Month: October 1998

Creative Crisis?

Marketing Week

Two of the UK’s top ad agencies, Saatchi & Saatchi and Ammirati Puris Lintas, have taken the unusual step of hiring foreigners to head their creative teams. This provides more evidence that London’s reputation as the centre of the creative adv

Will collaboration pay off for DVD?

Marketing Week

There is something rather cosy and unlikely about a group of corporate giants getting together for the greater good of their product. Five years ago, the idea of Sony, Philips, Panasonic and Toshiba lining up alongside Warner Brothers, Warner Vision, Buena Vista, Columbia Tristar, MGM and Polygram to promote their products would have been unthinkable. […]

Sky’s no limit for high-flyers

Marketing Week

The next time you use the term high-flying about an advertising executive you should do so advisedly. Last Thursday, TBWA GGT Simons Palmer creative director Trevor Beattie was literally the highest flying creative director on the planet. He and his brother Kevin went up in a Russian MIG fighter to the edge of space. They […]

Innovation aids fight for survival

Marketing Week

The new dynamics of the European and global market are forcing leading advertisers to put innovation and change management at a premium. And that means communications agencies should take careful note. Advertisers face an increasingly complex and baffling array of circumstances – economic, political and technological – which offer an uncomfortable mix of opportunity and […]

C&W breakaway hunts agency for 5m brief

Marketing Week

International telecoms company Interoute is to hire an advertising agency for the first time. The move follows Tom Frankfort’s appointment as marketing director. The company, formed three years ago by Cable & Wireless executives, operates telecoms networks and retail businesses for residential and corporate clients throughout Europe and North America. Frankfort, former Cable & Wireless […]

Brief

Marketing Week

The benefits of reading to babies is the subject of a new campaign through Bartle Bogle Hegarty for BBC Education. Each of the three promotional films opens on a parent sharing a book with a baby in a different situation – in a cot; in a baby bouncer; and on a sofa. When the baby […]

Marketers are still deaf to the power of music

Marketing Week

I work with probably the most powerful and emotive communications device – music. Everyone loves it, everyone buys it. It reflects our lifestyles, evokes memories and triggers emotions. It has an immediacy and power that words and images cannot compete with. So it is curious how few advertisers talk to their target market through music. […]

Amazon launches UK incarnation

Marketing Week

Bookpages, the British online bookseller acquired by Seattle-based market leader Amazon.com in April, has relaunched under the Amazon.co.uk brand, promising UK book buyers it will match the price discounting of its American parent. According to Bookpages founder Dr Simon Murdoch: “We will be aiming to quote prices equivalent to those in the US, after delivery […]

Banks can no longer count on consumer inertia for survival

Marketing Week

I have a theory that the British retail banks – including the former mutuals – will be marginalised so much over the next couple of years that, by what many pedants call the “real” millennium in 2001, they will no longer account for the majority of what used to be referred to as cheque-book business. […]

Greenpeace and Iceland take lead in eco-friendly fridges

Marketing Week

Greenpeace is putting its logo on a new range of fridges and freezers to be sold at Iceland Frozen Foods outlets – the first time the environmental group has been involved in product endorsement. Iceland is using the launch of the eco-friendly Kyoto range as a call for the refrigeration industry to follow its lead […]

Lloyds threat to free online banking

Marketing Week

Lloyds Bank is playing down suggestions that it may be introducing a premium charge for its Internet banking service, when it rolls out the scheme in earnest next month. The bank, which launched a pilot Internet banking service in May (MW March 26), has invited a second wave of customers to join the pilot scheme […]

Tango plots orange Xmas in Regent St

Marketing Week

Tango will turn London’s Regent Street orange this Christmas with a sponsored display of festive lights to be switched on by chart-topping girl band All Saints. When the lights are switched on on November 17, a blizzard of fake orange snow will be blasted from the rooftops. The event, organised in conjunction with the Regent […]

RFU exit scuttles Channel 5 show

Marketing Week

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) has pulled its backing from the Channel 5 rugby magazine show Rugby Express, which has left the sport without a magazine programme on ter- restrial TV this season. Rugby Express was shown last year and was jointly funded by the RFU, rugby Premier League sponsors Allied Dunbar, the English Professional […]