“£6 million” campaign only cost £364,000
The Daily Mail’s implication that a government advert cost £6 million could not be further from the truth. We are not surprised.
Today’s Daily Mail carries a trademark ‘outraged’ article about the Government’s “Act On CO2” campaign, giving the misleading impression that £6 million had been spent on a single advert featuring “a bedtime story about drowning kittens and puppies”.
The entire Act on CO2 campaign costs £5.75 million, only £364,000 of which was spent on the advert, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change told Left Foot Forward. Their entire campaign budget, she added, was only a fraction of the £40 million spent by the Department of Health on anti-smoking campaigning in any one year.
The report, on page 21 of this morning’s Mail, says “critics” have described the 70-second ad as “misleading, because it presents as fact disputed scientific evidence that humans have caused climate change” and quotes backbench Tory MP Philip Davies, a man whose voting record is “very strongly against laws to stop climate change” and “against equal gay rights”.
“More than 200 complaints” have been made to the Advertising Standards Authority about the advert, adds the article, though there is not a single mention in the entire paper of the record 22,000 complaints, as of yesterday, made to the Press Complaints Commission about Jan Moir’s column on the death of Stephen Gately last Friday.
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