10m Telegraph for Media Factor

The Telegraph group has dropped John Ayling & Associates and hired The Media Factor to handle its 10m media buying business.

The Telegraph group has dropped John Ayling & Associates and hired The Media Factor to handle its 10m media buying business.

The account, held by Aylings for nine years, was decided after a four-way pitch between the incumbent, Mediastar and J Walter Thompson which has the Telegraph’s creative account.

The review was called following a change in the Telegraph’s strategy. The group has ditched the three-year brand-based marketing strategy carried out by former marketing director David Pugh.

New promotions director Paul Woolfenden, who joined in January (MW January 5), is known to be planning a number of promotions involving last-minute TV airtime buying on Friday and Saturday nights.

The promotions strategy is designed to retain readers from the Saturday newspaper, which sells 1.2 million copies, through the rest of the week when it sells just over 1 million.

Telegraph sources claim Aylings was unable to deliver the kind of late-booking airtime prices that the Telegraph required for the new strategy.

Woolfenden worked with The Media Factor when he was promotions director at The Times and Sunday Times and it handled the media buying for a similar airtime strategy for the whole of News International. The Media Factor lost the Times Newspapers account in January when it started working on Sunday Business.