Questions to the Mayor of London – answered at on 20 March 2021.
How much money has the GLA group spent on advertising each year since May 2016 and how much has been allocated for future advertising budgets?
The GLA has a responsibility to keep Londoners informed and engaged in our work, including to inform them of services that are available to them and policies that may impact them. Advertising plays an important part in this as it allows us to reach Londoners, particularly hard to reach communities in London.
Since 2008, the GLA has worked with Wavemaker (previously MEC) as our appointed media planning and buying agency. All our significant marketing and communications spend has been via Wavemaker.
The GLA’s advertising spend by financial year can been found in www.london.gov.uk/questions/2019/17429.
At this time, we cannot attribute an accurate figure for “future advertising budgets”. As always, we will work strategically with our media buying agency to decide what will be the most impactful way to reach our audiences and achieve our goals, and therefore we cannot confirm what spend will be allocated for advertising campaigns that have yet to be decided.
However, as per the recently published Budget, the Central Marketing budget will be reduced by £300,000 in the next financial year.
Transport for London’s advertising spend can be found in MQ on TfL’s advertising: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/2020/1764. TfL’s future plans for 2021/22 are currently in discussion with GLA and DfT colleagues and are not yet finalised.
The London Fire Brigade ran a one-off advertising campaign in 2018 to recruit women firefighters – total spend on this campaign was £250k. The LFC provisional annual budget for 2021-22 and the following 2 years is £15k per year.
LLDC advertising spend was £80k in 2016, £125k in 2017, £80k in 2018 and 2019 and £20k in 2020. The future LLDC budget is £50k in 2021-22, and a provisional budget of £65k is allocated to the subsequent 2 years.