More clouds at the Ryder Cup

BOOKMAKER PADDY Power, known for its cheeky and opportunistic advertising campaigns, pulled off a clever stunt at last weekend’s Ryder Cup at Medinah Country club, Illinois.

Five planes, circling over the golf course, “wrote” messages in the sky, much like old fashioned skywriters – a form of advertising that dates back to the 1920s.

But the communication was brought bang up to date because it was made up of messages that were being tweeted to Paddy Power by European Ryder Cup fans.

Forty tweets in all were written in the sky during the final two days of the competition and they included “Spirit of Seve”, “Retweet this Poults” (in homage to Ian Poulter) and “Mrs Dufner is hot”, a reference to US golfer Jason Dufner’s wife. The tweets were visible up to 20 miles away.

The technical delivery of the skywriting was handled by Curb Media, a US company which described the stunts as “marking the start of a new kind of marketing”.

How aware television viewers were of the stunt during the excitement of the final day is difficult to assess, but viewing figures for the tournament show a healthy interest in the competition on this side of the Atlantic, despite the time difference.

Sky Sports 1 achieved a peak audience of just over two million people on Sunday night. Overall, the satellite channel had an average of 1.2 million viewers and a 6.8 per cent audience share between 4pm and 1am on the nailbiting final day.