Finance

Lord Bell, chairman of Chime Communications, has written to me regarding our story about Chime’s acquisition of Gulliford Consulting for a maximum price of £4.75m. We noted that Simon Gulliford, former marketing head of Barclays and Standard Life, had been ...

WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell recently doubled his 2011 acquisition budget to £400m and he’s been busy spending some of it recently, including today’s purchase by WPP agency JWT of A4A, a digital agency founded in 2003 and based in ...

US shareholders in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation are trying to gang up on Rupert Murdoch, his family and assorted cronies in an assault that, if even partly successful, will surely bring forward the day when the company’s newspapers, source of ...

College Group, the UK mini marcoms group based on College Hill financial PR has sold just over half the company to US venture capital firm Vitruvian in a deal that values the whole company at £45m, leading to a £20m ...

Life looked a bit grim for Haymarket, publisher of Campaign, Management Today, Brand Republic and What Car? among many others, last year after a pre-tax loss in 2009 of £3.7m. This was only the half of it as the company, ...

You have to feel for Tesco CEO Phil Clarke (pictured), no sooner had he taken over from long-serving and highly successful predecessor Sir Terry Leahy, than UK retail sales fell off a cliff, hitting supermarket food sales too for the ...

And here they are (in billions of dollars) according to the big brand consultancy: 1/Coca-Cola (71.8); 2/IBM (69.9); 3/Microsoft (59); 4/Google (55.3), 5/GE (42.8), 6/McDonald’s (35.6); 7/Intel (35.2); 8/ Apple (33.5), 9/Disney (29), 10 Hewlett-Packard (28.5). These things are measured ...

Interpublic CEO Michael Roth has acquired a taste for acquisitions recently, buying companies in Brazil, India and the UK, and now the owner of McCann Erickson and DraftFCB is buying Meteorite, a well-established independent London marketing agency with 70 staff ...

Advertising on the internet accounted for 27 per cent of the UK’s adspend in the first half of 2011, taking over from television advertising (26.1 per cent) for the first time since 2009 according to new figures from the Internet ...