May 15, 2015

local woman fires scathing attack on Destination Merredin Advertising.

 

The Destination Merredin meeting at The Shire offices, was a lovely and considerate get together to thank everyone for their amazing efforts during the ANZAC and Destination Merredin weekends.

The Deputy Bec McCall formally thanked the town for their hard work and enormous effort preparing for and during the events and acknowledged the closeness of the community.

We were in awe of the statistics she shared…

6,600 poppies of various mediums were made

400 people were involved in making these poppies.

Some groups are still making poppies for next year.

It calculated to over 2000 hours work by our community, if each poppy took an average of 20 minutes to make

A teacher from the college mentioned that the students had showed a lot of excitement and were very proud of their town and the display of poppies.

One lady, in a scathing attack complaining that Quote “No one, No one, absolutely no one knew anything about Destination Merredin.” She went on to say that “advertising on websites and facebook were a complete waste of time, no one saw it”.

It seemed a strange comment and said with such fury. It could only be an unjustified personal attack on shire staff who gave their heart and soul for this event.

 

This is only my opinion and observations of the advertising for the event:

I saw it advertised in the Mercury several times.

Courtney also supported it with online features with The Mercury.

I heard it on the radio lots of times, Anthony was amazing.

It was on Destination Merredin website

It was on The Shire website

The Shire facebook pages sometimes more than every day for at least two weeks.

Destination Merredin Facebook.

‘Merredin Today’ Website and event calendar.

Merredin Today Facebook advertised the events daily from the calendar of events.

It was on The Shire big sign on the road.

It was in the notice board on the main street.

I also saw material sent to my letterbox.

 

That’s just the advertising that I noticed, there is probably lots more as well.

The person also complained bitterly that the big sign on the highway was far too big and was a danger to road safety. The solution was that Shire staff walk into every business and tell them about the events. I figure this to be unreasonable but I’ll try to do the math to see how much will be added to your rates for everyone to get a personal invite to every function.

But there again, if someone doesn’t listen to the radio and support Anthony, doesn’t read the local paper and doesn’t support our media, doesn’t look at any sort of social media and obviously doesn’t look at mailouts, are they really going to take notice of a personal invite? I don’t think so.

Could I please request that The Shire media take a print screen of their facebook advertising that would show how many people actually saw the posts? If they show No one, No one, absolutely no one…then I’ll give up on facebook forever.

I was flabbergasted at the comments, I know not everyone is on facebook but there were so many attempts to let everyone know, then another person mentioned in conversation afterwards that three ladies came up from Perth to Destination Merredin for the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. It was known in Perth!

One more comment was that the weekend was a great success and hundreds attended, so the advertising MUST have worked well.