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What are we, made of stone or something? How could we possibly resist this new ad for Activision's Guitar Hero computer game, in which supermodel Heidi Klum strips down to bra and pants for some guitar heroics? Recognise the scene? Yup, it's a reference to the old Tom Cruise comedy Risky Business. And if Heidi Klum isn't quite your cup of tea, how about this matching spot which features sporting superstars Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps, Tony Hawk and Alex Rodriguez? DDB NY is the agency. 

Saturn is one of Germany's biggest consumer electronics retailers. This great ad by Scholz & Friends Berlin depicts what it calls the Evolution of Technology. A rough translation of the voiceover would be: "The selection was tough, but now it's here. The most powerful technology of all time, mercilessly low priced. Saturn. We hate expensive!" Cool CGI.

Mother this week unveils its first ad for Stella Artois, drawing a line firmly under the long-running series delivered over the past decade by Lowe. The ad retains its Gallic flavour, but dispenses entirely with the old "reassuringly expensive" positioning. "A smooth finish" is the new concept. Nicely done, but we miss the artistic charm of Lowe's campaigns. (Nice sly reference to Lowe's Red Shoes spot for Stella, though).

Finally, a very sweet Canadian ad for Toyota made by Montreal agency BleuBlancRouge. Ah, reminds me of my youth. Only with more time-lapse.

Just room for one more, which comes with a mild content warning. Beate Uhse is Germany's top adult entertainment cable channel. This spot promotes Beate Uhse's parental protection features which are designed to stop kids from accidentally accessing inappropriate content. The tagline means "You will see it. Your children won't." See the film here. It's like Rolf Harris for grown-ups. I guarantee you'll laugh.

"Change"

There was no question what made Story of the Week this week (maybe even Story of the Century). The selection of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was a huge victory for change in the world's largest economy. It looks like great news for just about everyone. Let's just hope that President Obama can live up to all our expectations in what is likely to prove a tough few years. 

The election also brought an end to several of the year's largest advertising campaigns, and their contribution will be sorely missed by the American media as we head into the cold winter of 2009. According to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of TNS research, the total amount spent in the US on political and issue based ads since January 1st 2008 was well in excess of $1.1bn. Barack Obama was easily the biggest contributor to that total, with expenditure of around $207m on TV ads alone. John McCain's equivalent broadcast spend was just under $120m, while the Republican National Committee forked out an additional $18m. Just to put those amounts in context, Obama's 2008 spend was broadly equivalent in dollar terms to what banking giant Citigroup spent on TV the year before. For McCain, think Dell or HP. The two main candidates were followed in expenditure by a large tail of other political or associated bodies who chose to broadcast their message to the nation in the run-up to the election. The New York Times has been carrying an updated ready reckoner of expenditure on their site here. 

The loss of all that adex comes on top of the cutbacks by automakers, banks, retailers, consumer electronics manufacturers and other big-ticket advertisers struggling to make ends meet in the current downturn. Despite the benefits of political spending as well as the Olympics, 2008 is shaping up to deliver the sharpest decline in broadcast media expenditure in decades. According to the US Television Bureau of Advertising, the year-on-year decline could be greater than the 1.5% fall reported in 1970. In the UK, media auditor Billetts forecasts a overall 5% fall in TV advertising revenues for 2008 (to £3.09bn), despite a continuing steady rise in overall audiences. It will be succeeded by a further 6% decline in 2009.  

Want a foretaste of how all this will affect the media companies? Look no further than CBS which reported a whopping $12.5bn loss for its latest quarter, although the company stressed that the biggest hit in those figures came from impairment charges rather than falling ad revenues. Meanwhile, Viacom, which owns the MTV Networks cable business as well as Paramount, reported a 37% fall in 3Q profits. There was further evidence of the toughening market in results from News Corp and Time Warner. The latter experienced sharp falls in spend at AOL and Time Inc, although these were offset by better than expected results from its cable networks. Here in the UK, commercial broadcasting giant ITV also unveiled another set of grim figures for 3Q. Yet ironically, its advertising performance was better than expected. A 2.5% fall in ad revenues for the year so far actually outperformed the rest of the market, where the fall averaged 3.2%. ITV now expects a further decline of 9% in 4Q, but predicts that its overall share of all UK broadcast advertising will hold steady year-on-year, after declining every year for more than two decades as a result of increasing competition.

