Government propaganda for more than 90 million HUF

Atlatszo.hu has lately asked the Prime Minister’s Office to publish the details of the campaign ’Hungary performs better’. The requested information qualifies as public data, even so, not all of our questions concerning the expenses have been answered exhaustively. It turned out that the gross price of the costs of the campaigns on online and print media and on public posters will be expectedly 256.7 million HUF, a brochure promoting the success of the government cost altogether 91.5 million HUF.

The public data requests were sent out in two rounds: firstly, we inquired about the amount of money the government has spent on electronic (online and TV) and print media advertising and how many ads these contracts exactly included. However, since we did not receive a proper answer concerning the costs of TV ads, we gave another a try. For the second attempt, we made inquiries specifically about the TV and radio spots of the campaign and the production and the distribution costs of the before mentioned brochure. The replies of the Prime Minister’s Office revealed that they had been contracted with Lounge Design Kft. to carry out the creative tasks of their communication campaign. The contract was about 150 million HUF +VAT which could be raised with further 135 million HUF. The campaigns costs on TV spots were also included in this contract. They were at a price around 8 million HUF. Our further questions on the details of the campaign’s costs remained answered. However, we have received the expenses of the requested governmental brochure. According to this, the production costs of the brochure was around 55,4 million HUF (gross price), the distribution which was carried out by the Hungarian Post cost approximately 32.5 million HUF.

This text was originally published in Hungarian on 25 June 2013. The article was translated by atlatszo.hu volunteers.