He said there was never a decision to pull out the ads from the Marianas Variety.
“Our procurement regulations state that we need to advertise on only ONE general distribution newspaper locally and we need to go with the cheapest one at the time that we solicit for bids,” he said in an e-mail.
“I leave that up to the procurement staff to decide but based solely on cost rather than one paper over another. We are equally getting good exposure on the TV ads and on the radio. We only have so much money to spend on the ads. We do not expect that our ability to get the word out to the community will be decrease just because we’re limiting to one general distribution newspaper.”
But the ads that were pulled out from the Variety were not new and were based on purchase orders with the set amount already allocated.
Funding for the ads came from the federal government and were specifically designed for community outreach and awareness only.
Public Health cannot take that money and use it for other purposes.
“We definitely played an important role in helping the recent HPV vaccination campaign reach about 90 percent rate of vaccination among high school girls — the only jurisdiction to achieve this,” Variety president Laila Y. Boyer said. “We believe that by advertising in only one newspaper, Public Health would have not been able to reach those numbers.”
