The electoral campaign is coming, which is like the peak season for arrests by the Prosecutor's Office in San Bartolomé de Tirajana to act ex officio. The ITB Fair in Berlin (from March 7 to 9) is known to have existed for decades and the Department of Tourism of the south of Gran Canaria has waited until the end of February to launch an express tender that it has awarded based on price criteria. a promotional campaign against companies with proven technical and professional solvency such as JFT, 22ª Grados or Atlantis Publicidad. Tourism has followed the price as a criterion against the criteria of the Federation of Advertising and Communication Companies, which recommends doing things with European and Western rigor. Thus, the technicians have preferred that a municipal provider, that is, a press outlet that has a radio station and a website not sequenced by Google, manage the distribution of advertising among other media, breaking the confidentiality of the market since it has to give a non-independent company a price for its services. Likewise, there is a risk of self-purchasing services to the detriment of the real audience and the correct allocation of public money.
71% of Maspalomas Tourism advertising contests called in 2022 and 2023 value price over creativity, ideas and technical proposals from agencies. And, furthermore, almost half (47%) give less than three weeks to develop and present the proposals, insufficient time to be able to carry out or plan a campaign or the required advertising actions. The company most affected by this practice is JFT Comunicación, which has always enjoyed municipal respect for collaborating in the launch of the Maspalomas logo. An unwritten pact in the sector that has been blown up as a result of the new methodology signed by officials following political instructions from Ciudadanos (Cs), partners of the PSOE and NC government pact.
As everything is improvised, the prices applied are 'tun tun' and without logical criteria such as the audience of each medium or the effort in the coverage carried out. That is to say: a medium with a presence at ITB in Berlin 2023 earns the same as another that has a radio station in a house in San Fernando without auditing by EGM and without a legal frequency. When reviewing the evolution of the calls during 2022, it is very worrying that more than 7 out of 10 contests analyzed in the fourth quarter value the economic offer more over the technical one. With the standard in hand, technicians mostly fail to comply with the logical criteria in their calls for tenders. Considering the four criteria that are most violated, 66,3% of the contests analyzed in 2022 contravene more than one criterion in 70,03%.
