Image: Paul McFarland, Picturskew Photography.
A Northern Ireland council is to spend £450,000 on a Christmas ad campaign.
Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council’s (LCCC) regeneration committee has agreed to begin a public procurement for a communications company to deliver its seasonal campaign from 2025-28.
A new independent research report in chambers has suggested advertised council Christmas activities encourage an uplift in visitor spend by approximately 30%.
A council officer said:
“Due to the lead in time required to procure a new three year service contract to be in place to allow the early planning of Christmas 2025, which commences pre-summer 2025, it is proposed that this work is tendered in Autumn 2024.
“This should include consideration of the need to refresh the integrated marketing branding for the 2025-2028 period and beyond.
“The financial implications will be up to a maximum £450,000 over three years. A total average annual cost of up to £150K from the tourism budget estimates.”
The officer told the chamber that radio advertising could become more of a focus due to “expensive TV advertising”.
This led to a request from committee chairperson, Amanda Grehan (Alliance): “What if we got Hugo (Duncan-the Country Music DJ) maybe?”
A council receipt provided to elected reps for Christmas 2023, has shown £23k of ratepayers’ money was spent on a 30 second TV ad shown on UTV, ITV X and Sky over a two-three week period with over 1.6m “impressions”.
A 20 second advert on Cool FM and Downtown radio across a two week period cost £4.5k with almost 620k people “reached”.
Downshire East DUP rep, Uel Mackin added: “What are we going to be marketing?
“Instead of just repeating the Christmas lights and all we’ve had.
“There is about 70-80% of people coming to Lisburn because they have heard about what we have early. They come because they want to see something different.”
The regeneration director told elected reps he was “confident any issues would be resolved”.