An article of mine from today’s Sunday Business Post:
A Dublin design agency has stopped working for RTE, citing creative differences over some of the adverts produced by the broadcaster.
Last week Rothco quit the RTE contract that it was awarded jointly with another media buying agency, Vizeum, earlier this year.
The firms were awarded the contract to handle the broadcaster’s creative and media buying business in April, with Rothco in charge of design and Vizeum looking after media placement.
‘‘We made a principled decision based on the fact that there’s work out there that we’re getting credit for that we absolutely don’t want to get credit for,’’ said Patrick Hickey, Rothco’s managing director.
He said a disagreement about the standard of advertisement led the company to make its decision.
‘‘We weren’t given the ability to be the brand guardian.
“Somebody has to take responsibility for that and, in normal circumstances, it would be the advertising agency who were tasked with doing that, but our hands were tied,’’ Hickey said.
RTE’s head of communications, Bride Rosney, said: ‘‘Obviously we’re disappointed, but we are very pleased that Vizeum wants to continue and we look forward to talking to them next week.â€
Rothco made its decision during a six-month review recently.
‘‘We said from the beginning that we would be using our internal team, but, as we cannot meet all of our requirements internally, we need an additional advertising agency on occasion,’’ said Rosney.
‘‘It was in their contract that we asked them to be brand custodians where they were providing the service, but not generally.
‘‘Clearly, we couldn’t ask an outside company to be brand custodian of everything within RTE. It was based on a project-by-project basis.â€
Hickey said that the decision to resign from the contract would have no financial or operational implications for the company’s activities.
‘‘We don’t want to be seen to be beating on RTE, we were absolutely ecstatic when we won it. In previous years, it would have been seen as a very prestigious account to hold, but that’s now questionable,†he said.
Rosney said no decision had been made on the possibility of re-tendering the creative side of the contract.
More on the way tomorrow, including the ones I missed from the last two weeks.