More like money slipping through their fingers

If like me you watch far too much television you may have seen the following advert (found on YouTube which is being slow (again!)) in the past month or so popping up during the advert breaks of The Bill and X Factor. It's part of a campaign called In Our Hands by the Learning and Skills Council.
Should you be by any chance wondering, it cost the LSC, £324,367 to commission. This represented 4% of the total budget the LSC has for the campaign of £8 million. A snip of the budget really, until you realise that to show it during the summer as meant they've paid the TV channel £2,410,716 (ex VAT). They're also planning on spending a further £658,380 in Jaunary on the campaign.

The purpose is, of course, to drive people to the website, the website itself only cost £6,460 (ex VAT) to design, which sounds cheap, but then that figure excludes scoping, information architecture, development management and project management costs. Anyone who knows a little bit about IT project will know that a hell of a lot of money excluded.

So what's the traffic like? Well, in the eight weeks since the campaign launched they've managed to get 79,296 visitors. The vast majority of which were during the first couple fo weeks since when it has tailed off to an average of about 1,200 visits a day. So currently it's costing them somewhere in the region of £20-£30 a visit.

Money well spent then!