Media & Marketing: Precious urban space continues to be eaten up by advertising and now some of Dublin's best known landmarks are to be surrounded by advertisements - at least for a short period.
Advertisers are being offered advertising close to some of Dublin city's most famous monuments.
Monuments to the following people on O'Connell and Parnell Square are due for refurbishment by Dublin Corporation: Charles Stewart Parnell; Fr Theobald Matthew; James Joyce; James Larkin; Sir John Grey; Daniel O'Connell and William Smith O'Brien.
During the cleaning and repair work on the monuments, hoardings will be erected around them and advertisers will be allowed to place their work there.
The Dublin poster company, Poster Plan, is offering the space on the 12-foot-high hoardings.
Work on the monuments starts next month and ends in June/early July.
Dublin, although nowhere near the saturation levels of other major cities like London or New York, is becoming increasingly colonised by advertising.
In the last five years advertising has become prevalent on taxis, buses, Dart, Luas, bus stops, beer mats, sandwich wrappers, bins and even urinals.
However, one wonders, can a relatively small market like the Irish one sustain all these offerings in the long term?
At present a staggering 80 companies are offering "other media" or ambient space to clients.
This is space offered outside the traditional channels like press, television, radio and cinema.
Village on Fridays
The Village magazine will begin publishing on Fridays from April 8th, instead of Saturdays.
The magazine set up by journalist Vincent Browne and executive Barbara Nugent claims to be selling more than 16,000 copies a week.
A spokeswoman said: "Farrell Grant Sparks (independent auditors) audited the circulation numbers for Village and confirm that Village is selling on average 16,666 copies every week.
"This does not include subscription copies or copies distributed free or in bulk. It therefore refers solely to sold copies".
The paper's move to Friday will mean it avoids having to compete directly with Saturday magazines offered by the main broadsheet papers.
Publishing on Saturdays also denied the magazine valuable radio and television follow-up reaction to stories it published.
Shirt sponsorship
Dublin agency AFA O'Meara this week focuses on some interesting research on the efffectiveness of football shirt sponsorship.
It says the biggest English football clubs may not necessarily be delivering value for money.
For example West Brom, currently trying to avoid relegation in the English Premier League are regarded as a good sponsorship vehicle.
"They may be hovering near the bottom of the English Premiership at the moment, but West Bromwich Albion are the tops when it comes to delivering the best value for money in the UK in terms of the performance of their shirt sponsorship deal," states the agency.
The remarks are based on some recent British research on the subject.
Using a cost-per-thousand (CPT) model which looks at the sponsorship performance against the cost paid by the sponsors, West Brom really delivered.
According to the research findings, T-Mobile who are the shirt sponsors of WBA enjoyed the most cost-efficient deal in the UK.
One wonders if somebody in Ireland will shortly do a similar exercise on Arnotts's lucrative deal with the Dublin football team.
Patrick's Festival
St Patrick's Day is no longer actually about one day. It is effectively a five-day national festival, according to organisers.
Because of its sheer scale, very few corporate names are prepared to ignore the festival and in previous years Aer Lingus, Bank of Ireland, RTÉ, Diageo, Baileys and the National Lottery have become involved. But 2005 will see the greatest number of sponsors involved to date.
In some cases the spending on the St Patrick's festival takes up the lion's share of annual marketing budgets.
The St Patrick's Festival costs €2.5 million to stage; half of that comes from public funding and the rest comes from sponsorship and other commercial arrangements.
This year, two internet-based firms are sponsoring the festival - IrishJobs.ie and Top-up Club. Retail group Mace will lead the festival parade this year.
Other companies involved this year are Guinness, Bank of Ireland, An Post, Baileys and Toyota. The Dublin radio station Q102, owned by UTV, is also on board.
According to a spokeswoman, companies chose to sponsor the festival in two main ways: either partnering an event or partnering the festival as a whole.
Golden Pages ads
The Golden Pages is offering advertisers space on the front cover and spine of its directory in an attempt to increase revenue.
Golden Pages says 1.7 million directories are distributed to homes throughout the State.
Tim Wynne, marketing director of Golden Pages admitted traditional brand advertisers might not normally consider Golden Pages as an advertising platform, but he hoped the new format would address this.
