Preponderance of government/govt. agency ads

C

Chamar

Guest
There are just so many of them. Off the top of my head:

- Safe Sex campaign (it only takes one sperm.....)
- Drink Responsibly (know the one that's one too many etc. etc.)
- Drive Carefully
- Energy Awareness (don't switch things on between 5 and 7....)
- Anti-smoking ads.
- Advertising Commission - know your rights ad
- Ads telling to you to eat/not to eat butter/cheese/milk
- Give blood
- Race Against Waste
- Get the Point not the points
- Financial Regulatory Authority ('I don't know what APR is!)
- Check the Register
- Iarnrod Eireann (sorry, why???)
- TV License


Don't get me wrong. I'm not judging these individually on their merits and I should obviously just watch less TV but doesn't there seem to be an awful lot of these ads? I would be interested to know how much money is spent on the production and airing of these commercials and the relative benefit of each as opposed to investing in alternative methods of action (e.g. installing bottle banks, mobile blood donation clinics, manually checking the register, banning alcohol advertising etc etc etc.....) I wonder if these less 'glamourous' activities are given the same priority.
 
Do you accept that TV advertising is an effective communications medium for private businesses?
 
Did you know that a lot of these campaigns are not dealt with by the government but have instead been outsourced. e.g if you phone the Financial Regulator you get through to a minimun wage/ no benefit callcentre. not the financial regulator. The people manning the phones have little financial experience and are told to refer people to the brochures. They are also told to lie about where they are located. i.e. they are to say that they are in Dublin and that they are working directly for the Regulator. Try calling them.
 
madisona said:
Did you know that a lot of these campaigns are not dealt with by the government but have instead been outsourced. e.g if you phone the Financial Regulator you get through to a minimun wage/ no benefit callcentre. not the financial regulator. The people manning the phones have little financial experience and are told to refer people to the brochures.
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Surely this could be an efficient use of resources in this context?
 
madisona said:
They are also told to lie about where they are located. i.e. they are to say that they are in Dublin and that they are working directly for the Regulator.
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This is a fairly serious claim to make against a Govt agency. I trust you have a solid basis for your allegation? Specifically who is telling the staff to lie - Their own management, or the FR staff?
 
I do, but am not in a position to provide the evidence. maybe lie is a strong word. The Financial Regulator does not publicise the fact that it has outsourced the phone information service or that the call centre agents on the phones are on minimun wage with no benefits or security of tenure.
 
It'd be typical for call centers to give the appearance of being more local to the caller, some Indian call centers for UK based companies go to the trouble of teaching staff regional UK accents. If the number dialled is a local one it's easy to make incorrect assumptions, though if you asked I doubt they'd lie.

If a call center really wants to fool people into thinking they're talking to the government dept. then they should misconfigure their answering machine so that certain paths will just hang up, close up for lunchtime and at 4:30.

Then if they make sure the staff give misleading and inconsistent information, bounce you back and forth between sections, and generally just sound irritated you've called then you'll be convinced you're straight through to the civil service.
 
madisona said:
I do, but am not in a position to provide the evidence. maybe lie is a strong word. The Financial Regulator does not publicise the fact that it has outsourced the phone information service or that the call centre agents on the phones are on minimun wage with no benefits or security of tenure.
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Would you expect any organisation, public or private, to publicise the facts about their outsourcing arrangements? What do you want - "Terms & Conditions apply - the person who answers your phone may not have a great pension"? Seems pretty ludicrous?

I have heard some UK banks refering to 'UK call centres' in their adverts, presumably as some kind of backlash to the India outsourcing?

Anyway, to get back to the original query - I'm wondering why the query was directed at the public sector? Given that 20%-40% of the price of every grocery basket and every pint of beer is down to advertising costs, if there are queries about the value of TV advertising, these queries are relevant for ALL advertisers.
 
point taken. terms and conditions are not really relevant. I guess my issue is that I don't think that government agencies and departments should be outsourcing. I realise and accept that it is now standard practice for private industry such as banks , insurance companies etc. but I feel that government jobs (with pensions, benefits etc ) should stay in the public sector. Also as far as I can tell they give the impression in their ads that you will be contacting staff of the Financial Regulator which could be considered misleading. Also if you call and ask them where they are they will dodge the question.
 
