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If you're reading this anywhere outside Europe, you may not be aware that the continent is heading into the final stages of the Euro 2008 football championships. Yes, I know. If you live in the US the only soccer story you're following is whether or not that's really a huge pair of socks in David Beckham's new Armani underpants. However, sadly David Beckham's services are not required in Europe currently, because England didn't qualify, so instead we're looking for other countries to root for. Spanish star Fernando Torres plays for Liverpool FC, and tonight will be fighting Russia for a place against Germany in the final. The European arm of US agency 72andSunny has quickly put together this nice little film for Nike to show just where our hearts will be this evening. How about that for a quick turnaround!

We like the new campaign for the World Wildlife Fund's Connect2Earth project, which depicts what happens when superheroes "can't be arsed" to save the world. Quick note: "can't be arsed" is local colloquial for "can't be bothered". (This is an extraordinary bit of timing as well. Isn't there a new Will Smith movie with exactly the same idea?) The agency responsible is London independent Escape Partners.

An absurd controversy has resulted from a new spot for the Fiat-owned car brand Lancia. That company was probably in raptures when it managed to sign up movie star Richard Gere to appear in an ad for its new Delta model. They obviously didn't realise that he would want to make a point in the process... which they and agency Armando Testa allowed him to do. That's all fine, but what seems entirely incomprehensible is the way in which Fiat Group is now attempting to disassociate itself from the inevitable offence caused by the ad to the government of China, while still running the commercial. For the record, Fiat Group's statement says the ad "should not be understood as an endorsement by Fiat Group of Mr Gere’s social and political views. Fiat Group reiterates its neutrality in connection with any political matter, be it on a national or international basis. To the extent that the Lancia Delta advertising may give rise to misinterpretations of its well established position of neutrality, Fiat Group extends its apologies to the Government of the People’s Republic of China and to the Chinese people." Disingenuous, or what?

On the subject of protests: farewell, sweet cheeks... The Heinz Deli Mayo spot with which we signed off our Ads of the Week last week was pulled off-air on Friday after more than 200 viewers contacted the UK's Advertising Standards Authority to complain that it was just, well, too damn gay. The ASA has yet to decide on whether or not to investigate, but Heinz took the unilateral decision to drop the ad immediately to keep (some) customers happy. In response, gay rights group Stonewall and specialist broadcaster Gaydar Radio are calling on their supporters to boycott all Heinz products in protest. That counter-reaction, of course, is just as ridiculous as the complaints made by the 200 homophobes who contacted the ASA in the first place. And I thought we Brits were able to cope with this sort of thing?

And finally, the new spot by Wieden & Kennedy for Old Spice bodywash. Although we miss the tongue-in-cheek presence of actor Bruce Campbell, the new quadruped spokescreature does an excellent job. We sincerely apologise if this ad causes offence to centaurs or their wives.

In the news this week: Advertisers

As had been widely expected, French retail giant Carrefour confirmed plans to drop its Champion supermarket brand, and rename all 800 existing outlets as Carrefour Marché. Over the six months it has been running a test rebrand in 13 stores, and the group claims to have experienced sales increases of as much as 15% in the refreshed outlets. Now, a further 100 stores will change over to Carrefour Marché by the end of 2008, followed by the remaining outlets during 2009. The changeover is complicated by the fact that almost half of the stores are owned by franchisees who have a right to transfer from Carrefour to a rival retailer if they are not satisfied with the terms of the new arrangement. The group is already involved in a legal dispute with one of its biggest franchise operators, which has accused it of failing to pass on the full benefits of  supplier rebates. Its relationship with some other franchisees is also strained.

Procter & Gamble chairman & CEO AG Lafley has warned US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain against talking the country into an even worse recession by overplaying economic gloom for political effect. In an interview with the FT he said, “In my business we don’t need excessive negativism. We are in a business where psychology matters – even in the staples business – and in the economy psychology matters. It could go negative on the economy, that could be a problem... We will talk ourselves into a worse recession.”

Research company Harris Interactive published the latest results of its annual Reputation Quotient study, which compiles a ranking of America's most reputable companies from the views of ordinary consumers. This year's champion? Well, forget all those conspiracy theories: it's Google. Last year's champion, Microsoft, slipped to 10th place. Rounding out the top ten were Johnson & Johnson (also #1 in the sub-categories of emotional appeal and products & services), Intel, General Mills, Kraft, Berkshire Hathaway (#1 for financial performance and vision & leadership), 3M, Coca-Cola and Honda. Whole Foods pipped Google for 1st place in the social responsibility sub-category. Most-improved company this year was HP, which climbed from #38 overall in 2007 to #17 this year. At the bottom end of the scale, the companies with the worst reputations were Halliburton, most of the big oil companies, Northwest Airlines, Comcast, and Detroit's big three of GM, Ford and Chrysler. See the full report here.

