The IPA has welcomed the Coalition’s dramatic U-turn on funding for public health campaigns, saying that it is “unsurprising” that evidence emerged that the spending freeze had cost lives.
An extra £15m has now been set aside for promoting the Government’s anti-smoking website and £14m will be made available for a campaign promoting healthy living.
IPA director general Hamish Pringle said: “As the IPA proposed, the Department of Health and the COI have taken the opportunity presented by the Coalition’s drastic budget cuts to carry out the biggest ‘test and control’ assessment in advertising history.
“Unsurprisingly to the professionals working in advertising, media, and marketing communications agencies, the analysis of the data has proven that the dramatic reduction in investment has had a similarly dramatic and adverse impact on citizen behaviours, with a consequent net increase in societal costs.
“We therefore welcome the reinstatement of budgets for key campaigns and look forward to a much closer integration of policy and marcoms once the future of the COI is decided later this month.”
The DoH found that the number of people ringing the drug abuse support helpline, Frank, had fallen by 22%, that visits to the Smokefree website had fallen by 50% and that the number of people joining the Government’s lifestyle website was down by two-thirds.
There was also evidence that “the cessation of marketing activity [had] resulted in declining quit attempts, and subsequent loss of life from smoking-related illness”.
The report added: “Following the Coalition government’s freeze on non-essential marketing expenditure, all social marketing programmes were reduced and expenditure on advertising all but ceased.
“We have now had the opportunity to learn from the freeze and to assess where the loss of mass communications had a negative impact… We now recommend that some advertising, and other forms of mass communication such as sponsorship, paid media partnerships and PR, be resumed.”
The revelation follows criticism of the DoH decision last year to axe the £1.5m awareness campaign for flu vaccinations. Figures released this month showed there had been a rise in deaths from 474 in 2009/10 to 535 in 2010/11 and that a disproportionate number had been among the young.
Lansley justified the freeze on marketing spending last year as a departure from previous Government’s “lecturing” approach.
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