Media and Marketing

AD LIB

John Mulligan

€40M EXPECTED SPEND ON JAMESON PUSH

THE South African arm of TBWA, Hunt Lascaris, has been appointed the worldwide creative agency for whiskey brand Jameson.

Irish Distillers, which is hoping to recruit younger drinkers to the venerable brand, expects to spend 40m on marketing this year. This will include 20m advertising across various media, according to chief executive Paul Duffy.

The Johannesburg office of global ad company TBWA developed the recent, musically-themed television adverts for Jameson, directed by famed music video auteur Jonas Ackerlund and debuted on Irish screens earlier this month. The South African agency has since been handed responsibility for Jameson's worldwide creative work.

Jameson, whose ultimate owner is Irish Distillers' parent Pernod Ricard, is likely to be getting more attention from the French giant's marketers. Pernod sold its other major whiskey brand, Antrim-based Bushmills, to Diageo earlier this year in the lead up to Pernod's merger with Allied Domecq.

Jameson has been one of Irish Distillers' best performing brands in recent years and has produced compound annual sales growth of over 8% year-onyear over the last decade. If, as Pernod Ricard expects, it breaks the two million case sales mark this year, it will have doubled global sales since 1996, when one million cases of Jameson were shipped for the first time.

John Mulligan Sunday Tibune 12/11/2005