Evidence of meeting #97 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Professor, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual
The word that is missing, in my view, is “control”. What we differentiate about advertising, compared to any other form of communication, is that it is the one thing where you have complete control over the content. In anything you're doing that involves things like photo ops, an interview with a journalist, or other activities, you can't control what is going to happen, but with advertising you have complete control over the design and even the timing of when it's going to go out. For me, the word “control” is a really important part, because in some ways what we are concerned about is who is controlling the content.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Okay, excellent.
On the topic of independent oversight, Professor Rose, you've mentioned the possibility of an advertising commissioner. I'm wondering if you could talk about how that office would function and how it would relate to Advertising Standards Canada.
Prof. Jonathan Rose
What I'm suggesting would be as a replacement to Advertising Standards Canada.
Prof. Jonathan Rose
While I think there's a lot to be desired about Advertising Standards Canada, one of the big problems is that there doesn't seem to be a clear accountability to Parliament or an appropriate lever with which they can enforce their mechanisms. I think that having it reside within Parliament as an officer of Parliament would alleviate that.
They would review all the advertisements the federal government runs, issue a number that would be necessary for the government to have before they purchase air space or radio space, and have a sense of the need for the campaigns. This would include public opinion research as well as a sort of proactive idea about whether an ad fulfills its goal of informing Canadians about policies.
NDP
September 28th, 2017 / 12:25 p.m.
Professor, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual
Yes. I agree with this idea. I think it's a smart one. I would also have a concern that if that particular individual were somehow seen as connected to the governing party, you would have a challenge, because that person would potentially be legitimizing activities that the rest of us could understand probably are questionable.
Suddenly, the governing party says, “Well, you know, there's no problem. It's been cleared by this individual.” We see that sometimes with different officers. I would simply put a question to the committee. If such a position were created, how could we ensure that it is at arm's length from the government?
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Certainly, and as you suggest, that is an issue for other officers of Parliament as well. There have been some recent controversies.
I want to ask both of you whether you think there are areas in which more government advertising would be warranted. We're talking a lot about restricting government advertising.
Prof. Jonathan Rose
Yes, I think it was great with the health scare for H1N1 influenza and the mandatory vaccination. I'm talking about provincial ones. I think those are really warranted.
I think that tourism ads are probably useful, but the amount of money spent on advertising external to Canada is miniscule, so it suggests that the government doesn't put a lot of emphasis on that.
Generally, advertisements are effective if they respond to a need, and I can think of no greater need than health care.
Professor, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual
I would think it would be useful to have advertising that promotes the fact that you can find information through the Government of Canada's information portal—just generic, very high level, basic advertising that runs on a regular basis.
If we can think of “Good things grow in Ontario”, why is it that we can't have some sort of a campaign that runs year after year—hopefully outlasting whichever government happens to be in power at any given time—that becomes a slogan that we can all identify with and allows us to think that if we need information, here is a good place to get it?
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
One government program that I feel has not been very well promoted is the disability tax credit. As a result, there's a whole industry of consultants who, for quite hefty fees, will help people apply for the credit. New Democratic MPs have been holding public information sessions across the country to try to get the word out to people that they can apply for this benefit directly without going through consultants.
I wonder if the presence of private consultants promoting what should be public services might be an indication of where more public advertising is warranted.
Professor, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual
What I often explain to people is that, in my view, advertising in some ways should be the last resort, not the first thing you do. Remember I used the expression about control. It's when you're trying to control the information. If you do everything you possibly can to get information out there, then advertising becomes an option to be able to reach people, because for some reason you can't do it in all these other uncontrolled methods.
In your particular example, I would suggest that perhaps advertising is not the first thing we should be thinking about. It would be more a matter of looking at all the other options that are involved, such as direct marketing, media relations, and other forms of getting information out there.
Conservative
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Thank you very much.
Thank you both for very interesting thoughts on what we should do.
I'm just going to follow through with what Erin was saying. As government, we have to communicate what programs and policies we have so the public understands. You're saying we should be doing it as direct marketing. I'll give you an example of direct marketing. We all have ten-percenters and householders, and despite the fact that we give that direct information to the public, they say they never received it, never read it, didn't do this, or didn't do that. The public is inundated with too much of what they call junk mail. How does a government overcome this by any other means but advertising?
I was looking at the 2016-17 costs on advertising, and at which department was spending a lot of money. Departments with a social justice agenda spend the money. So I am trying to figure out how we make this policy better to avoid unintended consequences.
You can go for it, Professor Marland, and then I'll go to Professor Rose.
Professor, Department of Political Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, As an Individual
I can explain at a high level. When I think of direct marketing, it encompasses a wide variety of things. You're right. Obviously pieces of mail in your mailbox is one of them, but telephone calls would be another. Email is another example of things.
Probably the way to think about it is that a really good communications campaign uses all the different forms of media that are available to try to get the information to the individual. For every person who is taking a householder and not looking at it, there will be some who do.
Equally, you want to impress your message multiple times. If you just happen to see it once in your mailbox, even if you look at it, you might forget about it. However, if you receive an email or a telephone call about it, you see it on television, hear about it in the media, or whatever the case may be—social media, for example—the more times you hear about something, the more likely it is to connect with you; plus the more likely you are to reach more people.
We might tend to spend a lot of time talking about government advertising, but my view is that a lot of the time this might be driven by the media and the media's interest. I have this general view that the media often treats it like a bit of a horse race. How much money has been spent on advertising in this given time? Also, they're waiting for these quarterly results. It's really not as helpful as a broader consideration of communications as involving an awful lot of things, of which advertising is one element.
Prof. Jonathan Rose
The reality is that, for the average citizen, trying to digest information is a bit like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. You have this torrent of information coming in and it's hard to discriminate between what's important and what's not.
I don't think governments and many organizations are really strategic or smart in making sure the information they are providing responds to a need. I think there is so much extraneous information citizens receive that, when they do get important information, it's lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the other things.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I have a counter-question for you. I can understand that the large media houses would love to have the advertising dollars, and that puts the ethnic media and the smaller media at a disadvantage. With this rule that says anything over $500,000 will be audited by the ASC, do you think we should have another standard? People can go to the ethnic media and not have to pay that much money. Do you think there are some holes in this policy that may be improved?
Professor Rose.
Prof. Jonathan Rose
That's another great example of something we talked about earlier, that the $500,000 is a big campaign in traditional media. As you pointed out, it's not a lot of money—
Prof. Jonathan Rose
Pardon me. It is a lot of money in ethnic media, and it is certainly a huge amount of money on digital platforms.
What I think that raises for this committee is whether that $500,000 threshold is too high, and whether you may want to lower that to encapsulate both the trend toward digital marketing and other things like ethnic media.
Liberal
