promoworks, Inc, which as some people have discovered is registered to the owner of Target Marketing.
You may recall Target as the agency of record for provincial government advertising. They also did the triffid logo thingy the provincial government now uses.
Promoworks is an interesting company. You won’t find it online. You won’t find it listed in the telephone book.
The only director of the company is Noel O’Dea, the guy behind Target Marketing. In fact, the mailing address for the company is the street address for Target. Unlike the corporate registry entry for target, Promoworks has a different mailing address. It’s a law firm – O’Dea Earle - which, among other things, is home to the Premier’s brother Tommy.
Now there’s nothing unusual in any of that.
What’s odd is that the bills flowed through Promoworks when, by any reasonable deduction, the work was done by Target. It’s not unusual for an advertising agency to do political work like this, even an agency like Target whose client list includes Air Canada Jazz, McCains, A & P, Irving and other major brands. And it’s not like some simple sleuthing didn’t figure it out.
Yet for some reason the bills went through a legally registered company but one without any public face at all.
Odd.
The campaign bills themselves seem a bit odd too, odd if one considers they were supposed to be advertising for a national campaign.
A single billboard in downtown Toronto cost almost half the total budget for the project, if you consider only the actual line item in the financial statement for the billboard. People who know don’t measure advertising by the amount of media coverage it garnered. They measure it by the impact it had on consumers and by all informed accounts, this sucker didn’t have any impact on consumers outside Newfoundland and Labrador.
Even allowing for some media coverage of the billboard, the total impact of that money would be negligible in the total amount of advertising, news work and other communications coming from the political campaigns themselves. It had about as much effect as a pebble tossed in the Atlantic in the middle of a hurricane.
It’s almost like this whole thing was supposed to look good even if it didn’t do anything substantive beyond generate billings, a campaign by Fernando if you will.
There are some niggling details that don’t add up here either.
Like the $244.50 for registering the domain “anythingbutconservative.ca”. It went to internic.ca, incidentally, not something called “intonic.ca”. Registering the domain doesn’t give you content and there’s no bill for the website design in there anywhere, apparently. None of the amounts or labels match up to that.
Like splitting the contract between two advertising companies when Target/Promoworks could easily have handled the whole thing.
Like figuring out what “advertising services” constitutes that wasn’t captured in the rest of the bill or why a billboard required $16,000 in “planning.”
Like what the heck is an Inbox Factory, anyways? That one still defies the searchers.
Rest assured though, they are still searching, even if all they turn up are more questions.
-srbp-
