This is such embarrassing rubbish: news mentions are not advertising

The government’s communications office – all hail Kurt Farrugia – has called in a British advertising agency to collate the media coverage generated by the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the EU-Africa summit.

And now it has got a representative of that agency to address a press conference and say how much the coverage is worth, in a really transparent and embarrassing attempt at deflecting criticism of how much that meeting, and the EU-Africa Summit, cost the Maltese public: between €10 million and €12 million that could have been put to much better use elsewhere, in the public health service, for instance.

If the media exposure were to be quantified, it would reach the equivalent of €548.9 million in advertising costs, Kurt Farrugia’s advertising representative said.

What pants. The media exposure was all in news content, and there is not a newspaper or television network anywhere in the civilised world which will or is permitted to take payment for mentions in news reports, which means that you can’t put a price on mentions in news reports, and therefore you can’t quantify them, still less reach the figure of €548.9 million as Kurt Farrugia and his man in advertising have done.

To make matters worse, the man from the British advertising agency has assumed that he is talking to a league of backwoods bunnies in backwoods-bunnyland (not an outrageous assumption to make, admittedly) and made a direct comparison between news coverage and advertising, which besides being a complete logical fallacy is also a shockingly bad media assessment if not downright nuts.

Effectively, this is what he said: spending between €10 million and €12 million on those meetings generated a lots of news coverage and that news coverage is worth the equivalent of €548.9 million in advertising.

As I said, total pants.

News mentions are not advertising, but exposure, which is different. Exposure can be good, bad or neutral. In this case, it was neutral. In other words, nobody gives more of a damn about Malta now than they did before.

Advertising always has a message. That is the point of it. News mentions, by definition, do not. Advertising sells something specific. News mentions do not.

As somebody who works in the field, I’ll put it the plain, cold terms that somebody should have done at that press conference: if the aim of the Maltese government, in organising these meetings, was to get exposure for Malta, then it should have dispensed with the meetings altogether and spent those €12 million on a properly targeted international sales and marketing campaign.

As for that man talking so patronisingly to the Maltese press (which in this case richly deserved to be talked down to, I’m afraid), I’ll quote Kurt Farrugia’s deceased and safely rotted political hero at him: Go back where you came from.

How offensive, honestly.