You may recall a few weeks ago our blog post (and this Squamish Chief story) about a BC Transit video promoting a bus route that doesn’t exist. It highlighted two climbers coming down the famous Stawamus Chief and boarding a BC Transit bus – but no bus goes anywhere near the Chief.

“Picky, picky,” tsk-tsked BC Transit spokesman Drew Snider of the criticism about promoting a fake bus route.

“False advertising,” is what we call it.

Now we know what that video cost taxpayers, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request we made. Sherpas Cinema, out of Canmore, Alberta, was paid $162,046.50 to produce three 30-second spots for BC Transit. (See the agreement HERE)

Of that, $40,511.63 seems to have been paid for the Stawamus Chief ad, according to this invoice and bill payment document.

Did taxpayers get good value for money? Well, this document shows the number of impressions, views, likes, shares and comments the videos got. BC Transit spent another $3,179.10 USD (that’s $4,082.92 CAD) to promote the three ads, and the document claims they nearly 1 million social media impressions and more than 300,000 video views.

Impressive numbers? Not when you look at the next column. They only got 852 likes on the video, 57 shares, and 98 comments. As a comparison, our original blog post on this got 95 shares – with no advertising.

Let’s do some math. Production and advertising of these videos apparently cost $166,129.42. That works out to: 

• $194.99 per like
• $2,914.55 per share
• $1,695.20 per comment
• 54 cents per view
• 17 cents per impression

Ouch. And for a bus route that doesn’t exist. Looks like we have an early contender for a 2017 Teddy Waste Award…