Country Music Television will brief four agencies this week before inviting them to pitch for a £1.5m above-the-line awareness campaign scheduled to start next month. The channel, available in 3.5 million cable and satellite TV homes in the UK and a further 5 million on the Continent, wants to broaden its audience beyond the predominantly […]

Asda is extending trials of its customer loyalty Club Card, which it has been secretly testing since November, and says it could go national with the scheme at short notice. The development follows last month’s launch of the Clubcard discount loyalty scheme by Tesco. Co-incidentally, Asda’s loyalty card is also called Club Card. Asda has […]

The more the Minister of the Arts succeeds in winding up the nation’s cultural grandees, the better he is doing a job that should not exist outside Soviet Russia

There are a number of exaggerations and inaccuracies in Jo-Anne Walker’s article “Pride after a fall” (MW March 3) that I should like to correct. I would challenge Panini to prove that they sold 1 billion packets of stickers in the UK last year. Given that they accept Merlin has the major portion of the […]

Companies are continuing to break the Advertising Standards Authority code on slimming and health products despite the authority’s renewed efforts to tighten up on the area. The ASA’s latest report upholds four separate complaints against companies for making misleading and unsubstantiated claims for their products. The judgements come two months after the ASA tightened rules […]

Product placement (above) and bad language are the subjects of two TV commercials launched by the Independent Television Commission this week. The two commercials, which are part of the ITC’s attempt to explain its role to viewers, were created by Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters. Both the ads were directed by Andy Wilson, whose work includes […]

ICL is to make a ú25m launch into the pan-European consumer home entertainment market, using the brand heritage of its majority shareholder, Japanese giant Fujitsu.

British marketing isn’t what it used to be, says a recent article in the Economist. A series of misfortunes engulfing such Eighties bellwethers as Saatchi & Saatchi, Unilever and J Sainsbury has exposed them as City idols with feet of clay. It might seem nit-picking to question the misfortune afflicting J Sainsbury, which has seen […]

Zenith Media will not lose the Mars media buying business, despite Saatchi & Saatchi’s loss of the global and media strategy business, Mars confirmed this week. According to John Murray, staff officer (franchise) at Mars in the US: “There is no media buying review underway and we are not making any special evaluation of media […]

Virginia Matthews’ jousting with the customer service industry (MW, February 17) elicited a few sympathetic groans here at The Cade Partnership. As an agency with a good deal of experience helping clients handle customer complaints, we are only too familiar with the “how may I help you?” brigade. Telephone helplines are a marvellous opportunity to […]

* Frank Mars launched chocolate and nougat bar, Milky Way in the US in 1923. He gave his son Forrest Snr $50,000 and the foreign rights to market the brand, which was launched in the UK and renamed the Mars bar. It was produced at a factory in Slough from August 1932. A different product, […]

At one time, you were either young, middle-aged, old or dead. Now, the world is full of Generation X and Third Agers, all desperate to be targeted.

Holsten Distributors is axing its 12-year sponsorship of Tottenham Hotspurs football club at the end of the season, and could pull out of sponsorship altogether. The last deal the two companies signed nearly three years ago was worth ú1.9m over three years. Tottenham is expected to announce a replacement sponsor within the next few weeks. […]

Young & Rubicam is understood to have won the ú3.5m European Night Services business to promote the Channel Tunnel’s sleeper service.

It’s a mystery to me why you included a mention of Gay Times in your article “Rude Awakening” (MW February 10) about the distribution, sales and advertising revenue of soft-porn magazines. WH Smith tends to put our magazine on the top shelf, largely because of the ads we carry for telephone contact lines. However, many […]