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Our favourite ad this week: 

Once again, 118 118 achieve brilliance with a parody of Honda's advertising. This viral, produced by WCRS's digital agency Meme, spoofs the car company's "choir" ad to ludicrous extremes. See it online at http://www.the118118team.com/ and laugh out loud.

New Snapshot

Geico is a leading US insurance group, specialising in automobile cover. The company has expanded dramatically since the 1990s, primarily through expansion of its highly effective direct insurance service, operated by mail, telephone and online. Click here for an Adbrands Snapshot of Geico (subscribers only). 

Advertising: Who handles advertising? Click here for agency account assignments from adbrands.net.

Competitors: see Financial & Insurance Sector index for other companies

Recently Revised Profiles and Snapshots

In the news this week: Advertisers

Apple beat Apple in the London courts this week. A judge dismissed the suit brought by the remaining members of the Beatles that Apple Computer's Apple logo, when used on the iTunes website, infringes the copyright of their own Apple Corps holding company. 

Meanwhile Sony finally set a date for the launch of the Playstation 3, now due to appear in shops in Japan, Europe and the US in November, close to a year after Microsoft's Xbox 360, and priced some $200 more expensive. Despite the American company's headstart, Sony hopes its own machine will regain the edge in the sector as a result of its technology. In addition to a new-format Blu-ray DVD drive the new machine features a game controller with an inbuilt motion sensor so it can be waved in the air to control the onscreen action. Nintendo's new console, also expected later this year, will offer similar technology. However Microsoft is confident that it can withstand the challenge, announcing that it expects to have 10m Xbox 360s in the market before either of the rival machines launches.

The 10-year exclusive co-marketing deal between McDonalds and Walt Disney will end this year after the release of Pirates of the Caribbean II and Cars. Both sides denied reports in the LA Times that the deal had not been renewed because of Disney's concerns over obesity. Instead, the two companies will work together on selected future projects, but will also have the freedom to tie up promotional deals with other partners. 

Best Brands Poll: we asked you - GM, Ford or Toyota? Toyota took 53% of the vote, followed by Ford (30%) and General Motors (15%). How about this one: Dell, Apple or Hewlett Packard? Vote here or on-site on several high-traffic pages throughout the site including the free-view pages for P&G and BBDO.

In the news this week: Agencies

Interpublic's senior officers still spend much of their time fighting fires. Group CEO Michael Roth asked McCann Erickson chief John Dooner to drop out of the three-way review of Reckitt Benckiser's global account to avoid upsetting long-time FCB client SC Johnson, Reckitt's main competitor in household cleaning products. 

Meanwhile UK trade bible Campaign reported last week that Johnson & Johnson, one of Interpublic's biggest global clients, is considering a realignment of its creative and media business, mainly divided up between McCann, Lowe, Initiative and Universal McCann. True? We'll know if and when it happens, but one of the biggest problems facing a group in Interpublic's position right now is that rumours of account defection can easily become accepted as truth, a fact often ruthlessly exploited by rival agencies keen to undermine a competitor. 

Meanwhile, Lowe London's CEO Garry Lace, who was suspended by Interpublic a few weeks ago, has officially "resigned" from the agency. Lace was alleged to have met with former network founder Frank Lowe, who came out of retirement last year to poach Lowe London's prized Tesco account for his new start-up agency.

Capping a lousy week, Interpublic reported another set of poor financial results for the first quarter of 2006. Revenues were flat and net losses increased from $151m this time last year to $182m. In a welcome glimmer of good news, organic revenues grew 5%, partly as a result of increased spending by existing clients. The group said it has not yet made a decision whether or not to merge its FCB and Draft networks, an idea floated a fortnight ago.

Interactive advertising giant aQuantive, which specialises in creative and technology services, was said to have come close to agreeing a merger with online sales house ValueClick. The deal fell apart over terms, according to reports. aQuantive's CEO Brian McAndrews later said no further talks were being contemplated.

The biggest account win this week was Carat's capture of the global Adidas and Reebok media business. In other assignments, TBWA\Chiat\Day took Sara Lee's US bakery and deli account; and famed UK tea brand PG Tips ended its 30 relationship with DDB London to join Mother. 

Agencies Poll: we asked you to select your most admired specialist creative agency. At the end of the fourth week, Bartle Bogle Hegarty held its lead, with 19% of all votes. Crispin Porter & Bogusky made up ground to come second with 16%, followed by Deutsch (12%), M&C Saatchi (9%) and Mother (7%). This month we'd like you to vote on your most admired media agency. Vote now from our home page or by following this link.

Regards


Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands

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Recommended Reading

UK users

With a big nod to Al Ries and Jack Trout, whose "22 Laws..." series has become required reading for any self-respecting marketer, Michael Newman goes one step beyond by pooling the collected wisdom of the world's leading practitioners in advertising. Newman approached a broad selection of the industry's best-known gurus and asked each to suggest and explain his or her own personal mantra. As a result, as Saatchi's creative director Bob Isherwood says in the foreword, this is "22 books for the price of one". More importantly, as the tagline "and when to violate them" suggests, Newman and his contributors set out to demonstrate that advertising laws are not in fact irrefutable, immutable or any other sort of utable, and that there are often the best reasons for ignoring them. 

Better still, Newman offers a decidedly cosmopolitan view of what makes great ads. Unlike most such books, which tend to view the industry through American eyes, Newman's panel is multicultural in the widest possible sense. A former ECD of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, there is a strong Asian Pacific slant to this book, with contributions from several fellow Australasians (including New Zealander Kevin Roberts, now Saatchi's worldwide CEO), as well as Jim Aitchison and Ian Batey from Batey Ads in Singapore, and Neil French, the former O&M Asia Pacific and WPP worldwide creative chief. Others include Jean-Michel Dru of TBWA, Marcello Serpa of Almap BBDO Brazil, Sebastian Turner of Scholz & Friends in Germany, and Graham Warsop of South Africa's The Jupiter Drawing Room, as well as the UK's MT Rainey (ex Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R) and Dave Trott (ex GGT, now Walsh Trott Chick Smith). And providing those American eyes - Allen Rosenshine (ex BBDO) and Dave Lubars (BBDO and Fallon) among others. Oh, and for good measure, Al Ries as well, who recaps and updates his original Law of Positioning, first conceived more than 20 years ago.

Not all the laws included here are quite as strategic as Ries's. After all, advertising is a gut-instinct discipline. Marcello Serpa, for example, offers the Law of Simplicity ("What is simple moves people. It is the revelation of the obvious: 'Gee, why didn't I think of that before?'"); Ian Batey argues on behalf of Consistency of message and campaign elements; M&C Saatchi founding partner James Lowther proposes that great staple of the best ads, Humour. Others talk about Emotion, Relevance, Experience, and so on. Perhaps the most interesting, if only because they offer an unfamiliar insight into less well-studied advertising markets are Sebastian Turner's Law of Jump ("Whenever great minds change the world, they jump") as applied to the German market; and especially Graham Warsop's cryptic Law of the Silver Elephant, which he defines thus: "great advertising relies on the imagination of one or more individuals who have the desire (1) to bring something into the world that has never existed before, (2) to do so in such a way that it surpasses what has been done before." 

Finally it is left to MT Rainey to sum up the contradictions inherent in a book about the "laws" of advertising. In a chapter entitled The Outlaw, she points out that advertising, after all, depends for its success on originality and creativity, two principles which rely fundamentally about breaking laws not following them. All in all, the book offers an excellent, entertaining and sometimes profound contemplation of that most elusive of goals: great advertising.

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