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Dear ${token1} ${token2}
Our favourite ads this week:
Is there no escaping Kate Moss these days? Extending her current
media saturation campaign, La Moss stars in a new
viral movie for upscale lingerie designer Agent Provocateur, currently
choking up broadband pipes worldwide while huge numbers of male internet
users rush to stream their own copies. (Yes, that now means you too. Purely in the name of research of
course!) Now I'm certainly not to going to complain about a film which
consists almost exclusively of a good-looking girl lying around with not
many clothes on, but the end result is just a touch underwhelming. And
Kate's flat Essex-toned voiceover suggests her acting career may not
progress much further than this...
Spectacular in a different way is the new
ad for Sony's Bravia TV range, the follow-up to the bouncing
"Balls" ad which made a clean sweep of most advertising awards
during the last year. The new ad is much messier, featuring an apartment
block which explodes with colour, provided by a series of massive multicoloured
paint bombs. Agency Fallon and director Jonathan Glazer detonated 70,000
litres of paint in just under 70 seconds. Colour "like.no.other" indeed!
Finally - and as a longstanding PC user, I really hate to say this - TBWA's current
ad campaign for Apple Mac is wonderful. There are 15 great spots, all beautifully scripted and wittily performed. Each takes the form of a
little vignette in which "Mac" (in the shape of the laidback
good-looking kid below) and "PC" (the nerd) compare notes with each other. Be sure
to watch them all.
New Snapshot
Remy Cointreau is France's
third largest wine & spirits business (behind Pernod-Ricard
and LVMH).
It controls a small selection of prestigious brands of which the
best-known are Remy Martin cognac, Piper-Heidsieck champagne and Cointreau
liqueur. These are supported by Charles Heidsieck champagne, Passoa
liqueur, Mount Gay rum and Metaxa brandy. Click
here for an Adbrands Snapshot of Remy
Cointreau (subscribers only).
Recently Revised Profiles & Snapshots
In the news this week: Advertisers
Wal-Mart has raised its game in China with a $1bn deal to acquire the
local operations of Taiwanese general retailer Trust-Mart. The purchase
will ultimately push the US giant past Carrefour of France as the biggest
foreign retail group in China by revenues, although even with around 170
stores the business will be dwarfed by the country's leading local groups
China Resources and Shanghai Brillance, with some 8,000 stores between
them. Assuming this deal is approved by Chinese regulators,
Wal-Mart will at first acquire around 30 of Trust-Mart's stores, and will buy the
remaining 70 outlets in stages between 2007 and 2010. Carrefour was also bidding for Trust-Mart, along with Tesco of the UK and
China's Lianhua. However, Wal-Mart's was the best offer.
As has been expected for some time, US
telecoms group Verizon confirmed plans
to divest its directory services and
information division, which controls a range of yellow and white page
directories as well as website SuperPages. The business will be spun off
to shareholders as a separate company in November, trading under the new
name Idearc.
Apple reported another
strong set of quarterly results, capping an excellent year. The company
sold a total of 5.3m Macintosh computers and a staggering 39m iPods.
Preliminary net sales for the year rose almost 39% to $19.3bn, while net
income jumped almost 50% to just under $2.0bn. However those figures are
likely to undergo significant adjustment during the audit process to
reflect incorrect pricing of prior year stock options. Apple is one of
hundreds of companies which are being forced to restate past performance
because they set artificially low prices when offering stock options to
employees.
Congratulations to Jonathan Mildenhall, former MD of TBWA\London
and most recently strategy director of Mother, who has been appointed as
VP, global marketing at Coca-Cola.
Among other senior marketing appointments, Casey Keller was named as the
new chief marketing officer at Motorola;
Helen Stevenson was appointed to the same role at directory services group
Yell; and in a more unconventional posting, rapper Jay-Z was named as
"co-brand director" for Anheuser-Busch's
Budweiser Select premium spin-off in the US.
In the news this week: Agencies
Interpublic unveiled another restructuring of its
troubled media services businesses. Initiative and
Universal McCann have both been plagued by account defections in recent years, and
industry pundits had been speculating for some time that the two groups
might be merged. In fact they are
actually being moved further apart. The Interpublic Media construct, an
umbrella entity created only 17 months ago along similar lines to WPP's
Group M, is to be disbanded. Instead Universal will be realigned closely
with the McCann Erickson advertising network, while Initiative will be
partnered with the newly merged Draft FCB Group.
WPP is said to be assembling a dedicated unit
drawn from several
agencies within the group, to handle the account of the UK satellite
broadcaster Sky. The business is currently housed at WPP's United London,
but according to Campaign the new entity could also drawn on the skills of
Tamara Ingram, CEO at Grey London. Ingram has a reputation as one of the
industry's strongest account handlers, not least because of her long and
fruitful relationship with Procter & Gamble.
Ben Langdon, the former head of McCann Erickson and
Euro RSCG in the UK,
is to return to the advertising industry. Widely credited with restoring
the fortunes of the tired McCann UK outpost in the 1990s, Langdon has kept
a low profile since being ousted from Euro RSCG in 2005. His new agency, Digital Marketing Group, is to be formed through
the acquisition and merger of direct marketing shop Dig For Fire and
digital agency HSM.
This week's big account news is Philips'
review of its global media business, worth around $600m annually. Carat is
defending. In other developments, Mediaedge:CIA
picked up Danone in the UK (also from
Carat); and Peugeot and Citroen
shifted French media back to MPG
(after a stint at OMD). On the creative side, Glenfiddich whiskey
appointed 180 Amsterdam; Y&R picked up
the global account for Palm handheld computers; and Bartle
Bogle Hegarty resigned InBev's Boddingtons and Castlemaine XXXX beers
in the UK.
Please note - there will be no Weekly Update next week. Normal
service resumes on 2nd November.
As always, please confirm your subscription
to the free Adbrands Weekly Update if you haven't already done so by
clicking here or on the link at the foot of this email. Thank you for your
assistance!
Regards
Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands
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