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So then this happened.
And with no notice at all, in the space of a single day, AA Roadwatch disappeared off our airwaves.
According to their own announcement, this was a decision made by the AA, which “decided to move away from this service and instead focus on growing other areas of [their] business”. That’s corporatespeak for closing down an unprofitable business.
I had quite a few people get in touch with me about this, mostly wondering whether I had something to do with this. If you’re not familiar with my history on this, it’s pretty long-running, but in brief, the AA is a registered political lobbyist, it’s their job to persuade people, in particular politicians, to be more favourable towards the motor industry – in short, build more roads and less public transport.
They seem to have been pretty successfully. In the last few decades, while most of Europe developed sophisticated public transport, Ireland earmarked billions for motorways, often to places like Limerick and Westport that couldn’t remotely generate the amount of traffic that would justify the scale of the projects.
Public transport in Ireland is pathetic compared to most continental countries, the only major project in the last 30 years has been the Luas, and even this was ferociously resisted by the AA’s lobbying. They were central to the decision to punch the heart out of the system and make sure that the two lines didn’t initially connect, a decision that cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of euro, and commuters a decade of inconvenience.
The AA used AA Roadwatch to, day in, day out, beat the drum that the only significance of the Luas was how it caused traffic congestion.
I took several complaints that all basically said political lobbyists aren’t allowed to supply content for broadcast on RTÉ, and RTÉ used every trick in the book to defeat those complaints. Then, one Friday morning in July, they AA said that the slots were axed. It was obviously a pretty hurried decision, the staff didn’t even finish their day’s work, AA Roadwatch was broadcast normally on Friday morning, the announcement was made that day and the whole thing was shut down so fast that they didn’t even do the drivetime slots on Friday afternoon.
The south-Dublin accents, the Exposé, the reporting of a new bus corridor as though it was the siege of Mafeking, all the jokes about pronunciation of a car crash on a roundabout… I’m not going to do the accent, I’m no good at that, I’m not Mario, the loose horses, the traffic jams caused by Luas works, it was all gone. A cultural phenomenon just disappeared.
But that’s not the strangest part of it.
The reasons given by the AA to axe the slot was a) that they wanted to as they put it, focus on other areas of business, basically save money, and b) because technology has moved on and people have smartphones that give traffic information that people can actually use, making AA Roadwatch even more useless than it already was.
These seem like nonsense to me. Firstly, the point about traffic on smartphones, that has been true for the best part of a decade, it doesn’t really ring true that AA management only heard of smartphones last Friday week.
But the really strange one is that this is a cost-cutting measure. AA Roadwatch was insanely good for the AA. Now, it’s true that my complaints did have some effect. My complaints were rejected, but the bulletins normally ended with giving out the AA’s phone number and web address, supposedly to ‘report traffic’, but coincidentally both the phoneline and website were overwhelmingly used for the AA’s insurance sales business.
On the same day that RTÉ wrote their defence to the Broadcasting Authority, that call to action was dropped from the format. Despite that, have a listen to what Dr Michael Foley is professor emeritus at the school of media at TU Dublin – formerly DIT – also a member of the NUJ’s Ethics Council said on the podcast in February 2019.
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So that’s what the AA got. But what did it cost them? AA Roadwatch was produced by seven part-time staff; their typical researcher was a recent PR graduate – none of them had any qualifications in transport or any related field. Even if you are doing it rich and paying €50k full-time equivalent, that would work out at less than 200 grand; and let’s be really generous and assume the same again for non-salary costs, you get up to 400 grand.
That’s the annual cost of producing the 12,000 slots that went out on all RTÉ stations, plus TodayFM and a couple of locals. Even if you forget about the other stations and just consider the RTÉ slots, that works out at €33 each. Contrast that with a 30-second ad on Morning Ireland, that would set you back anything up to €2,500 or more.
Advertising rates change according to the time of day and the time of year, but considering that most of those Roadwatch slots were in prime time, and they were 90 seconds long, buying that much advertising time would easily set you back €50m euro a year.
To be fair, I did put a little dent in the commercial value of them, and the branding value is priceless, but let’s not call those slots real ads; in fact, let’s be really generous and discount their value by 80 per cent.
That still leaves the AA getting €10m’s worth of advertising for less than €400k in production costs, so the reasoning that this is a cost-saving measure just doesn’t wash. Another thing, the AA said that they would be keeping up their traffic-reporting service, just not on the radio. That promise didn’t last long.
The AA Roadwatch Twitter account averaged about 40 tweets a day on traffic reports, basically went dark the moment the announcement was made.
So the answer is that the best I have is guesses. Maybe RTÉ realised that, notwithstanding their win against me at the BAI, the whole thing was legally unsustainable and closed it down a decent interval after declaring victory; maybe it’s not unrelated that we happen to have a Green Party minister for communications, maybe it was something else.
