Mr Dobson said if Labour wins the next election it will “play its part in promoting higher environmental standards, thus helping these companies develop further products and sales.” The Labour Party has praised the environmental marketing efforts of big companies including Procter & Gamble, and called for laws to make other firms follow suit. Frank […]

Banks Hoggins O’Shea has been appointed to handle a UK project for clothing retailer C&A and is battling with an unknown German agency to win the store’s multimillion pound pan-European account. The size of the European account is not known, but the UK spend for TV, press and radio advertising was ú6.7m (Register-MEAL) last year. […]

Talk Radio UK moved quickly to quash any fears about its sales performance this week after the sudden resignation of sales director Alec Kenny. An external replacement for Kenny has already been found and will be confirmed in the next seven days, managing director John Aumonier says. Aumonier dismisses suggestions that the station’s initial sales […]

Television may still be the senior medium, but it has no cause for complacency – lessons should be learned from the way radio has achieved double-digit ad growth.

German computer company Escom is taking on Dixons in the high street with 231 own-brand computer stores. Executives at Escom, which manufacturers and retails computer hardware, have confirmed this week that it will buy 231 former Rumbelows stores from Thorn EMI. The move will bring an instant tenfold boost in Escom’s UK retail presence. Escom […]

Country Music Television will brief four agencies this week before inviting them to pitch for a £1.5m above-the-line awareness campaign scheduled to start next month. The channel, available in 3.5 million cable and satellite TV homes in the UK and a further 5 million on the Continent, wants to broaden its audience beyond the predominantly […]

Asda is extending trials of its customer loyalty Club Card, which it has been secretly testing since November, and says it could go national with the scheme at short notice. The development follows last month’s launch of the Clubcard discount loyalty scheme by Tesco. Co-incidentally, Asda’s loyalty card is also called Club Card. Asda has […]

The more the Minister of the Arts succeeds in winding up the nation’s cultural grandees, the better he is doing a job that should not exist outside Soviet Russia

There are a number of exaggerations and inaccuracies in Jo-Anne Walker’s article “Pride after a fall” (MW March 3) that I should like to correct. I would challenge Panini to prove that they sold 1 billion packets of stickers in the UK last year. Given that they accept Merlin has the major portion of the […]

Companies are continuing to break the Advertising Standards Authority code on slimming and health products despite the authority’s renewed efforts to tighten up on the area. The ASA’s latest report upholds four separate complaints against companies for making misleading and unsubstantiated claims for their products. The judgements come two months after the ASA tightened rules […]

Product placement (above) and bad language are the subjects of two TV commercials launched by the Independent Television Commission this week. The two commercials, which are part of the ITC’s attempt to explain its role to viewers, were created by Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters. Both the ads were directed by Andy Wilson, whose work includes […]

ICL is to make a ú25m launch into the pan-European consumer home entertainment market, using the brand heritage of its majority shareholder, Japanese giant Fujitsu.

British marketing isn’t what it used to be, says a recent article in the Economist. A series of misfortunes engulfing such Eighties bellwethers as Saatchi & Saatchi, Unilever and J Sainsbury has exposed them as City idols with feet of clay. It might seem nit-picking to question the misfortune afflicting J Sainsbury, which has seen […]

Zenith Media will not lose the Mars media buying business, despite Saatchi & Saatchi’s loss of the global and media strategy business, Mars confirmed this week. According to John Murray, staff officer (franchise) at Mars in the US: “There is no media buying review underway and we are not making any special evaluation of media […]

Virginia Matthews’ jousting with the customer service industry (MW, February 17) elicited a few sympathetic groans here at The Cade Partnership. As an agency with a good deal of experience helping clients handle customer complaints, we are only too familiar with the “how may I help you?” brigade. Telephone helplines are a marvellous opportunity to […]