There were red faces among the banks and advertising agencies that phoned JC Decaux to discover the identity of the new bank advertising on their poster sites, only to be told that the campaign was a market research exercise by the poster company.

The vivid blue posters with the line "Bleu, banking will never be the same again!" have been on 100 poster sites around the country for the past two weeks and were designed to test poster awareness and site recall among the public.

JC Decaux revealed at the weekend that the poster was a market research exercise. "We had to wait until after the market research was complete until we revealed that the poster was for a non-existent brand," said Mr Colin Leahy, sales and marketing director at JC Decaux. "We got a lot of calls particularly from banks involved with internet banking who assumed that it must be a new internet bank." Earlier this year, JC Decaux ran the same market research campaign in the UK.

The vivid blue is hard to miss so it's not surprising that the poster sites are highly visible - a lot more visible than cluttered 'real' ones.