VentnorBlog has been carrying out some investigation into where the Isle of Wight council is spending money on adverts in the media.
We originally asked the council’s press office (as we have to with any questions to the council) for the figures. They said they couldn’t provide the information to us and that we’d have to request the data under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.
Late delivery broke law
The FoI law states that any request must be answered within the maximum of 20 days. Despite this, the council broke the law, delivering it 13 working days after the statutory FoI maximum. No reason was given.
We received a massive spreadsheet detailing payments made to media outlets.
Total spend
Labeled as the total amount spent in the year 2009-10 to date, the figure provided was over £900,000.
That broke down to
- £394,205.44 in Media Payments
- £170,301.62 in Recruitment Advertising
- £344,515.44 in Isle of Wight Council Image Campaign
Clearly there’s loads of information – too much for a single article – so we’ll be publishing the detail of it in a number of articles over the coming weeks.
As with all of these things, the devil is in the detail.
The Media Payments is the part we’ll look at first.
Which media source got the most money?
Which media source do you think the largest payment went to? How much do you think they received?
For the case of openness, we should state that VentnorBlog received £44 via the council. Not directly, but because they controlled the purse strings of a lottery-funded community project.
