Simon Harris #4 He lost 5 stone, and gained 457 thousand pounds

[meredgrave]

Sorry if you both already know this (but just in case, to keep our facts straight!) - it wasn't 500k p.a., these are the amounts that went out each financial year

	FY
	19-20	20-21	21-22	22-23	23-24	Grand Total
SUM of Value	£1,650.00	£148,000.00	£192,700.00	£87,300.00	£65,000.00	£494,650.00

It's still a colossal amount for one person, particularly during the pandemic, and you'd definitely get a team of three or maybe even four out of it

Thank you!

Agree it's a huge amount for one person overall, and even just for those 22-24 yearly figures, they're roughly equivalent to the annual salaries of experienced, director-level people in PR/marketing/ad agencies. These would be people with around a decade or more experience in those specialised areas, not just a few years of recycling dad jokes and building anti-Tory pile-ins.

And, as @LavaFlake and @VeniVidiVicki note, why the large amounts after COVID was long done?

 

[HotesTilaire]

if I can be bothered I’ll FOI the equalities impact survey this weekend from a burner account.

 

[Pkershaw]

Sorry if I am being thick.

How can you earn that during COVID but be eligible also for a loan as COVID has effected you? If anything tye effect for him was amazing.
The pandemic was his jackpot

Such a brilliant question that I would love somebody to put to him. Also, if you spent the years 2019-2023 carrying out media related work and racking up an income of £494,650 from just one client alone (he likely had others), how do you possibly end up liquidating a media company in March 2023 which went under with unpaid debts to the tune of over 70 grand?!

In order to legally qualify for a Covid bounce back loan of the size he obtained, D Media Ltd's turnover needed to be in the region of £80k. And that money is separate to the ECC grift as they never made payments to D Media. Add in any money that he's made through his relationships with Social Kind(ness), Suffolk council and the NHS, and you have a huge amount of income.

And yet he still managed to constantly look like he spent last night sleeping in a wheelie bin. So here's the question that keeps cropping up with this guy.... WHERE DID ALL THE MONEY GO, SIMON??!!!

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

Weed and escorts is my guess

 

[skronkywildcat]

Definitely not gym membership.
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I think the large amounts paid post-Covid was that Essex CC facebook groups pivoted from communal helping out to a broader public health messaging thing - Essex Is United facebook group for instance. (it's terrible).

 

[Mr Krabs]

Perhaps the Coca Cola shirt is just for the cosplay and he actually has a wardrobe of Armani suits.

 

[Pkershaw]

Apparently the CEO of Nestle had to call a crisis meeting when he heard Simon was going on a diet.

I’m sure they’ve bounced back now though. No way is he still tucking into berries and doing 50,000 steps a day as his whole world spectacularly crashes down around him

 

[Fred Santos]

It was on BBC Radio this morning - on the news BBC Essex, I think the 11:00 bulletin.

The presenter mis stated the conclusions one could reasonably draw from the ECC statement that the money went through him also to other people. What the statement said, was that he was paid for supporting people but it didn't say financially. Any way one way or another both ECC and Simon will have records of all of this....won't they?

 

[Pkershaw]

Definitely not gym membership.
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I think the large amounts paid post-Covid was that Essex CC facebook groups pivoted from communal helping out to a broader public health messaging thing - Essex Is United facebook group for instance. (it's terrible).

This is a really good point bearing in mind ECC just hid behind the magic C word to justify all of this. All of their response was based on this being a Covid response issue, and they haven’t even begun to try and justify the myriad of other groups that he must still get paid to run now, where 2 or 3 likes represents one of their more successful posts.

It’s amazing how easy people can get away with sheer incompetence and often downright dodgy behaviour just by invoking the phrase, “tHaT wAs dUriNg cOv1dDDdd”.

 

[LavaFlake]

Having worked in both agency and on the other side, the way people overplay the impact of social media and get away with it to people who aren’t social media savvy is astounding. Take impressions - it’s easy to get millions of them on one post but it doesn’t really mean anyone’s engaged or cares about the post. So if the wrong person at ECC after KOC left was rubber stamping his work and its impact it would be easy to hype up results based on very little if people don’t know what to look for.

 

[Lazarus]

Living with COVID guidance was produced in Feb/March 2022
I wonder what he was doing from this point on. Are the facebook pages still visible that we could see what the public have paid for?

ETA: i bet he's the type to buy toys and keep them in their boxes. he looks the type to be into those dolls with the square heads that people seem to buy in shops like forbidden planet.

 

[Lobster Johnson]

Having worked in both agency and on the other side, the way people overplay the impact of social media and get away with it to people who aren’t social media savvy is astounding. Take impressions - it’s easy to get millions of them on one post but it doesn’t really mean anyone’s engaged or cares about the post. So if the wrong person at ECC after KOC left was rubber stamping his work and its impact it would be easy to hype up results based on very little if people don’t know what to look for.

