Media & Marketing:Beamish & Crawford, the Cork brewer, has had mixed fortunes over the years trying to establish a mainstream lager brand.
At various stages, the brewer put big marketing pushes behind Carling and Foster's and while both beers have strong niches, they never really joined the national mainstream.
Now though, B&C appears to be on the right track with Miller Genuine Draft. Though Miller's share of the national lager market is only about 5 per cent, the brand's sales are on an upward curve and Miller now claims to be the biggest selling bottled beer in the off-trade, ahead of Heineken, Budweiser, Carlsberg, Stella, etc.
That is encouraging in a market where lager sales are set to decline as more drinkers switch to cider and wine.
Much of Miller's success in Ireland is due to a huge splurge on TV advertising. The brand is licensed in Ireland by Beamish & Crawford, the subsidiary of Scottish & Newcastle, and B&C has been spending on TV spots like thereis no tomorrow.
The current commercial, "Rollerboy", depicts a handsome young guy roller-blading through the streets of Shanghai warbling about his girl. The ad, like the previous commercial of the cool guy on a bike, is supposed to convey an aspirational attitude to life.
The TV spot is aired around the world but the version seen in Ireland has modified music and a less frantic edit. Apparently Ireland is the only market that secured its own localised ad.
The TV spots, made by UK agency Mother, are the result of a think-in by Miller marketing executives two years ago.
They concluded that while the lager brand had a youthful, laid-back appeal, this was not being explicitly communicated to customers. So they decided that the marketing across all platforms above and below the line had to reinforce the easy- going message. Budweiser has countered Miller with its Answer The Call campaign, although that pitch seems to be aimed at both a grunge and office worker audience.
While the tracked media spend for Miller in Ireland in the past year is €2.4 million, the figure may be shy of the reality.
Apart from TV, further money is spent supporting the brand with press, outdoor, the high profile sponsorship of The Sopranos and significant below-the-line activity.
Justifying the heavy spend, Miller marketing manager Séamus Daly says: "You don't just win a customer once and keep them for life any more. You have to keep winning them again and again and again."
Mags aplenty but lads prove scarce
Young men finally seem to have grown up - and all at the same time too. Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that sales of lads' weeklies and monthlies are sinking faster than Irish bank shares.
Year on year, Arena is down 23 per cent, FHM down 26 per cent, Loaded down 35 per cent and Maxim down 28 per cent. But it's not a case of the zany weeklies doing all the damage because sales of Zoo are down by 20 per cent while Nuts has seen its circulation fall by 10 per cent.
Strange as it may seem, men seem to be tiring of the staple diet of pouting, semi-clad C list girl celebs and are exercising their grey matter instead, as the more cerebral titles GQ and Esquire have bucked the downward trend.
The market for men's lifestyle magazines soared through the 1990s, led by FHM and Loaded. The introduction of the weeklies in 2004 expanded the sector further and publishers responded to competition with more sexually explicit photos.
It seems the target audience is now weary of all this soft porn - or maybe they've got round to signing up for broadband.
So what do men want to read? Next month former IPC executive Mike Soutar unveils ShortList, a weekly magazine aimed at affluent young men, which will focus on urban centres such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh.
Soutar says there will be no nudity and no profanity in his magazine because he doesn't want to embarrass his readers.
Battle of the freesheets hots up
Competition for readers is fierce in the free newspaper market in Ireland. New ABC figures show that circulation of Herald AM fell in July to 63,130 copies per issue but its average over the February to July 2007 period is 82,530.
Circulation of Metro Ireland, in which The Irish Times Ltd is an investor, increased by 1 per cent through July. Metro's average circulation for the February to July 2007 period was 75,990 copies. The ABC report also reveals average ad content for Herald AM of 42 per cent and 36 per cent for Metro. Average pagination for Herald AM is 32 compared to 29 for Metro.
Meanwhile, the Irish edition of the Daily Mail ended a three- month pattern of circulation losses as it rose 3.3 per cent month on month to 58,330 in July, 5.5 per cent ahead of the same month last year. This compares with an average daily sale of 163,730 copies for the Irish Independent, 116,100 copies for The Irish Times and 56,440 for the Irish Examiner for July to December 2006 - the latest audited numbers available for those three titles.
