Devil is in the detail in Ryanair price promise

It's hard to beat a headline that promises a return fare of £9 to London - which is why Ryanair doesn't even try. Its advertising typically doesn't bother with clever headlines or tourist-tempting pictures of the Tower of London, but instead aims to sell entirely on price.

The airline is currently running a press campaign in support of its new £9 fare but, as usual, the in-your-face headline is too good to be true.

If you think you're going to get to Stansted for less than the price of a round trip by bus to Drogheda you are, not surprisingly, wrong. Once the taxes mentioned in the very small print are added, the price goes up to £34.20.

It still makes Ryanair cheaper than its competitors but it is the sort of advertising that undermines consumer confidence and has consistently generated controversy for the airline.

"There is no legal requirement to include the various taxes in the advertised price," says Ms Ethel Power, head of communications for Ryanair, "and no other airline does it."

A fair point, but Ryanair has been before the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland on occasion and the complaints have generally centred on misleading price promises. Unlike other airlines, the company's advertising strategy does not include niche marketing or corporate campaigns

"We have an aggressive marketing approach with an `in-your-face, call to action' strategy," says Ms Power. "We're controversial by nature."

That approach has most recently brought it before the standards authority and earned it several column inches of newspaper editorial for an opportunistic press advertisement that was widely seen to be making commercial capital of an armed robbery at the Bank of Ireland branch in Dublin airport.

Despite the fact that a complaint against the advertisement was upheld, Ms Power feels it and its headline "It's not just the Bank of Ireland that gets robbed at Dublin Airport" were valid, saying that it was not intended to refer to the robbery but solely to a statement about the Dublin-London route by Aer Lingus chief executive Mr Gary Cullen.

For the past 18 months, the company has handled its own advertising in-house. It parted company with McConnells, the agency which had represented the company since its setting up, in 1994 and moved the business to British agency Griffin Bacal.

"Clients are victims of too much advice from advertising agencies," says Ms Power. "Ultimately, they all have it within themselves to know what is best for their own business and that's how we operate."

She talks of "trimming the fat" from advertising expenditure, with the aim at all times of diverting resources into creating lower fares. "You'll find that we spend a tiny percentage on advertising and marketing by comparison with other carriers," she says, while declining to give advertising spend figures.

In terms of press expenditure for the last six months of 1999, the independent media monitoring company Advanced Data Analysis has calculated that Ryanair spent just over £250,000 on press buying, a sixth of Aer Lingus's spend during the same period.

While Ryanair's marketing department is made up of only four people, the company does have two press people on staff and, while it is scathing about advertising agencies, it does employ two PR consultancies, one in Dublin and one in London - a line-up that seems reflective of the media attention the airline generates.