As approval slumps and scandals break, Mexican government pushes advertising budget past US$150 million/year
Mexican First Lady Angelica Rivera and Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The Mexican government led by under-fire President Enrique Peña Nieto has dramatically raised its spending on advertising over the last few months, a move that has coincided with a dramatic fall in his approval ratings after several scandals broke.
According to reports in the Mexican press yesterday, based on access to an annual government report detailing expenditure, the state’s advertising spend has risen to over US$150 million. There was a sharp rise toward the end of 2014, when stories broke over a corruption scandal involving the first lady, Angélica Rivera, and the disappearance of 43 missing students, now believed to have been killed.
The figure means the government is now spending around US$422,000 a day on advertising, around four times as much as it did in 2013, when it spent around US$33 million in the first 10 months of the year.
Human rights organizations and opposition figures criticized the government yesterday, claiming it was attempting to buy off the media.
Dario Ramírez, the director of the Article 19 human rights organization told Telesur that the government was attempting to directly influence the media.
A Greenpeace protest against Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
“The discretion and lack of regulation of billions (of pesos) of public money spent by the government or governments toward media, is subtle censorship,” he told Telesur. “They use this money as a reward or punishment for editorial lines.”
The government is now spending around US$422,000 a day on advertising, around four times as much as it did in 2013.
The money was spent on television, print, radio and Internet advertising, with some also going to advertising agencies and consulting firms.
One report yesterday showed how the country’s three largest national newspapers received US$11.2 million in total.
The two largest TV stations were the recipients of close to US$15 million between them, with US$9.7 million going to Televisa. Peña Nieto’s administration is seen as very close to that TV network and Rivera, in a statement referring to the recent scandal, said that in 2010, when she dissolved her contract with Televisa, they paid her with a house she had been living in and an additional US$6 million.
Another revelation was that some payments were made directly to radio and television journalists. A report last year by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers had identified this issue earlier, shining a light on the so-called “Chayote” phenomenon. This refers to journalists who have been identified by the government as badly paid or facing “obstacles” in their work. These reporters are then given a fee for each article or story they contribute and are sometimes taken on as government advisors to justify the payments
Comparisons
Some brief international comparisons however show that the Mexican government is not alone in splashing the cash on advertising.
In Argentina, according to figures in its 2015 Budget, the government predicts it will spend around 1.2 billion pesos (around US$140 million) on official advertising next year, plus an additional 1.6 billion pesos through the Fútbol Para Todos programme. Adding together the two figures, that would equate to a total spending of approximately US$331 million.
Advertising expenditure is even higher in the UK, where government advertising increased by a fifth to £289 million (US$437 million) in 2014. The British government said that the figure was higher than normal due to a necessity to explain the country’s deficit reduction, Scotland’s referendum on independence and “improving public confidence” over the UK’s role in Afghanistan.
Figures are harder to come by in the United States, but according to a 2012 Congressional report, federal government agencies spent more than US$900 million on advertising back in 2010. That figure would naturally be much higher today.
@urlgoeshere
Originally published in the Buenos Aires Herald, on Thursday, January 8, 2015