What is it with CDP Associates and teaser campaigns? Just as they revealed that their week-long press campaign was a teaser for the ESB, they launched a new teaser campaign for a different client, this time for Ocean. The mysterious sheep that is on a large proportion of 48 sheet sites around Dublin is a teaser for Ocean's new campaign.
That company's advertisements are always notably creative and entertaining, so it should be worth waiting to see the link between the woolly teaser and the actual campaign, which should break over the next 10 days.
Ryanair has signed a three-year deal with Sky News to sponsor the satellite broadcaster's weather bulletins. The airline, which trades on putting its prices into bold print, is surprisingly coy about how much the deal has cost. It will only say that it is a "six-figure sum" per annum. Eircom's sponsorship of the weather bulletins on RTE cost £600,000.
According to Mr Tim Jeans, marketing director at Ryanair, the company has moved into television sponsorship with Sky because of that station's "increasing market share and its European coverage, which makes the channel an ideal vehicle for us to reach both the leisure and business markets".
The agenda for this year's annual media buyers' beano in Killarney sounds considerably more focused than usual, with an emphasis on assessing various media as brands in their own right.
Mr Ruan McGloughlin, who is one of the conference organisers as well as being group media director at Universal McCann, says increasing media fragmentation is making media owners and planners more conscious of the brand values of particular media. "With numbers getting smaller, what a particular medium stands for as a brand will become more and more important, says Mr McGloughlin.
Tickets for the March 24th conference are available from the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland.
Bernice Harrison can be contacted at bharrison @irish-times.ie