In the news this past week: Advertisers

So what else happened this week? All things considered, the Autumn of 2008 is not perhaps the ideal time, economically speaking, to be opening the biggest shopping centre in Britain and one of the largest in Europe. But schedules are schedules, and the new Westfield Centre opened as planned in London's Shepherd's Bush district at the end of last week, containing around 280 retail outlets as well as 50 cafes and restaurants. Just about every shop brand you can think of is jammed into the centre's three floors, and it has - inevitably - been packed with visitors since Thursday evening. But how many are spending, and how many merely ogling? There are no figures just yet. Within days of the opening, many of Westfield's biggest retail tenants were already up in arms over proposals by the centre's owners to hike service charges by as much as another 75% to cover higher cleaning, marketing and security costs. That increase could cost individual stores as much as £500,000 a year more than they had budgeted. Several retailers said they would refuse to pay.

Mobile operator O2 is to strengthen its position as one of the foremost sponsors of live entertainment in the UK by replacing Carling as the title sponsor of the Academy group of music venues. These are spread across eight regional cities as well as London, where Academy's three sites include the Carling Academy Brixton and Carling Empire in Shepherds Bush. They will all adopt the O2 brand from January 2009. O2 has already experienced considerable prominence through its sponsorship of the former Millennium Dome, now arguably the UK's premier concert venue, and widely known as simply The O2. 

There was evidence of consolidation in the Japanese consumer electronics sector. Panasonic has apparently received consent from the board of smaller rival Sanyo to proceed with proposals for a merger. A deal would boost Panasonic's revenues of around $90bn a year to almost $110bn. A key advantage to Panasonic would be Sanyo's #1 positions in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and in solar power cells. Meanwhile Fujitsu agreed to pay around E454m acquire the 50% shareholding held by Germany engineering firm Siemens in their Fujitsu Siemens joint venture, now the last large-scale computer manufacturer in Europe. The deal is expected to close in April 2009, at which point the Siemens name will be dropped. The current strength of the yen could well inspire other Japanese companies to look towards Europe for low-priced acquisitions.

One deal that won't be happening just yet is the proposed merger of General Motors and Chrysler. This is now on hold after reaching what was described delicately as an "impasse". The "impasse" in question was the Bush administration's refusal at the end of last week to extend its $700bn bailout package to industrial manufacturers as well as financial institutions. GM had been counting on up to $15bn of federal funding to help it pay for Chrysler.

Various British banks pushed forward with their restructuring plans. Barclays succeeded in raising around £7bn of additional capital from private investors. However the plan has come under intense scrutiny from existing shareholders, because of the bank's decision to generate the largest portion of that cash from sovereign funds from the Middle Eastern states Qatar and Abu Dhabi, each of whom will end up with holdings equivalent to 16% of Barclays' equity. The bank appears to have chosen this route in order to avoid the restrictive covenants attached to capital borrowed from the UK government's rescue fund, mainly an enforced limit on executive bonuses. Current shareholders will get the chance to vote on Barclays' plan later this month. Separately, Lloyds TSB announced the new management team for the merged Lloyds/HBOS group. Only two of HBOS's managers will remain among the 11 most senior executives at the combined company.

In the news this past week: Agencies

Quite a few account assignments this week. OMD triumphed in the E800m shoot-out against Carat for the consolidated European media account of auto manufacturers Renault and Nissan. OMD already handled the Nissan account; Renault had been managed by Carat. The two agencies are also in fierce competition over the Vodafone account in the UK and Ireland. OMD currently has it in the UK while Carat is the incumbent in Ireland. Another Carat client, Grupo Santander, called a review of UK media across its three UK brands, Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley. 

In France, trade paper CB News named the four agencies competing for the creative account of supermarket group Auchan, one of the biggest reviews of the year. CLM/BBDO is defending against Y&R France (which had the business for 25 years before BBDO won it in 2000), as well as DDB affiliate Agence V and - a surprise competitor - the independent shop ASAP Aubert-Storch. In the US, Johnson & Johnson concluded a review of the creative roster for its various prescription pharmaceutical subsidiaries. The reviews were carried out at holding company level. WPP and Interpublic were named as the winning bidders, but details of how the individual brands will be split out and into which agencies have not yet been released. 

