Food safety board appointee prepares to raise awareness

ADVERTISING/MARKETING: The cross-Border food safety promotion board, Safefood, has appointed ESB public relations manager Mr Barney Whelan to the post of director of marketing and communications. The appointment signals a significant increase in the marketing and communications activities of Safefood.

"The first task will be to raise awareness of the organisation and what its mandate is," says Mr Whelan, who takes over next month. Since it was established after the Belfast Agreement, the board has not been as publicly active as, for example, a similar board dealing with road safety which has been responsible for several hard-hitting advertising campaigns in the past year.

Safefood's brief is to foster and maintain the confidence in food supply in Ireland with an emphasis on consumer confidence. This will take place partly through a series of advertising and information campaigns, focusing on all aspects of food from the risks of foodborne disease to poor nutrition.

The board has no enforcement powers. When set up, it did appoint a Dublin-based advertising agency, Grey, which has produced several tactical campaigns, including the current "safe barbecue" television and press campaign. It uses a contemporary Japanese-style cartoon character to get the message across.

"Working on cross-Border campaigns requires a certain sensitivity, particularly in terms of accent," says Mr Philip Sherwood, managing director of Grey, recalling a campaign his agency ran some years ago in Northern Ireland using what the agency felt was a fairly neutral southern accent. "We considered it middle of the road but it resulted in hate mail and a lot of unpleasantness," he said. "But it did help in our understanding of the sensitivities in cross-Border work." Grey's solution was to develop the cartoon character, Harry Hatman. "For this summer, we re-worked the advertisement so that the Safefood brand is now more prominent," said Mr Sherwood.

The cross-Border sensitivity of the job is something Mr Whelan will be familiar with through his work with the ESB, the second-largest supplier of electricity in the North with a power station in Belfast. "The all-Ireland dimension of the role makes this an interesting challenge," he says. "The audience that I've been dealing with is the same in that it's everybody working and living in the country."

While Mr Whelan is known throughout the marketing industry, particularly for his role developing the ESB's extensive arts and sports sponsorship portfolio, his career started out quite differently. When he completed his doctoral studies in fisheries ecology in 1978, he joined ESB's fisheries conservation unit, with responsibility for recreational fisheries development. He later became involved in the aquaculture industry before taking up responsibility for ESB's public relations in 1994.

A feature of the cross-Border Road Safety Authority's advertising campaigns has been the commercial sponsors behind them, most notably Axa and Ford. With his extensive background in commercial sponsorship, Mr Whelan will be looking for similar deals.

"Sponsorship is an alternative revenue stream and if it can give weight and frequency to a campaign, it's something that I will be looking into," he says.

bharrison@irish-times.ie