Stanton On…Your Tax Dollars At Work—In Texas

By Rick Stanton

Let’s cut to the chase. The Washington State Department of Transportation is paying a Texas “creative consulting firm,” Sherry Matthews Group of Austin, “about” $1.6 million dollars for its role in a $4.4 million dollar marketing effort for the new Highway 99 tunnel that I still don’t quite understand.

In a Seattle Times article by Mike Lindblom (link below), he notes that a WSDOT representative, Emily Glad, said, “We see a big portion of people not knowing the alignment. People are busy. We know we need to reach them several times for them to take action” (i.e., use the tunnel).

Glad sights an online survey in 2017 (sample size undisclosed) that found only 30% of respondents knew the tunnel will have different entrances and exits (in fact, there are none inside the tunnel) than the old viaduct. I propose that the 70% who had no clue have their driver’s licenses revoked. Their ignorance of the facts goes beyond tunnel confusion; they’re a threat to society.

But beyond the needless waste of $4.4 million in taxpayer dollars is the insulting snub of marketing firms in Washington State, dozens of whose offices are a stone’s throw from the tunnel, in fact. They also employ thousands of people who pay taxes that are going toward this project.

[Pub. Note: We learned from a WSDOT spokesman that the tunnel contract actually is an extension of the contract given to the Matthews Group in 2013 to promote the then-new toll lanes on I-405. He said there were five other competitors for the original contract, but could not name them.]

Either the RFP was so egregious in its demands that our highly qualified local marketing pros tossed it into the wastebasket after reading page one, or it was selectively sent to companies incapable of fulfilling those demands. Just the fact that some company in Austin, Texas even received the RFP is damning to me.

A few years ago, the City of Bainbridge Island hired a design firm from South Carolina to design a logo for my fair municipality—to the tune of $35K. There was no RFP: they simply hired the same company that also had bilked the city of Poulsbo for the same purpose.

When I caught wind of this, I raised Holy Hell and started a mess for a BI City Council that was/is composed of people without one ounce of business acumen or an understanding of what fiduciary responsibility means. Net result: The project was stopped and given to a local designer to clean up the mess. Amazingly, it still is a mess and the logo never has been used on anything.

Essentially, BI pissed away $35K because they could. Now WSDOT has upped the ante on pissing away taxpayer money.

God knows I’m the last person to be against clients spending money on advertising. But this is just another fiasco foisted upon us by government departments who have no idea how marketing works and when it’s needed.

And for the record, the billboard creative is at best sophomoric and does nothing to assuage any confusion that exists among that deaf and dumb 70%. And I’m waiting for Amazon to sue the state for stealing its signature “smile.”

P.S. The only local winners are the four major TV stations, who are billing more than $2 million to air the commercials, and Lamar, the outdoor company hired to post nine bulletins on roads leading to the south tunnel entrance, beginning as far away as Burien. The message on those nine boards will be changed before the tunnel opening on Monday, Feb. 4.