“£6 million” campaign only cost £364,000

Misleading Mail: The advert in question cost only £364,000 to make 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.

http://twitter.com/shamikdas/status/5022016011 Shamik Das

Another day, more Daily Mail b******* http://is.gd/4sBtK
http://twitter.com/derbyshiredude/status/5022909978 RJ

RT @shamikdas Another day, more Daily Mail b******* http://is.gd/4sBtK <– This is SO typical of Daily Mail reporting.
Rory

‘The ad, being broadcast at prime-time as part of a £6million campaign, shows a father telling his daughter a story about climate change destroying the world,’ is what the article says. Nor does the headline even give the impression that the full £6m was spent on the ad.

If you are going to devote a full section to media manipulation, you should be a bit more careful about mis-representing what other people say.
http://www.shamik.co.uk Shamik Das

Why mention the £6m figure at all? And if they’re bemaoning the fact the Government are spending £5.75 million on this in the first place, why focus on an advert which used up 6.3 per cent of that figure?

It’s plain to see what they were looking to do. The fact they did not mention the cost of the advert at all nor what the other 93.7 per cent of the budget is being spent on should convince you of that.