Millennium trouble ahead

As dream clients go, the National Millennium Committee would appear to have it all. It has £30 million (€38 million) to give away to popular and good causes, its very raison d'etre is to celebrate a feel-good event and its good works include every person in the State.

It would not, on the face of it, seem to be too difficult to trumpet the activities of such a committee, to cause a warm millennial glow to settle on all our heads and to promote a sense of pride in all that money being spent in our name.

But it has not exactly worked out that way. It might not be a PR disaster on the scale of Charlie McCreevy's Budget but it is certainly heading there.

It started with Messiah XXI and the £700,000 donated by the committee to help a private company stage the event. Then, £1 million spent on candles exercised the letter writers to newspapers and callers to phone-in radio shows.

Some crisis management was attempted. Mr Seamus Brennan, the minister who heads the committee, did a stint on Marion Finucane's radio programme but he came across more as a defensive politician than as the confident head of a celebratory committee.

There was an unconvincing attempt to present the Messiah money as a worthwhile investment in our collective enjoyment and a limp announcement that a portion of any profits made would go to charity.

Last week, the national advertising campaign started - very belatedly - on television with an advertisement that could have been made any time in the last 20 years with its dull production values and workaday creative approach. It does not augur well.

Part of the problem has to be that the committee does not seem to have placed a great deal of importance on the communicative powers of advertising and public relations.

A budget of £700,000 has been reserved for advertising and marketing. But the 15-strong committee, which was formed in November 1998, only appointed an advertising agency and a public relations company one year later in Nov ember 1999 - two months before the Big Day. Mr Tom Rowley, the press officer in the Millennium Office, admits the delay has caused problems but puts it down to several factors including the time it took for the committee to formulate something to communicate and the obligation to put the advertising contracts out to European tender.

However, this tendering process is entirely normal for Government-related accounts and would have been known by the committee from day one.

In the end, Peter Owens and Pembroke PR won the advertising and PR accounts which run until March 2000.