Armando takes Disney Euro brief

The Disney Channel has appointed Armando Testa in Milan to create the channel’s first pan-European campaign.

The agency has been briefed to produce separate executions for different programmes, including one for regular movie slot The Wonderful World of Disney and another for animated series Kim Possible.

Walt Disney Television International vice-president of marketing Chris Cowan is understood to have appointed Armando following a five-way pitch.

Although the campaigns will be adopted by the Disney Channel in the UK, its marketing director Nick Richards maintains that Wieden & Kennedy will continue to be used in the UK on a project basis. The agency was appointed by Richards to the £1.5m UK advertising account in January.

Richards, who joined Disney from Claydon Heeley Jones Mason in June last year, is doubling the channel’s spend on outdoor advertising. Last year, outdoor accounted for ten to 15 per cent of the total budget – which will remain static in the new financial year, beginning in October.

The channel uses poster sites in bus shelters and in schools, but is to experiment with 48and 96-sheet posters for the first time.

Richards says: “We will use the poster sites to communicate with a family audience and remind them that we show great movies.”

The channel plans to cut its TV spend because rival channels, while taking the ads, usually insist on vetting scripts.