The Department of Further and Higher Education is seeking media buying and strategy services worth €4 million over four years.
A notification posted on the Government procurement platform, eTenders indicates that the Department is seeking a provider for “media strategy, planning and buying services” to expand a number of its public campaigns, including the ‘Building Heroes’ and ‘Build Back Home’ campaigns.
Media buying refers to the process of purchasing advertising space, while media strategy is concerned with how best to promulgate a message or a campaign in order to achieve the desired outcome.
In the tender documents posted online, the Department said it was seeking a media agency to buy media “for a number of campaigns that arise out of the implementation of the Department’s policies”, to an annual budget of approximately €1 million, or €4 million over the four year span.
It will be focused on the ‘Room for a Student’ scheme, which is an annual campaign encouraging homeowners to rent a room in their house to students; ‘Building Heroes’, which is a social media campaign “aimed at dispelling myths about what a career in construction is really like”; and the ‘Build Back Home’ campaign, carried out in the US, Canada and Australia, intended to encourage Irish construction workers abroad to return to Ireland.
Figures released to Gript Media previously under Freedom of Information legislation revealed that over €7 million worth of ‘Media Buying’ contracts had been placed by State bodies with the Office of Government Procurement (OGP) in the three years prior.
The contracts/campaigns placed by State departments and bodies, and taken up by print, audio and digital platforms and outlets between January 2022 and December 2025 were worth an accumulated total of €7,025,035.
The figures released to Gript showed that a variety of print, audio and digital platforms and outlets had been contracted by the Government through a number of departments and state bodies to host thousands of euros worth of advertising.