$9Mn Seafood Splurge
The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources is developing a $9 million, five-year advertising campaign for Mississippi seafood, an agency official told the Commission on Marine Resources.
At the commission's Sept. 16 meeting, the official, Executive Director Joe Spraggins, gave commissioners the executive director's report on the campaign's progress. "We're wanting to do a $9 million five-year campaign and that is to advertise Mississippi seafood and we're working on that right now," the official said, according to a recording of the meeting.
The official said about $2.5 million of the total has already been allocated across two or three projects to launch the campaign, with roughly $1.7 million a year budgeted afterward to keep it running. No further detail on the campaign's content or timeline was given during the report, and the funding source for the initial and ongoing amounts was not specified at the meeting.
The proposal amounts to a multiyear, taxpayer-linked marketing commitment for a private industry's product, raising questions about how the money is being tracked and accounted for as the campaign moves forward. The $2.5 million up-front commitment and the projected $1.7 million annual cost after that mark the campaign as a sustained public expenditure rather than a one-time outlay, and both the total figures and their funding source were not independently confirmed at the meeting. The speaker's identity was likewise not confirmed beyond the meeting's reference to "General."