CJI study: Romanian public advertising doubled in 2011

Cristina Blanaru Creativity, Studies

The Romanian state advertising doubled in 2011 compared to 2010, while the transparency of public advertising contracts decreased, as the study  “Public Advertising: Step on it!” shows.

The study, made public by Romanian  Independent Journalism Center (CJI), shows that between January-October 2011, the public authorities offered for contracting budgets of over RON 137M  (@ EURO 32.5M).

Most of those contracts (67%) were attributed on the “lowest price” criteria, that doesn’t take in consideration the impact on the public and eludes professional criteria of allocating the advertising. For only 2 of the 345 analyzed procedures, the impact evaluation report demanded by law was published.

Over half of the procesures (54%) weren’t also published on the specialized site for state advertising contracts (www.publicitatepublica.ro), as the public acquisition law demands.

We face once again proves that show us a lack of respect towards the law, towards the public money and the general public. In 2010 there were adopted legal rules which, in Government’s opinion, were to accelerate the absorption of European funds. They might have accelerate it – RON 115M from the total RON 137M amount – are coming from European prokects, but transparency and authorities responsability were affected. European funding means public money and authorities – regional or central – must show to the public the way they are using the money (…). As the advertising budgets in the privat sector decreased by half, because of the economical crisis, the public advertising budgets doubled, making the state one of the main players on Romanian media market. This situation imposes to authorities even bigger responsabilities in what concerns the transparency and the efficient attribution of the contracts, strictly in public’s interests

Ioana Avadani

Executive Director CJI

The Romanian public advertising market research made by CJI aimed to identify the effects generated by legislative changes in public acquisitions area operated in 2010. There were verified the procedures (auctions and offer demands) published between July 2009 – October 2011 on Romanian eLicitatie website and there was analyze the respect of the ad rules in publishing the announcements on www.publicitatepublica.ro.