All advertisers like to be on the side of the angels so Mars-owned Pedigree Petfoods is donating a million ‘free’ meals to rescued dogs this year. And here’s the appropriately gritty AMV/BBDO ad to launch the campaign. The campaign also includes sponsoring Paul O’ Grady’s ‘For The Love of Dogs’ ITV show; which some might [...]
ITV CEO Adam Crozier (left) played an unseasonal Santa Claus this morning with a £246m giveaway to shareholders from the £800m or so cash the company has accumulated over the past few years. This is a considerable achievement but it doesn’t disguise the fact that revenue at its main ITV channel was flat (its much [...]
Media takeovers are all the rage at the moment – the latest being Liberty Global’s $20bn deal for Virgin Media – and the boys in dark glasses who still inhabit the undergrowth of the City of London financial district are busy speculating that someone or other is intent on taking out ITV, the UK’s biggest [...]
Rupert Howell (left), a founder of the HHCL agency, boss of McCann in London and former client sales supremo at ITV, is set to be the CEO of the People tabloid newspaper if Journalist Sue Douglas’s consortium succeeds in raising the £10m required to buy it from Trinity Mirror. Howell has been winding down his [...]
It has been compared to bottoms – and also the most fiendishly complicated sex toy yet devised by Ann Summers. Yes, the new ITV logo, spearheading the TV station’s most ambitious rebrand in 11 years, has turned us into a nation of amateur psychologists desperately attempting to infer inner meaning from the Rorschach blot of [...]
WPP-owned GroupM and the media agencies it represents are returning to Channel 4 on Monday, as we predicted over Christmas. Quite what the media giant achieved with this bout of sabre-rattling is unclear but Channel 4 certainly couldn’t afford to reduce its ad rates much (it had already offered to renew the two-year deal that [...]
The above isn’t (quite) as daft as it sounds, there must be millions out there that have been squirrelled away by advertisers who certainly aren’t daft enough to advertise ice creams, summer frocks, barbecues and all the other things that get an occasional lick/airing in the average British summer, assuming such a thing exists any [...]
ITV has unveiled its first two commercials using Shazam, an app that lets you access competitions and giveaways when you’re watching a commercial. The first two, for Cadbury and Pepsi, aired during Saturday’s final of Britain’s Got Talent, won by a performing dog act. Here’s Cadbury’s ‘Unwrap Gold’ from media agency PHD’s Drum unit, plugging [...]
ITV Boss Adam Crozier has delivered some of what he has been promising with 2011 profits up 14 per cent to £327m on a not-quite-so-exciting revenue increase of four per cent to £2.1bn. Hero of the hour is ITV Studios, now run by highly-paid former Channel 4 programme chief Kevin Lygo. Non-advertising revenue was up [...]
The UK’s only two remaining independent terrestrial TV companies – STV which operates in Scotland and UTV Media in Northern Ireland – are both in the takeover frame following recent troubles. STV, formerly Scottish Television and best known for its long-running Taggart crime series – has slipped to a £900,000 loss following the £18m settlement [...]
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