In-depth features, interviews and insights into marketing’s biggest issues.
The COI has more than doubled its digital spend this year, but cut almost 10% – or £15m – from its £154.7m advertising spend, according to sources. In the year 2005 to 2006 it had an overall marketing and communications budget of £321m, which has risen slightly this year. Much of the increase is due […]
Internet entrepreneur Marc Worth, the founder of online fashion directory Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), has been appointed to the board of the soon-to-be-launched shopping site Osoyou.com. This will be Worth’s first venture since selling his trend forecasting WGSN to EMAP for £140m last year. The Osoyou.com website, due to launch next month, will be […]
Actor Ewan McGregor will be the face of a new Davidoff fragrance for men, due to launch early next year. The move will be a first in the fragrance market for McGregor. The actor has signed up to do a television commercial and print ads in a worldwide campaign for the new fragrance. Davidoff fragrance […]
MTV has signed fashion retailer Esprit as a sponsor of its Europe Music Awards in a multi-million pound deal that will give Esprit’s youth brand, edc, TV exposure for the first time. The partnership marks a change in strategy for Esprit; it wants to launch edc as a standalone brand. MTV Networks International will produce […]
Culture Minister James Purnell’s decision to re-examine whether the 16 councils awarded the right to open new casinos actually want them has upset the bewildered councils. Great Yarmouth is among the towns recommended for one of the eight large casinos. Councillor Graham Plant of Great Yarmouth Borough Council says: “It’s very frustrating. We have been […]
Initiative Media’s loss of the pan-European Johnson & Johnson business is yet another blow for the Interpublic Group-owned network, which lost General Motors – one of its biggest clients – last year and Credit Suisse earlier this summer.
Adobe, the creative software giant behind applications such as Acrobat, is launching a Minority Report-style ad campaign that will aim to blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy. The US software group is to use a giant interactive wall – seven feet high and 15 feet wide – at Virgin Megastore’s Piccadilly Circus branch to […]
As the saying goes, when one door closes, another opens. The smoking ban in England means that for tobacco companies the doors to pubs – and all other enclosed public places – are firmly shut but the ban may have opened up a host of new marketing possibilities. The Gallaher Group, whose brands include Benson […]
Esprit is plotting a raft of standalone stores across Europe for its youth fashion sub-brand edc by Esprit. It marks a dramatic change of strategy by the clothing retailer, which until now has sold and marketed edc with the masterbrand. Esprit brand president Thomas Grote says: “From now on, edc is taking its own path […]
Videogames publisher Sega has restructured and beefed up its UK marketing team. Tina Hicks, formerly brand manager, has been promoted to marketing director for the UK, reporting to managing director Alan Pritchard.
Can PoP campaigns for brands that are not available in store work, or are they a thinly-disguised ploy of increasing media sales opportunities rather than product sales? asks Lo-Anne Flack
The Virgin brand is experiencing some uncharacteristic ups and downs. On the one hand things are looking rosy in the planes and games fields but, on the other, the trains and broadband businesses are facing a murkier, uncertain future. David Benady and Catherine Turner report
The Number’s claim that Yell’s latest subtle campaign has done more to help its rival directory enquiries brand reopens the debate about style over substance that has raged since Leonard Rossiter met Joan Collins mid-air. John Reynolds asks whether creative ads can be effective
M&C Saatchi is understood to have won the above and below-the-line accounts for German luxury car marque Porsche after a four-way pitch. The account is worth about 1m.
Advertising spend is growing as its fastest rate for seven years as marketing budgets are increased for the second successive quarter, according to the latest Bellwether Report. The quarterly report, published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, shows that one-in-five companies have reported an upward revision of their media budgets. It says that “such […]