John Key’s Musical Misadventure

Until now, around $50,000 plus some extra has been the general consensus on the cost of the Key DVD, a huge sum to spend on an inefficient mode of message dissemination, especially when it’s a boring message.  

Now, the Press has dropped a bombshell: the 20,000 DVDs cost National $110,000.  To put that in context, for around the same sum of money you could run a full-page ad (or a couple of half page ads) in both the Dompost and the Herald, putting your message in front of something like half a million readers.  The Dompost estimate is even higher: $200,000 (cheers, Tane).  In New Zealand politics, that’s an enormous investment. 

But, because we and The Standard revealed the fact that the DVD ripped off Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’, National will now scrap all of those DVDs still in its hands.  Audrey Young reports the printing replacement DVDs “could cost the party conservatively $30,000 at $3 a pop.” (Young’s title also alludes to the irony of Mr Labour-lite using Coldplay-lite on this vacuous self-promotion.)

 

So, $110,000 plus $30,000, plus reediting costs and, maybe, legal costs on top of that.  That’s a fair sum of money even for National’s secret backers, especially, when all it bought them was an early Christmas gift to Labour.