Hachette Filipacchi has secured long-standing drinks firm SodaStream as the sponsor of its forthcoming Inside Soap awards, giving the brand prime placement at both the ceremony, and within the magazine’s extensive coverage of the event.The awards, celebrating their 10th year, will be launched with a star-studded party in September, promising more glitz and glamour than… Continue reading SodaStream Cleans Up With Inside Soap Sponsorship

ITV Sales has today announced a third key appointment to its advertiser relationships team as part of ongoing attempts to improve its image by becoming more customer-centric.Maria-Isabel Jassies will join the twelve-strong team at the beginning of September from Mindshare, where she was an account director with responsibility for a number of high-profile clients including… Continue reading ITV Sales Recruits Third Agency Account Director

Channel 4 has appointed investment bank UBS to review its strategic options, in a move that has sparked speculation that the state-owned broadcaster is edging closer to a merger with commercial rival, Five.The two channels have made no secret of their desire to forge closer links and have held tentative discussions about the logistics of… Continue reading Channel 4 Hires UBS As It Mulls Merger With Five

The Real Radio network has announced its most high-profile station-led promotion to date, giving away £150,000 to lucky listeners, inviting them to hunt the station’s ‘man on the run’ on the streets of Wales, Scotland and Yorkshire.The network’s Fugitive campaign is designed to create a frenzy amongst listeners, with a daily bounty being offered to… Continue reading Real Radio Hunts Success With Fugitive Campaign

Advertisers in the UK seem to be showing very little interest in the 2004 Olympics with only 3% of marketing activity in the run-up and during the games related to the event, says a survey conducted by a global network of independent advertising agencies. Colorado based ICOM surveyed members in more than 25 countries and… Continue reading UK Advertisers Place Little Importance On Summer Olympics

The popularity of text messaging looks set to get an even further boost as communications giant, British Telecom, has announced that land-line owners can now also join the texting revolution. New developments in technology has allowed BT to offer text-messaging services to home phone owners. Fixed line texting allows those who don’t have special SMS… Continue reading BT Launches Text Messaging For Land Line Phones

As internet shopping continues to boom, so does the number of people using credit cards online, with one-in-ten UK web-users now choosing this payment method, which has grown by five times in popularity since 1999. According to research by the Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS), 10% of all credit card transactions now take place… Continue reading Online Credit Card Payments Surge

WAP page impressions have grown by 42% to 4 billion over the past year, according to the Mobile Data Association, putting it on track to reach a total of 13 billion by 2004. Despite this being a traditionally quieter time because of the summer holidays, WAP has grown from 784 million pages since June 2003… Continue reading WAP Pages To Reach 13 Billion In 2004

Emap Communications has today announced that it has purchased the event that hosts the advertising world’s ‘Oscars’ – the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival – for £52.5 million. The festival, which has been acquired from WJB Chiltern Trust, is the largest yearly gathering in the marketing world and each June over 8,000 advertising and marketing… Continue reading Emap Acquires Ad World’s ‘Oscars’

Global holdings group, Interpublic, has saw revenues jump 3% during the second quarter of 2004, with organic revenue moving out of the red for the first time since 2001. As organic revenue, which has been adjusted for acquisitions and dispositions, scraped in to the positive with a 0.3% increase, operating profits rose 3.8%, a slight… Continue reading Slow Improvements Continue At Interpublic