Jeyes: 'The Bill' Sponsorship

The challenges that Jeyes face will be all too familiar to most FMCG brand owners….the increasing power of the grocery trade, wafer thin margins, almost continuous price promotion, sky high R&D costs - the list goes on.

And to make matters worse, the household products market is dominated by heavyweight players like Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser and SC Johnson with huge resources and advertising budgets to match.

Jeyes have several products competing in different trade sectors and we have worked with them for many years. The media conundrum has been broadly similar every year - each brand has excellent potential and deserves TV promotion but the modest advertising resource can only adequately support one or two of them.

Whilst the cracking TV value that we have always negotiated has helped Jeyes to get the most from their limited budgets they have always had to restrict the use of TV to their largest brands. All their other brands have had to fall by the wayside – until now!

Just before Christmas we heard that ITV were still seeking a sponsor for “The Bill” in 2007. Whilst a TV sponsorship of this scale would normally cost way more than anything that Jeyes could ever afford we knew that this represented a terrific opportunity for Jeyes to support all their brands - and at a price that might just be feasible at this late stage.

To cut a very long story short…

-Jeyes reacted very positively to our proposals

-We were able to negotiate an affordable price with ITV (who have been very helpful throughout the process)

-Christmas was all but cancelled for the creative teams at WARL who have produced a total of 25 idents for 10 products in record time

-The sponsorship started in March and runs through to the end of the year

-Initial trade reaction has been hugely positive

The only problem is the challenge that we have set ourselves for 2008 - sponsoring “The Bill” will be a very hard act to follow!





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