There's no end in sight just yet for the squeeze in the banking industry. US giant Citigroup warned that it will make further large writedowns and credit losses in 2Q in the face of what it called "unprecedented" market conditions. The subprime adjustments will be less than the $10.5bn written off last quarter, said Citi's CFO, but would nevertheless be substantial. At the same time, the position of Citi's mortgage and credit card businesses have got worse, and losses in this area are likely to be higher than the $5.5bn reported in 1Q.

Meanwhile the UK's Lloyds TSB was reported to be considering opportunities for international expansion. The group pulled out of almost all its non-UK interests in 2003 to focus on the domestic market. Now however, it is said to be keen to take advantage of other banks' difficulties to rebuild a wider profile. One possible target is Germany's Dresdner Bank, currently a subsidiary of Allianz. It is expected to face opposition in such a bid from Santander of Spain, which is also sniffing around for potential acquisitions; and from a German plan which could merger Dresdner with Postbank and Commerzbank to create a stronger domestic rival to Deutsche Bank.

Nokia announced plans to acquire software developer Symbian, which develops operating systems for high-end phone handsets. Rather than keep the benefits of the business for itself, however, Nokia said it would convert the software into an open-source platform which can be used free of charge by third party developers. As a result it hopes to deflect the growing competition from other smartphone system developers such as Apple, Microsoft and Google. Meanwhile, Korean mobile giant SK Telecom called it quits in the US and agreed to sell its Helio service to Virgin Mobile USA in return for a 20% holding in the merged business, which will continue under the Virgin Mobile banner.

In the news this week: Agencies

Publicis Groupe announced another new initiative designed to put digital disciplines at the heart of its media services. VivaKi is a new strategic unit which, the group says, will "take advantage of the combined scale of the autonomous operations of Digitas, Starcom MediaVest, Denuo and ZenithOptimedia to develop new services, new tools, and new partnerships." Not sure about the name, but the logo is cool. The group is committing two of its biggest guns to the process. Media services chief Jack Klues has been named as joint managing partner of VivaKi alongside David Kenny, who will as a result relinquish his role as CEO of Digitas to #2 Laura Lang. According to the Publicis announcement, Kenny "will focus on identifying advantages linked to scale", including the creation of a data analytics  and knowledge-sharing service (to be known as VivaKi Nerve Center), and a training and education platform, which will be placed under the supervision of former Starcom MediaVest head Renetta McCann. For his part, Jack Klues will be responsible for growing and developing brand-specific solutions. The first fruits of the VivaKi project came later the same day with the launch of Audience On Demand, a technology platform that will allow Publicis clients to buy targeted campaigns for specific web audiences - such as mums, travellers or dog owners etc - across all four main online ad networks (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL) in a single transaction.

Publicis also established a new dedicated agency to take on interactive duties across Europe for Nissan. The new unit is to be named DNA (for Digital Nissan Agency). It was the winner in a shootout against Tequila, the digital arm of Nissan's advertising network, TBWA. Incumbent Duke, a unit of Avenue A | Razorfish, keeps digital duties for France.

Coming hot on the heels of an announcement that it will establish a London office later this year, multi-hub creative network StrawberryFrog said it was splitting from its original HQ in the Netherlands as a result of a parting of the ways between original founders Scott Goodson and Brian Elliott. The Dutch office has been bought out by Elliott and rebranded this week as Amsterdam Worldwide. Goodson, now based in New York, keeps the StrawberryFrog name and its international offices. The two Canadians originally founded the business in Amsterdam in 1999.

Havas chairman Vincent Bolloré confirmed that he will go ahead with further attempts to gain board representation at rival Aegis, but not just yet. Speaking to journalists at the Cannes Lions Festival, he said he will wait until next year to make his sixth run at the British media and research group. In the mean time, he's busy with the development of a new electric car, a joint venture with Italian automobile designers Pininfarina.

