Should they be allowed spend money on corporate entertainment for sponsors - Yes
Should that money be spent from a hidden slush fund which is shady as hell - No
There, I’ve made that a bit easier for you to understand
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That’s a judgment call but so is most stuff in business to be honest.
They’re in a competitive market for advertising. Clearly a lot of ad-spend goes outside RTE and it’s hard to think that ad-buyers have any particular bias towards giving spend to RTE unless it’s deserved.
Sure - cut all the client spend, sales spend, cut most of the RTE ad sales team etc and you’ll have saved a bunch of cost and by your reckoning the Euros will still flow in as strong as ever. Simples.
With who?
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The clients would have spent the money elsewhere in different industries that their Ad Agencies would have determined. Its how the advertising ecosystem works. No big advertiser buys TV ads or sponsorships directly. Its all done through agencies which is why the agencies get massive discounts because in many cases they’re the ones that hold the budgets and the power.
I doubt anyone in Renault woke up one morning and decided they wanted to sponsor the Late Late completely out of the blue. It would likely have been one of a number of possibilities pitched to them by their Agency.
Ah here - are you purposely putting on the stupid act for an argument.
With no effort
All the other commercial tv stations in Ireland
All the commercial national and local radio stations in Ireland
Online advertising incl video channels
Print advertising
Billboard advertising
etc etc etc
Renault sit down and decide they want to sell more cars in Ireland. Then they decide to advertise/market. As part of that they figure out how best to reach the customer and RTE ultimately is only one of the options they have for their spend.
RTE on the other hand, is making the case to Renault (or their agencies) that they can achieve better than spending money on Virgin/Today FM/Women’s weekly etc. Some of how they do this is through relationships built up through (gasp/shudder) being at client entertainment events together.
etc etc etc
Well sure that’s simple as hell then… and avoids all contentious issues. Eh, how much should they be allowed spend given they are given huge amounts of public funds every year? And should it be proportionately spent? Or just a certain percentage of their commercial revenue?
You’re telling me junkets to the world cup are necessary for a marketing company to understand that rte, a borderline monopoly, may be an ideal place to deploy their advertising if they want people to see it?
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What percentage of their commercial revenue did all this spend amount to do you know? Genuine question.
I’d say the employees whose wages get cut are paid from the public money and the employees who get outlandish wages and go on junkets are funded from the commercial revenue. But that’s ok because it’s a small percentage of commercial revenue.
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I think that’s a fair question but the reality is there is no “right” answer. It’s all judgement and it’s one of the key flaws in the public/private funding model I suppose.
Its a super little country all things considered.
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Seriously? Other broadcasters have long made the argument that rte have a special place in the market because they are publicly funded. The fact that they get so much state revenue allows them to flood the market as such. They have the infrastructure and the reach. They can offer cheaper advertising because they are subsidised so much by the state, particularly if there is competition on a given time etc. Simply put, they can offer greater bang for an advertisers buck because so much of their costs are underwritten by the state.
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I don’t know. It seems excessive from afar but I don’t know the details around it. Was it some massive accounts that they grew etc. Were competitiors doing similar?
I know lads in multi-nationals in Dublin that get all-expense trips to Hawaii with their spouse if they hit their sales targets in a year. Is that necessary? Clearly the hyper-successful multi-national think so but lots of others would disagree.
Yeah - I’d buy that argument too.
55% of its revenue is from the state.
I’ll answer by own question here @Juhniallio. This is taken from the report from The Journal.
During the period 2012 to 2022, RTÉ spent an average of approximately €150,000 each year on client entertainment/ hospitality, which was paid for through the barter account. The average annual commercial revenue generated by RTÉ in each of those years was €150,000,000. To put this into further context, during the same period 2012 to 2022, RTÉ generated €1.65 billion in total commercial income. During this period, RTÉ used approximately €1.6 million of barter account revenue for client entertainment and corporate hospitality.
By my Maths they spent 1% of their Commecial Income on Corporate Entertainment. I think 1% is adequate.
Now them going cap in hand to the Government looking for more handouts when they’re taking in this kind of commercial sponsorship is another issue and I’d question where all the rest of this money was going, along with the likes of the Montrose land sale.
I’d say, without even bothering to look, that the staff costs in RTE are way out of whack with the likes of Virgin/TV3 or independent production companies. Obviously at the top with the “talent” but I’d say if you went down through the organisation there’s a lot of people in well paid and well-protected jobs.
This thread came up somewhere again this week. Obviously anonymous but might be an indication as to the culture in Montrose
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/719cv4/ive_compiled_all_the_tweets_from_secret_rté/
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What competitors? Rte dominates the markets it operates in.
Your point about some lad in a multinational is unrelated and irrelevant.
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Id question whether those figures are correct at all. We’ll see in due course. If they are correct, then 1% of commercial income is fuckall. I’d suggest that it’ll come out the the rating of services costs /values has been wildly inflated through these barter accounts, as the details of the tubridy/renault deal would suggest.
It also depends whose they’re spending it on. Themselves and their partners is my strong suspicion.