BBH faces threat to £3m Gordon’s Gin business

Guinness UDV is understood to be reviewing its &£3m creative account for Gordon’s Gin, only a year after appointing Bartle Bogle Hegarty to the business.

BBH won the account in August last year, ending the Gordon’s 12-year relationship with Leo Burnett.

Guinness UDV brand director Wendy Darlington says: “From time to time we talk to other agencies on our roster and even outside of it, to get a different perspective or to canvass new ideas.”

A campaign launched last autumn, which aimed to win back older gin drinkers, marked a change in strategy for the brand, which in the mid-Nineties tried to woo the youth market with its ads.

The “You can only be truly great at one thing” campaign, created by BBH, featured celebrities such as cricketer David Gower and Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent, trying their hand at writing poetry and sculpting clay pots.

With more than a 40 per cent share of the UK market, Gordon’s is still the UK’s best-known gin brand. However, its market share has fallen in recent years, mainly because of increased competition from supermarkets’ own-label versions.

Worldwide sales of Gordon’s dropped from 5.4 million cases in 1999 to just over 5 million last year, while sales of UDV’s premium gin brand, Tanqueray, increased by two per cent to 1.83 million cases.

The review is understood not to affect the media account, handled by Carat.