Nogueira defends new criteria in official advertising.

247 - Former director of Editora Globo, journalist Paulo Nogueira, from Diário do Centro do Mundo, defends a new criterion for the distribution of official advertising and states that the current model favors Globo. Read below:

Why the distribution of government advertising needs to change.

By Paulo Nogueira, from Diary of the Center of the World

In a recent video, Lula appears speaking at a PT (Workers' Party) meeting.

At one point, he refers to official advertising. And he says that no media outlet has stopped receiving money for criticizing him.

Judging by how often he brings up the subject, it's clear that Lula is proud of it.

But it's a slightly more complex issue.

The PT administrations essentially followed the party guidelines in distributing advertising money.

The problem is that the billboards reflected monopolistic—and often corrupt—practices across all media.

On television, for example, Globo had achieved formidable dominance in advertising thanks to a legalized kickback called BV, or Bonus for Volume.

It was an invention of Roberto Marinho, and the objective was to chain the agencies to Globo.

The more an agency advertises on Globo, the bigger the bonus – or bribe – it receives.

That's the logic.

When traditional advertising entered a crisis from which it would never recover, in the mid-1980s, Globo's BV (Bonus Volume) became a survival factor for most agencies.

This constitutes, among other things, unfair competition, but competing is not exactly an attribute of Globo and other media companies. To this day, they enjoy a bizarre, anachronistic, pathetic market reserve.

Since bad practices quickly spread, other companies followed Roberto Marinho in adopting BV – although they never came close to achieving Globo's results, it's true.

This was the situation when the PT took over.

Did it make sense to maintain a distortion born from a viscerally corrupt practice, the BV?

I didn't do it, but that's what happened.

According to an official survey, during the ten years of the PT (Workers' Party) government, Globo – even with smaller audiences across all platforms, bombarded by internet advertising – received 6 billion reais in government advertising.

This sustains a journalistic army that ranges from Arnaldo Jabor to Merval Pereira – and which is entirely dedicated to perpetuating an unjust, unequal, and iniquitous Brazil with a biased, tendentious, and dishonest daily preaching.

Society is harmed. So again: shouldn't the Lula administration have brought decency to the distribution of advertising funds?

Listen to a video of Jabor and you'll inevitably say: of course he should.

But that wasn't done.

Nothing, in fact, was done.

The problem, incredibly enough, has worsened.

Consider this: The internet is a brake on corporate media. In the market as a whole, the internet's share of Brazilian advertising already exceeds 12% of the total.

Advertisers are following – albeit somewhat slowly – the movement of their consumers towards the internet. Consumers are spending more and more time online and less time on other media – newspapers, magazines, radio, and even television.

But in government budgets, according to official figures from 2012, the internet accounts for no more than 5%, and most of that ends up on corporate media websites.

Again: does that make sense?

No.

Firstly, because the government, like other advertisers, should keep pace with the march towards the internet, so that its advertising is seen, read, and heard more widely, since consumers are connected.

Secondly, because society desperately needs the alternative voice of digital journalism.

She is pushing, she is accelerating the transparency process that the country so desperately needs.

Without the internet, we wouldn't know that the Supreme Federal Court (STF) paid for a trip with public money for a Globo journalist to write (favorable) articles about Joaquim Barbosa's irrelevant visit to Costa Rica.

Modesty aside, the revelation came from the newspaper.

Without the internet, and congratulations to the blog O Cafezinho, we wouldn't know that the IRS fined Globo around 250 million reais for tax fraud in the purchase of the rights to the 2002 World Cup.

Society benefits from the scrutiny of digital journalism.

The 5% allocation of government funds to the internet, for all these reasons, is a mistake, a big mistake – just as maintaining the situation from ten years ago, born from monopoly, bribery known as BV, and lack of competition, has been a mistake.