Here in the UK, Tesco effectively put an end to speculation regarding its media account. The retail giant publicly reaffirmed its faith in Initiative, renewing its contract for a further period and praising the agency for its "knowledge and commitment". Initiative also did well in Australia, capturing the consolidated Hyundai/Kia Motors media account. It already handled Hyundai in that market; Kia had been managed by smaller rival Total Media, owned by Omnicom. Total Media is now expected to rebrand as the Australian outpost of Omnicom's PHD media network 

Also in the UK, mortgage lender Nationwide cancelled plans for a review of its creative business and is hoping to reappoint longtime agency Leagas Delaney. Carnival Corporation appointed Vizeum to UK media for its P&O and Princess Cruises brands. Muller yoghurt called a review of creative. For all other appointments, subscribers can access the full Adbrands Account Assignments database here.

In the news this past week: Media

Google pulled the plug on its proposed search advertising alliance with Yahoo, citing the objections of government regulators and a number of major advertisers. "Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners," wrote SVP corporate development David Drummond, in a post to the company's public policy blog site. "That wouldn't have been in the long term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement." Yahoo said it was "disappointed" by Google's decision. I'll bet. Under the original ten-year plan, Yahoo agreed to carry Google's search ads alongside its own pay-per-click entries, an arrangement that would have generated up to $500m of additional cash flow. However, the US Department of Justice, prompted by several leading advertisers, expressed strong concerns that such a deal would place as much as 80% of the internet advertising market under Google's control. 

To get around these objections, the partners drew up a new proposal last week which would limit the term to two years and cap the revenue which Yahoo could generate from the arrangement to no more than a quarter of its total search income. However those cuts failed to win over the regulators and also raised new questions over whether the deal was worth doing at all. Many Yahoo shareholders are still angry that the company failed to secure what would have been a much more lucrative (to them) deal with Microsoft. What now for Yahoo? New talks with Microsoft are inevitable, only at a very much lower price. Don't bet on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock keeping their jobs till next year either. 

After several weeks of steadily mounting controversy, and approximately 30,000 complaints from members of the public, the UK's largest broadcaster, the BBC, announced the suspension of its most highly paid presenter, Jonathan Ross, for three months as well as the resignation of Lesley Douglas, the head of its most successful radio channel, Radio 2. The other presenter involved in the scandal, Russell Brand, quit the corporation over the scandal two weeks ago. From the controversy stirred up by the whole business, you might have thought the threesome had done something really serious, at the very least broken a couple of laws. However, as every person in Britain must know by now, Brand and Ross merely made a series of childish prank calls to the elderly actor Andrew Sachs, best known for his role of Manuel in Fawlty Towers. The increasingly ribald messages left on Sachs' answerphone were mainly concerned with Brand's claims to have bedded the actor's granddaughter. 

The real problem was that the inexperienced producer of Brand's radio show saw fit to pass the recordings for broadcast, despite the use of swearwords. Although only two listeners to the show complained at the time, the cause was subsequently taken up by the Daily Mail newspaper, and was transformed into a veritable witch hunt. (See here for a story about how effigies of Ross and Brand will be "burned at the stake" in UK Bonfire Night celebrations this weekend). Although the situation was blown up out of all proportion, at its heart it reflected a genuine grievance among junior BBC staff over the over-indulgence of "star" performers. Brand seems to have been regarded by other BBC employees as the personal "pet" of station controller Lesley Douglas, who apparently allowed him to sack any producer who challenged his increasingly wilful and excessive behaviour. The BBC has since vowed to curb excessive pay to celebrity presenters.

In a separate development, which was rather more surprising (or worrying, depending on your point of view), the notoriously conservative Daily Mail was also reported to be considering the acquisition of its struggling broadsheet rival The Independent. That newspaper, independent by nature as well as by name, is well-known for its liberal views, and would make a strange bedfellow for the somewhat right-wing Daily Mail. 

Satellite broadcaster BSkyB was said to have entered exclusive negotiations to acquire the local arm of struggling broadband provider Tiscali. A deal would make BSkyB the country’s largest provider of residential broadband. Also this week, BSkyB agreed a truce with pay TV rival Virgin Media in their long-running row over carriage fees for Sky's free-to-air channels on Virgin's cable service. The two sides were due to meet in court later this year to settle their various lawsuits. Instead the Sky channels are now expected to relaunch on Virgin before Christmas.

As always, if you haven't already done so, please confirm your subscription to the free Adbrands Weekly Update by clicking here or on the link at the foot of this email. Thank you for your assistance! 

Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands

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