The COI has asked EURO RSCG Wnek Gosper, Leagas Shafron Davis Ayer and D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles to pitch for a pilot publicity campaign to increase the number of volunteers in the community and promote voluntary activity. The budget for the campaign is 600,000. The Department of Trade & Industry is refusing to reveal […]

Lowe Howard-Spink’s media planning director Simon King is understood to have resigned to join TMD Carat as strategic planning director. Time Warner’s bid for Turner Broadcasting appeared to have stalled as Marketing Week went to press. John Malone, chief executive of TCI whose affiliate Liberty Media holds 21 per cent in Turner, is understood to […]

The Italian white goods giant Merloni has hired top German film director Wim Wenders to make a series of new commercials. Wenders, who directed Paris Texas, has made three ads for Merloni’s Ariston brand. They will break in Italy on September 17 and will then be rolled out across Europe. The commercials give the Ariston […]

Morphy Richards and Bellings Appliances managing director James Moore has resigned. He leaves at the end of the month to become chief executive of a mystery company. Morphy Richards and Belling – which are part of the Glen Dimplex group – would only say that Moore’s new role will be outside the appliances industry. His […]

British American Tobacco has lost a second senior international brand specialist. UK-based Iain Hacking was general manager for international US brands in markets outside North America. He was responsible for Lucky Strike, Kent, US Pall Mall and Barclay. It is understood Hacking has left to write a book and has been replaced by David Grime, […]

Maiden’s purchase of BTA has set the stage for a flurry of takeovers in the poster industry.

I write with regard to your analysis piece “Can generic ads spread the word” (MW August 25) concerning generic marketing and the demise of the Butter Council. One omission that was slightly surprising, in an otherwise excellent feature, was that your reporters did not mention the National Dairy Council (NDC). The NDC has been the […]

An Australian property developer behind the proposed biggest retail centre in Britain is scouting for an agency. Lend Lease, the company behind the Blue Water development in Kent, is understood to have spoken to several agencies including Ogilvy & Mather and McCann-Erickson. It is now speaking to others. McCann-Erickson is believed to have declined to […]

I suspect Bayer will be surprised to read in George Pitcher’s piece, “True cost of drug dependency” (MW August 25), that it is the German company that has purchased “Marion Merrell Dow in the US for 4.4bn”. Actually, the purchaser is Germany’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical group – our own parent company Hoechst AG. Tony […]

With companies seeking synergy across all their marketing, POP is no longer an afterthought, reports Martin Croft, it is at the leading edge of many campaigns

Supermarket chain Somerfield is launching an 8m campaign aimed to attract a younger, more upmarket family shopper. The push features Birds of a Feather star Lesley Joseph in two TV ads. From today (Wednesday 13) Somerfield is offering a series of discounts and multi-buy deals through its Price Check scheme. Discounts include nine products at […]

Journalists are obsessive about their notebooks, but even the Diary wouldn’t claim that its notebook is a work of art (in the past, some have wrongly accused it of being a work of fiction) or, indeed, that it is worth $14m (9m). But the irrepressible advertising director Tony Kaye would. Advertisements in the New York […]

Customer magazines hold out the promise of a relationship with the consumer – invaluable to fmcg brands. So will they become part of big below-the-line budgets? Meg Carter reports

Virgin Atlantic has moved its below-the-line account out of MDBW and into KLP and increased its budget by 20 per cent. Virgin Atlantic marketing manager Alison Copus says it moved out of the agency it has been with for two years because “We are facing an increasingly competitive environment and we thought we needed some […]

UK cinema admissions were up 15 per cent year-on-year in July despite the heatwave and poor attendance in the first four months of the year, according to the latest Cinema Advertising Association figures. Summer blockbusters including Batman Forever, Judge Dredd and Casper boosted cinema attendance to 10.7 million in July. Further releases, including Die Hard […]