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Our favourite ad this week: 

DDB Germany won seven Silvers at this year's Cannes Lions Festival with a series of brilliant ads offering abridged 30-second cartoon versions of classic movies (um, featuring bunnies, by the way) to promote the new VW Fox - tagline "Short but fun". Actually this wasn't really DDB's work as such - instead the agency simply bought existing but little-seen output by web-based indie animator Jennifer Shiman, working as Angry Alien Productions, and adapted it for VW. See the seven Silver winners at the Cannes Lions site. For Shiman's full range of 30-second shorts (without the VW tagline) see her Angry Alien website. Titles include Alien, The Shining, Jaws, Titanic, It's A Wonderful Life and many, many more. Wonderful stuff!

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In the news this week: Advertisers

US investor Kirk Kirkorian, best known as the several-times owner of MGM and a long-time thorn in the side of under-performing US car companies, is attempting to broker a remarkable link-up between ailing giant General Motors, and expanding Franco-Japanese group Renault-Nissan. Under Kirkorian's plan, Renault-Nissan would pay $3bn for a 20% in GM. Kirkorian is himself GM's largest shareholder (with just under 10%), and his proposal already has the support of Carlos Ghosn, the Renault CEO who masterminded Nissan's dramatic turnaround from near-bankruptcy. The Japanese business, which Renault effectively controls, is now the world's most profitable car manufacturer. Kirkorian believes that Ghosn could work similar magic at GM. The US group has agreed - reluctantly - to consider the proposal but is said to be treating it as a hostile attack on current management.

Procter & Gamble will launch a new version of Crest in the US next month designed to win back leadership of the country's toothpaste market from Colgate. The new product, Crest Pro-Health, claims to fight all seven major oral problems, and is also said to be more effective than Colgate Total at fighting gingivitis. P&G is throwing a mammoth $100m marketing spend the product.

As EMI and Warner Music continue to wrestle over who will be the senior partner in any merger of their business, Vivendi's Universal Music Group is waiting in the wings to pick up any scraps. If EMI and Warner do indeed iron out a deal, the combined business will have to sell Warner Chappell, the music publishing arm of the American company, in order to appease regulators. (EMI already owns the world's biggest music publishing company). Vivendi is keen to bolster its own business in this area, and is said to be preparing an accompanying bid for Bertelsmann's BMG Music Publishing, also up for sale. 

A US judge has allowed a shareholder lawsuit against Viacom over executive compensation to proceed. The case has been brought by two investors outraged by the lavish payments made to Viacom's three most senior officers in 2004. The group reported an $18bn loss for the year; yet CEO Sumner Redstone and co-presidents Leslie Moonves and Tom Freston received a combined total of nearly $160m in compensation. In another court case, a former administrative assistant at Coca-Cola and two accomplices have been charged with stealing confidential documents relating to products under development at Coke and attempting to sell them to PepsiCo. The latter tipped off undercover agents who arrested the trio.

Cendant finalised the first deal in the planned multiple demerger which will see the widely diversified group broken up into four separate pieces. The first asset to find a buyer was TravelPort, which houses Cendant's online travel booking and reservations brands, including Orbitz, Cheaptickets and Galileo. It was sold to investment group Blackstone for $4.3bn. Also this week, global confectioner Perfetti van Melle acquired Spanish rival Chupa Chups, maker of the eponymous lollipops as well as Smint mints, for around E400m. The two companies already shared distribution partnerships in Europe and Asia.

In the news this week: Agencies

It was a quiet week in adland this week, as executives recovered from the Cannes Festival. The biggest story of the week by far was Euro RSCG's capture of the consolidated global Reckitt Benckiser account, the agency's biggest win for quite some time. Previously the account was split between Euro and JWT. However, following the acquisition of Boots Healthcare, whose advertising had been handled by McCann, Reckitt took the decision to assign the whole business to single network. McCann was obliged to drop out of the review several weeks ago because its Interpublic stablemate FCB handles SC Johnson, a key competitor to Reckitt. 

Regards


Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands

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