Advertising, marketing and communications controls (HTML)

Policy abstract

1 – Control of promoting, marketing and communications (AMC) expenditure ensures that, the place taxpayer cash is being spent on authorities communications, it’s cost-effective, coordinated and displays practical requirements and skilled finest practices.

2 – The AMC spending management doesn’t substitute or negate every other authorities or departmental procurement or governance insurance policies and processes.

What is in scope of this management?

3 – The AMC management applies to the next kinds of expenditure:

• promoting together with: prices of media; charges and fee for media shopping for; media and channel planning (applies to all channels, together with however not restricted to TV, radio, cinema, video and video-on-demand (VOD), audio, in-app, cellular, digital show, paid search and pay-per-click (PPC), social media, out- of-home (together with ambient), print, press and advertorials);
• marketing actions together with: inventive improvement and manufacturing; design and branding; direct and relationship marketing; electronic mail marketing; buyer relationship administration programmes; telemarketing; marketing campaign assist traces; cellular and SMS marketing; partnership marketing; recruitment marketing; sponsorship marketing; discipline or experiential marketing; content material marketing; influencer and affiliate marketing; merchandising; advertiser funded programming; audio-visual exercise; storage, printing and distribution of marketing supplies;
• communication technique, planning, idea and proposition testing and improvement;
• social, financial and market analysis that informs communications, marketing and promoting exercise, together with polling;
• evaluation and analysis of communications, marketing and promoting exercise;
• printing and publication of promoting, marketing and marketing campaign supplies, excluding any required by parliamentary Standing Orders;
• External marketing campaign and communications occasions (e.g. launch occasions), excluding coaching;
• public relations (PR) exercise, together with publicity related to consultations, stakeholder and public occasions and company charges; and
• digital exercise together with: marketing campaign web site and software improvement.

Threshold

4 – The management applies to any marketing campaign, programme or venture which includes promoting, marketing or communications expenditure of £100,000 or extra inside a monetary yr (excluding VAT) – even the place a person factor is lower than the approval restrict.

Process

5 – The course of to request approval for promoting, marketing and communications exercise is printed on the GCS website.

6 – In order to make sure a well timed determination, organisations are inspired to interact early with GCS, together with sharing draft enterprise instances forward of formal submission.

7 -GCS will:

• endeavour to return a choice to departments inside a 21 calendar day Service Level Agreement (SLA) from the date that an software is formally submitted and to provide discover of any modifications to this SLA (e.g. the place Parliamentary recess or ministerial modifications might lengthen it); and
• have common communications with organisations as soon as a submission has been obtained to make sure a ‘no shock method’.

8 – For all accepted expenditure, organisations ought to submit an end-of-year analysis report back to GCS that units out the success of the exercise in opposition to its targets, and gives suggestions for future exercise. Reports must be submitted to [email protected].

9 – Spending approval could also be contingent upon assembly particular circumstances. These might be set out within the determination letter despatched to the organisation’s Director of Communications, who might be requested to acknowledge these circumstances. Acceptance of any software for spending in a subsequent monetary yr might be depending on assembly any circumstances set on earlier approvals.

Templates

10 -To request approval of promoting, marketing and communications spend, please use the templates supplied on the GCS website. Completed functions must be despatched to [email protected].

11 – All queries regarding this management must be directed to [email protected].