Eircom is once again the main sponsor of the People in Need telethon, and next Monday it will introduce a £500,000 (€634,870) advertising campaign in support of the sponsorship, featuring D'Unbelievables, Dustin the Turkey, Irish rugby captain Keith Wood and footballer Roy Keane. All participants gave their services free.
The campaign will run until the telethon on May 5th and its aims to get as many people as possible involved in the fund-raising in the run-up to the event and to encourage donations on the day.
Wholly-owned Irish agencies are increasingly rare and this week has seen two of them merge - the Helme Partnership and O'Connor O'Sullivan. The new agency will be chaired by Mr Owen O'Connor with Mr Donald Helme as managing director.
The company, as Mr Helme readily admits, is going to have to do something about the name, the deeply uncatchy Helme O'Connor O'Sullivan Partnership.
But, as he points out, such names are not exactly unusual in the advertising world. The full name of the international agency that the Helme Partnership is aligned to is Tragos, Bonage, Weisendanger and Ajroldi which has quite sensibly abbreviated it to TBWA.
