For that alone City analysts and television chiefs believe the Sky bid will
Posted in General on 27. Aug, 2010
For that alone City analysts and television chiefs believe the Sky bid will fail.ITN remains bullish about winning a renewal of the five-year contract. Sources there said it had beaten off Sky for the Channel 4 contract in 1997 and the Channel 5 contract in 1999, that they had been going since 1955 and Sky had yet to win a contract for a tailored news programme.Certainly, the belief among users of ITN news is that it will retain the contract. Dawn Airey, chief executive of Channel 5, told the Broadcasting Press Guild Sky would not wrest the contract from ITN.Ironically, Ms Airey’s predecessor at Channel 5, David Elstein, did contemplate switching the channel’s news service to Sky when they came in with a bid that was literally half the price of the ITN service. But Mr Elstein was overruled by his board, chaired at the time by Greg Dyke, now director-general of the BBC..
He is cute, has brown ears, a waggy tail and a stick in his jaws. His name is Lucky and, if his corporate owners have spent their money wisely, he is the new four-legged secret weapon of advertising. He is cute, has brown ears, a waggy tail and a stick in his jaws. His name is Lucky and, if his corporate owners have spent their money wisely, he is the new four-legged secret weapon of advertising.
From newspapers to radio stations, election-style campaigning cars to pavement pawprints, dog-loving Britons have been bombarded for the past week with pleas to find the nation’s most elusive pooch.Adopting the rudimentary style of a forlorn dog owner’s attempt to find his or her lost pet by asking “Where’s Lucky?”, the slick campaign even has a website detailing his likes and dislikes.Result: Millions of sought-after ABC1s speculating about just why they are speculating about a missing Airedale/Collie cross whose fate will be revealed on Monday.
Such is the depth of the conceit, even journalists phoning to find out about Lucky’s fate were yesterday being greeted with a PR operative pleading for sightings of the mongrel.The post-modern spin operation, which The Independent can reveal is in fact for a new internet insurance service run by Royal & SunAlliance, is part of a new breed of “teaser” advertising.Lucky, the furry creation of advertising and PR giant Ogilvy & Mather, represents an amalgam of direct advertising and public relations designed to arose curiosity by talking, well, nonsense.An Ogilvy & Mather source said: “The idea is to gain people’s attention with something unusual, by advertising without advertising anything obvious apart from a missing dog.”It is a drip, drip effect at the end of which people will be dying to find out just who Lucky is, where he is and why he is here. It tells a story which will continue for the coming weeks and months.”Ruthlessly seeking to exploit the British soft spot for cuddly animals in peril, adverts last week related how Lucky had been missing since Tuesday providing a six-day run up to his salvation on Monday.The new approach to ensnaring the increasingly discerning British consumer involved a low-key beginning with small posters and paw prints dotted around cities, building to a television advertising blitz.It has been accompanied with “guerrilla marketing” tactics such as cars carrying election-style loud hailers, an appeals hotline and a series of 5am phone calls to radio stations by distraught “owners”.Aware of the potential PR trap of belittling the cause of helping stray dogs, the advertisers have been careful to include information on contacting local authority dog wardens or Battersea Dog’s Home along with a donation to the famous London dog pound.Kate Nicholas, editor of trade magazine PR Week, said: “The idea is to reach the consumer through a range of different avenues adverts, word of mouth, sights in the street, people on the radio It creates a momentum and an expectation which … can gain a very high public profile at a fraction of the cost required for a more conventional campaign.” The big tease “Tell Sid”, for British Gas, 1986, the Radical agencyOne of the best-known television advertising campaigns of the 1980s, the publicity drive for the privatisation of British Gas involved people seeking a mysterious individual, Sid. Initially, it was unclear what they wanted with the disembodied Sid. The subsequent share scheme was massively oversubscribed.The “O”, for Orange Telecom, 1994, various agenciesThe campaign featured the letter “O” against a blue and green background slowly turning orange without explanation and a number of words, such as “Listen” and “Cry”.The adverts were revealed as the launch of the Orange Mobile phone network which was recently floated.. An examination board has apologised after giving thousands of sixth-formers an A-level physics question that was impossible to answer.