Tomorrow night's TV3 Toy Show will be sponsored by Spar for the second year as part of a wider €1 million Christmas marketing spend by the convenience store retailer.
The toyfest, which airs one week ahead of the RTÉ original, may not win the million- plus audience of the kind the Late Late variety banks on, but it still does quite nicely for TV3, with an average audience of 353,000 viewers in 2013 growing to 472,100 last year.
Spar’s association with the show in 2014 was its first sponsorship campaign with TV3.
The retailer is a keen TV advertiser and signed the first product-placement deal of its kind on Irish television when an outlet of the convenience franchise opened in Carrigstown, the fictional suburb in RTÉ's Fair City. The retailer's new Christmas ad, using the slogan "Spar Delivering Christmas", debuts tonight during the Fair City ad break. It is also re-running its Spar Twitter Tree charity initiative in aid of the National Children's Hospital in Tallaght. The Christmas tree, which will be in Ranelagh, is "powered" by tweets using the hashtag #UnderTheTree.
When it comes to seasonal advertising, Spar doesn’t have to look too far to find inspiration – its year-round brand symbol is, conveniently, a tree.