Thank you. I was beating this drum to my own boss for a year. You can have me write 30 social posts aimed at fleet managers who want new truck tyres, but you're wasting your time and your client's budget because my experience on the other side of the fence told me that not a single fleet manager is making business decisions from Insta. I got fired for it in the end, though so what do I know?

 

[VielleFemme]

Thank you. I was beating this drum to my own boss for a year. You can have me write 30 social posts aimed at fleet managers who want new truck tyres, but you're wasting your time and your client's budget because my experience on the other side of the fence told me that not a single fleet manager is making business decisions from Insta. I got fired for it in the end, though so what do I know?

This is so accurate and so infuriating.

 

[Mr Krabs]

Thank you. I was beating this drum to my own boss for a year. You can have me write 30 social posts aimed at fleet managers who want new truck tyres, but you're wasting your time and your client's budget because my experience on the other side of the fence told me that not a single fleet manager is making business decisions from Insta. I got fired for it in the end, though so what do I know?

Have we worked for the same agency? I worked somewhere where every client was given the same boilerplate digital strategy which always included paying through the nose for us to create content for every bloody platform no matter the customer base. Think advertising stairlifts on Snapchat just so we could show off how many impressions we’d got (feck all engagement though).

 

[LavaFlake]

Have we worked for the same agency? I worked somewhere where every client was given the same boilerplate digital strategy which always included paying through the nose for us to create content for every bloody platform no matter the customer base. Think advertising stairlifts on Snapchat just so we could show off how many impressions we’d got (feck all engagement though).

I think all agencies are interchangeable because I’ve definitely worked here too. One thing that comes to mind was creating polls for Twitter, getting staff to vote on them, and then saying it was good engagement.

 

[Lobster Johnson]

Have we worked for the same agency? I worked somewhere where every client was given the same boilerplate digital strategy which always included paying through the nose for us to create content for every bloody platform no matter the customer base. Think advertising stairlifts on Snapchat just so we could show off how many impressions we’d got (feck all engagement though).

Was your "Head of creative excellence" a "certified genius"? As evidenced, of course, by working in a mid size agency in a mid size town for his entire career...

Spoiler: Me Rail

When I got fired they made me work a 3 month notice period (here in a certain north european country they have to give you a week for every 2 months you worked there. Usually they just pay you off) despite telling me they were firing me for my poor work. I really wanted to tell him to his face that he was a grass and a shithouse (never said a word to my face, had the owner of the company do the deed and ignored me for the whole notice period) on my last day, but he took a days holiday. Becuse he's a grass and a shithouse.

 

[Fred Santos]

He has made a statement:

Social media prankster paid £500k by council to manage Facebook page speaks out

Essex County Council paid the comedian and campaigner Simon Harris a six-figure sum, money which was used to pay for social media services including content, in his work as a contractor during the coronavirus pandemic.

www.essexlive.news

Dissapointing journalism that this has relied upon the actual cutting and pasting of elements (different fonts) - but, I suppose, even in the form it is given, he does deserve a right to reply.

It is still not entirely clear whether he is saying that the money went to him and then on to other people (in whole or in part) or whether he was paid it all and some of the payments were for him to support (maybe not financially) other people. If other people were supported financially, even if the names of these other people were not mentioned, it would be quite easy for him to say - "listen, I was paid £500K - £200K was for me (interjecting in doing so that the entire adult population of the region was reached every month and that he worked bloody hard - 7 days a week etc etc etc) and the remainder I distributed to 10 individuals - and here is the schedule of when these payments were made". All of this is going to need to be played back to the taxman in any case, if that was the model. And why have none of these individuals lept to his defence - simply by speaking out and saying, "yes I was paid by Simon and I did X, Y and Z". There are also a range of other people who were paid by ECC during the period in question - why were they paid direct, but not part of this arrangement - if this is, indeed, the arrangement that existed?

And was the same model deployed in Suffolk - was that in some way different and justified a considerably lower level of activity? And if SocialKind/Social Kindness (an entity) was the contractor with Suffolk did they too "support" other admins and would that be revealed by their accounts when they are due. (23rd Feb). Will they commit to publishing full accounts rather than just a balance sheet for example?

So many questions.....
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And, at last, in the Southend Echo. Looking forwards to the comments and it slipping behind a paywall once the clicks get beyond a certain point

Much less to say (or that they have reported) this time.

And not the sort of coverage he usually receives from that esteemed organ

Blogger handed £493k by Essex Council for Facebook page defends 'vital service'

A total of £493,000 was given to the Man Behaving Dadly blogger, which vary from £500 on May 19, 2021, to £100,000 on August 11, 2021

www.echo-news.co.uk

 

[lilykestrel]

What's with the police matter stuff at the end?
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[Jelly Bean]

What's with the police matter stuff at the end?

Fatty says he filed a police report in last July and it is ongoing which is why he has gone quiet on SM.
Sure.

But they're not letting it lie

 

[Seaford Haggington]

"Mr Harris said he had been vilified on social media and has deleted his accounts across multiple platforms."

Odd reaction for something that was apparently defensible.