OK - I think I now understand your point of view, but I respectfully disagree. A large part of the reason for outsourcing is flexibility. If the FR is running campaigns at certain times of year, the demand for call centre agents will vary. If they make a business decision to cut the phone lines next year and refer people to the web only (just for example), they could be left with a load of agents sitting on their asses. Outsourcing of non-core functions like call centres makes perfect sense.

Your claim that they 'give the impression that you are contacting staff of the FR' is yet again a fairly serious one. Pay attention to the next ad you hear, and confirm or deny this allegation. I'm pretty sure that you won't be confirming it.
 
I don't think that it is that serious a claim .The ads say "Contact the Financial Regulator on 1890 77 77 77" To me this gives the impression that if I phone that number I will be contacting staff of the Financial Regulator and not an outsourcing callcentre.

I retract the claim that agents are told to mislead people who call, purely because I am not in a position to provide any evidence to back it up.
 
Getting back to the "ads" - I think the money has to be spent. Awareness is important. In some cases, all the other suggestions you make are run in parallel to the Tv Campaign!


I suppose it would be good to see how "successful" the campaign was after it was run. i.e Blood Donation - do they see an increase in donators after the ad? If so, its money well spent I suppose.

Just my tuppence worth!
 
I suppose that is my main point. They are expensive and how do we know that they work? Regarding moderate drinking and imnproving road safety it seems they have had no effect. At least when a company advertises it has to answer to its sales and profit margins. I'm not against the principle for a second, it's just the amount of them conerns me. I think they can be a lazy way to govern and the govt. can just point to the latest campaign as evidence of doing something even though the problem still exists. Regarding the ads themselves, they are so abstract and slickly produced that for me, at least, the message is lost. They never feature real life/people. I mean, I've sat in pubs with people who laugh hysterically and sing the songs of all the car-crash ads. They would find it harder to do this if faced with the real thing (as in survivors/family of the dead) instead of some multi-million euro costing simulation with a stupid song.
 
I think the car crash adds have raised awareness. Last week I sat in the car with my daughter. She waited until everyone had belted up before she'd move. One guy (her friend) in the back didn't put his seat belt on at first. She turned, said it's the guy in the back who causes the damage and you've a big head behind me...so buckle up!!!
 
ashambles said:
It'd be typical for call centers to give the appearance of being more local to the caller, some Indian call centers for UK based companies go to the trouble of teaching staff regional UK accents.
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Most of the call centres in India brief their staff each day on the weather in the UK ( or wherever they are calling ), what happened in the soaps on TV the previous evening etc etc, as well as having the clocks on the wall in UK time etc. Sign of things to come.
 
madisona said:
I don't think that it is that serious a claim .The ads say "Contact the Financial Regulator on 1890 77 77 77" To me this gives the impression that if I phone that number I will be contacting staff of the Financial Regulator and not an outsourcing callcentre.
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Would you have the same expectation of Guinnesses, or Microsoft, or Lever Bros? When you ring one of their phone numbers, do you expect to be contacting their own staff and not outsourced call centre agents?
 
RainyDay said:
Would you have the same expectation of Guinnesses, or Microsoft, or Lever Bros? When you ring one of their phone numbers, do you expect to be contacting their own staff and not outsourced call centre agents?
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No. I would expect to get through to a callcentre in Bangelore, Glasgow, Cork or whereever. However when I phone an Irish government department I have an expectation that I will get through to staff of that department. I think that in light of the race to the bottom and outsourcing debates that took place last year during the Irish Ferries dispute ( which Irish Ferries comprehensibly won) that this discussion is pertinent. I would also question why the public sector unions are staying silent while the jobs of their members are being quietly outsourced. (call centre union is an oxymoron. Such a thing does not exist)

Btw this discussion is not related to the OP so there are in effect two seperate discussions in this thread. hope this isn't an issue.
 
What makes you think that the FR has outsourced existing jobs? I'd bet a fiver that these call centre roles are new, as the FR itself is new, and its consumer advice service is even newer. So no existing roles have been outsourced.

And of course, under pan-European public sector procurement guidelines, the FR could not have set out any tender evaluation criteria like 'pays above minimum wage' unless they had a sound business reason for doing so.

There is no inherent race to the bottom associated with using a call centre - it all depends how it is done. And btw, some call centres are unionised - see [broken link removed] for example.
 
RainyDay said:
And btw, some call centres are unionised - see [broken link removed] for example.
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my remark on union representation was incorrect. Some call centres as you point out recognise unions. I think the number of employees in Ireland who are union members is about 15% although I suspect that the rate is lower in other countries.
 
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