The government census ads are offensive. If you have been alive in the last few weeks, then you have no doubt received several postcards from the Federal government regarding completing your census documents and returning them immediately. If you have listened to the radio or watched television, then you have no doubt been exposed to similar advertising.
Now make no mistake about it. You pay for those ads and for those direct mail pieces. I do not have any information about what those direct mail pieces cost, but my belief is that the government may have spent in excess of $100 million, maybe significantly more, in advertising and direct mail pieces, not counting the direct mail piece -- the census itself. All this money was spent to encourage you to fill out your census form.
Arguably, 96% of us would fill out the census form with no government advertising reminders. The advertising expenditure then logically must have been spent to encourage the other 4% to fill the form out. Do you see where I am going with this reasoning? We could have just saved the money and estimated the other 4%. We predict a lot more important things with less data -things such as the economy, the unemployment rate and the value of the national stimulus package.
I won’t even go into the issue of whether or not the census could have been done, significantly less expensively, electronically. But that is another issue. For now, I want to call your attention directly to the ads.
The ads are insulting. I do not know who wrote the ads or who defined the audience that the ads were targeted to reach. But I hope you share my outrage. As an example, I will just mention one ad, although I could mention many. It was a radio ad. The radio ad said, and of course I paraphrase, “We won’t know how many buses to put in your city if you don’t answer the census. You might get on a bus, and it might be totally full because when you didn’t answer the census, we didn’t know if your city needed three buses or four buses.”
Really, that was the essence of the radio ad. First, I didn’t know the Federal government paid for buses in my city, perhaps they do. Secondly, no city needs a census to know how many buses they need. That is just stupid. It’s insulting to think that the Federal government uses our tax money to hire outside advertising firms to write ads that are so totally irrational and are written for an audience with a 60 IQ. Who would be motivated by the bus ad to fill out your census document? Oh, gee, I better go fill out my census document, or else the buses will be full and they won’t know how many buses to put in my community.
For me, it sparks of a Socialist viewpoint. Fill out your census documents or we won’t know how much corn to produce. We won’t know where to ship it unless you tell us where you are. Fill out your census document so we’ll know how many cars to build. Now that we own General Motors and a good part of Chrysler, we need to know where you live so we can know where to ship these cars once we build them.
It’s absolutely ludicrous, but it’s unfortunately a typical example of the way our government views its citizens. I hope you are as insulted and outraged as I am. What can we do about it? Nothing. Writing your Congressman won’t help. The money’s been spent. It won’t even come up again for another 10 years—at least the census won’t. But don’t give up hope. If there’s one thing that we do know, it is that change is inevitable. And change will come. It remains to be seen whether it is change for the better.
Tune in.
I will be writing more about the government advertising programs in the next few blogs. On second thought, maybe you are right.
I am just jealous that I did not have an opportunity to make a barrel of easy money writing these ads, between spoonfuls of cereal, as I ate my breakfast.
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