Over at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, the top prize in the Film category was shared between what were arguably the two favourites: Fallon London's "Gorilla" viral for Cadbury and "Believe" by McCann Erickson's TAG unit for Microsoft. The latter also collected a Grand Prix in the Integrated category. The Titanium Grand Prix - arguably the festival's top honour - went to the web campaign by Tokyo agency Projector for Uniqlo, which had already snapped up the Cyber Grand Prix. Top winner in the Outdoor category was TBWA\China for a poster campaign for the upcoming Olympics. BBDO New York was named as Agency of the Year; BBDO Worldwide was Network of the Year for the second consecutive year with an astonishing tally of 60 Lions spanning virtually every category. Omnicom's other achievements included second place in Agency of the Year for BBDO's Brazilian outpost Almap BBDO, while stablemate DDB London was placed #3. DDB Worldwide was the second most awarded network. Omnicom took a combined total of 140 Lions in all. Publicis Groupe ranked second in overall awards with a total of 101 Lions of different colours. Saatchi & Saatchi was its most awarded network. See more details, including case studies for all the winning entries, at the Cannes Lions site.

Pfizer announced a wide-reaching review of all its existing marketing assignments from advertising to digital, media and even PR. Earlier this year, the group's marketing came under intense scrutiny after an advertising campaign for top-selling product Lipitor featuring spokesman Dr Robert Jarvik was revealed to be misleading. For all other appointments, subscribers can access the full Adbrands Account Assignments database here.

In the news this week: Media

The gloom at Yahoo thickened this week, as the company suffered a series of high-level resignations. At least six or seven EVP or SVPs have quit in the last fortnight. They include Joshua Schachter and Stewart Butterfield, respectively the founders of social bookmarking tool Delicious and photo-sharing website Flickr, both acquired by Yahoo in recent years; Vish Makhijani, head of Yahoo Search; and Brad Garlinghouse, the head of the company's communications and communities services including email, messaging and Yahoo Groups. Garlinghouse was also the man who penned the celebrated "peanut butter" memo from 2006, which warned of the company spreading its services too thinly ("like peanut butter") and issued a rallying call for a return to Yahoo's original values. One analyst told the New York Times: "Wall Street has lost all confidence at this point. The senior managers have clearly lost confidence in the strategy and have lost confidence in Sue [Decker, president] and Jerry [Yang, CEO], and that's not a good thing." Ironically, Yahoo's share price has declined less than might have been expected as a result of these defections, but only on the back of rumours that Microsoft will take another run at the business. Expect raised voices and a packed house at Yahoo's annual general meeting next week!

Upfront ad sales for the 2008/09 TV season by US cable TV networks and syndication sellers are expected to close in the next week or so. Despite early fears that all advance sales would be on last year, the cable and syndication markets show signs of doing even better than the five national prime-time networks. They closed a couple of weeks ago with a haul of around $9.2bn, up around 1% or more on 2007. (Before sales began, the gloomiest prognostications were forecasting a decline of as much as 14%). However, the cable networks are expected to show an increase of as much as 8% to $8bn, while sales for syndicated shows are likely to hit $2.5bn, around 5% higher than last year. Looks like the standard 30-second spot ain't quite dead just yet.

There is a possible storm on the horizon, though, and it could prove just as damaging as the writers' strike which crippled TV networks and movie studios last winter. This time, it's the actors who could walk out. Current pay and terms contracts with the actor's unions are due to end in less than a week and renewal negotiations with the largest body, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), are not going well. Sticking points include many of the same issues which held up the agreement with writers, such as the pricing of royalty payments for DVD and download sales. Last week, SAG leaders fired a shot across the bows by suggesting to the media that a deal was unlikely before the June 30th deadline, in which case they might put a strike vote to members. Actors are themselves divided into two camps. The smaller union AFTRA, which generally represents less well-known performers, has already reached a tentative deal with the studios, and is currently waiting for members to approve it. A small number of bigger stars, including Tom Hanks, Sally Field, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey, signed a petition calling for members of both unions to endorse the AFTRA agreement. The more militant SAG, however, refuses to cave and is asking the smaller union's members to vote no, and force AFTRA back to the negotiating table. It has launched its own petition with support from the likes of Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte and Viggo Mortenson, among others.

In France, president Sarkozy confirmed plans to drop all commercial advertising from state-owned television channels from January 2009. Instead the government will levy a new tax on commercial broadcasters, including telecoms companies, of 0.9% of annual revenues. The idea for the new funding system was first raised in January.

As always, if you haven't already done so, please confirm your subscription to the free Adbrands Weekly Update by clicking here or on the link at the foot of this email. Thank you for your assistance! 

Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands

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