Grey unveils lively New Year campaign for the Sun – but it’s still too bossy for its own good

It’s going to be a big year for the Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper in the UK, one of the more profitable planks of his hived-off print business News Corp.

The phone and computer hacking and corrupt payments trial of senior former News International executives including Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson is wending its way through an Old Bailey courtroom and, even if the Sun, still the UK’s biggest selling paper, survives that it still has to show that its seventh-day version, replacing the defunct News of the World, can replace the earnings lost when that tacky and largely unlamented tabloid closed.

A big part of Murdoch’s UK newspaper strategy is the company’s newish arrangement with WPP’s ‘Team News,’ chiefly lively WPP agency Grey London. Can Grey persuade us (or some of us) to love the Sun? You suspect that not that many of its three million or so readers actually like it much even though they buy it.

Here’s the latest for the Sun from Grey, plugging a cheap holiday offer for the New Year.

And it’s not bad. But has anyone at Grey suggested a softer tone to its News Corp client? The Sun is always telling us to do something, emphasised by the bombastic voiceovers. The days when the Sun had the ‘authority’ to tell us to do things have probably long gone.