C&C to double spend on Club Orange brand with elaborate and surreal television campaign

Soft drinks company C&C is to spend £2.5 million (€3.17 million) on its new campaign for Club Orange, with £500,000 of that being spent on the production of four elaborate and surreal television advertisements.

Year on year that represents a doubling of the brand's marketing spend at a time when the advertising industry is facing a downturn overall. The expenditure would appear to support the theory that while technology-related and recruitment advertising is suffering badly, the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) sector is, as the industry predicts, virtually recession-proof, with brand-owners keen to develop share within a growing market.

"The carbonated drinks market grew by 6 per cent in 2001," says Michael McArdle, Club Orange's marketing director, "which would be typical of the growth rate over the past 10 years." Club Orange, one of the Republic's oldest brands, is the third most popular carbonated soft drink in the State after Coca-Cola and 7Up. It has 10 per cent of that market, and 45 per cent of the orange market.

For this latest advertising push, C&C took the unusual step of putting a single advertisement out to pitch. Prior to July all its business, both creative and media, had been with Cawley Nea - but in the summer it invited several agencies to pitch ideas for a single ad campaign. This is a most unusual move - and a controversial one - as agencies tend to work on brands and not on single campaigns.

Irish International won the pitch in September and made the television ad currently on screen. Cawley Nea still retains the media side of the business and also the creative strategies for other Club brands, including the new Diet Club campaign.

The new ad devised by Dylan Cotter and Damian Hurley of Irish International is a return to the brand's simple proposition that the drink is made from oranges. Recently, Finches - Club's home-grown competitor - has cleverly used "the made from oranges" concept in its advertising campaigns, while Club has concentrated on more humorous executions. The new campaign is a back-to-basics return to the brand's original theme.

The 40-second ad was directed by Declan Lowney, who directed Fr Ted and Cold Feet on television, and features actor Tom Hickey as a zany CEO explaining the origins of the Club name, while a conveyor belt shows oranges being clubbed to release the juice.

The ad was shot in a Dublin studio, with post-production special effects added by Screen Scene. There are also three 20-second ads which are not cutdowns of the main ad but different angles on the same theme. "Our brief was to do something contemporary that would be entertaining but at the same time would show the product substance," says Barry Dooley, account director at Irish International. The campaign will run for the next 18 months.

bharrison@irish-times.ie

Zenith Optimedia predicts that advertising expenditure in Ireland will not recover until 2003.

Its report this week says that advertising spend in Ireland will fall by 1.4 per cent in 2002, indicating a sharper decline than the last advertising downturn in the early 1990s.

London-based Zenith Optimedia is the world's fourth-largest global media services agency and its forecasts are closely watched. The problem for the Irish ad market, according to the report, is that "a lot of its growth in the late 1990s was driven by expenditure from the telecommunications and high-tech sectors - the ones that are suffering now".

In 2003, it predicts a growth in ad spend of 2.2 per cent followed by a modest strengthening in 2004, when growth will be 2.3 per cent after adjustment for inflation.

Zenith Optimedia also predicts that increased competition in the newspaper market will raise that medium's share of the total ad market from 55.3 per cent in 2000 to 56.6 per cent by 2004. Globally, the report predicts that the first signs of ad spend recovery will emerge next year.

IRS, the central sales and marketing office for 16 independent radio stations, introduced an online advertising booking facility in September.

The take-up among agencies has exceeded their expectations, and by the end of this month 30 per cent of all IRS's campaign bookings will be made online. It estimates that the figure will have doubled by the end of 2002.

The site also enables clients to listen to their advertisements online, and account managers can view the schedule of any campaign booked through IRS online.

Users include agency production people, account managers and media buyers. However, as the site develops towards a completely integrated online radio advertising media solution, the IRS predicts that users will grow to include account departments and even the clients.