FOI - Marketing and communications [Sep 2024]

Your request 

How much money have you spent on external contractors for public relations (including marketing and communications),

1. In the financial year 2021/22
2. So far in the financial year 2022/23?

And: I am referring to any external contracts the GLA has with outside people and organisations, with the purpose of providing the GLA with public relations support, including marketing and communications

Our response

I can confirm that the GLA holds some information within the scope of your request.
The GLA works with a media buying agency on targeted media spend to deliver key operational messages around major events such as New Year’s Eve, engage Londoners to help support rough sleepers off the streets, promote tourism and encouraging Londoners back to support economic recovery, promote holiday activities for young Londoners, support across the cost of living crisis, or informing Londoners about upcoming policies that may affect them.

In the period covered by your request, Wavemaker was appointed as our media planning and buying agency and you can find the budget figure for each year in the GLA’s central marketing budget decision documents for 2021/2022 and 2022/2023:

MD2756 GLA Marketing Budget 2021-22 | London City Hall

MD2931 GLA Marketing Budget 2022-23 | London City Hall

Marketing services are primarily bought into the GLA through a Group-wide Framework Agreement, with a single supplier ensuring best value for money. Please note this framework may not cover all marketing activity undertaken by the GLA; some areas may carry out activities outside of the central marketing budget. The GLA may work with other agencies on an ad hoc basis for marketing related services like creative development and video production. However, it is not possible to objectively define and identify all such activities within such a broad request.

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described and equates to 18 hours of work.

This is based on the time required to review our expenditure with any agencies used and identify which spend with an agency relates to one or more of the services that we might outsource. The way we record our spend does not align with services and can not easily be extracted.

We have therefore refused this request under the cost limit provisions of section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act and this letter therefore constitutes a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the Act.

• Advice and assistance about refining your request:

To bring the cost of responding to your request to within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing the scope of your request so that we can more easily provide the information you are seeking. For example, by making a request about spend with a specific company, rather than the type of service; by asking about a specific campaign rather than a type of service because this generally aligns better with our finance records.

• Further advice/assistance:

You may wish to review our overall central marketing budget decision documents for 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 and 2023/2024. Please note this does not cover all marketing activity undertaken by the GLA; some areas may carry out activities outside of the central marketing budget:

MD2756 GLA Marketing Budget 2021-22 | London City Hall

MD2931 GLA Marketing Budget 2022-23 | London City Hall

MD3152 GLA Marketing Budget 2023-24 | London City Hall

Marketing services are primarily bought into the GLA through a Group-wide Framework Agreement, with a single supplier ensuring best value for money. In February 2023 it was announced that Wavemaker was appointed as our media planning and buying agency

The GLA may work with other agencies on an ad hoc basis for marketing services like creative development and video production. 

The GLA does not currently buy marketing services related to SEO or PR.

The GLA’s spending over £250 is published on our website: Our spending | London City Hall

Details of the GLA’s contracts over £5,000 are published on TfL’s website: Contracts greater than £5,000 - Transport for London (tfl.gov.uk)

You can find examples of FOI request where the GLA has released details about individual campaigns on the GLA’s FOI disclosure log: FOI disclosure log | London City Hall