"This must go down as one of the world's most unsuccessful marketing campaigns, whereby several millions of taxpayers rands have been spent with little success in the promotion of their cause," chairman Wayne Duvenage said.
Duvenage said an advertising budget the size of Sanral's was usually enjoyed by few of South Africa's large companies. He said the SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) operated as a monopoly with government policy as its defence.
"There is something seriously wrong with any entity that operates in such a protected environment and [spends] so much money trying to sell an ill-conceived plan to society, while at the same time watching its credibility sink deeper into the mud.
"Sanral behaves as if it were a business operating in a competitive environment, seeking customers for its products over another," Duvenhage added.
He said examples of road tolling failures around the world were plentiful.
The levels of compliance the project required for its success in Gauteng would suffice, regardless of how much advertising Sanral threw at the problem, he said.
Transport Minister Ben Martins indicated in a parliamentary reply on last week that Sanral's advertising expenditure increased from R30.4m in 2010/11, to R84.5m in 2011/12 and R87.1m in 2012/13.
Democratic Alliance MP Ian Ollis said the figures were a "clear indication" that Sanral had changed its advertising patterns from awareness campaigns to "mass e-toll propaganda".
Source: Sapa via I-Net Bridge
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