McCanns sign up new talent.

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Orlaith.Blaney

Sally Ann O’Donovan has recently joined the client service team – Sally Ann is one of the most experienced and senior strategic 360’ marketers in the Irish market with both senior agency management, brand, digital and client management experience.

For 3 years she led the McConnell’s Fusion team to major success working on integrated marketing campaigns for Kelloggs, Coca-Cola, Dundrum Town Centre, Tesco and BMW/Mini. She has also worked with Bord Bia to create their new brand to promote buying fresh Irish fruit and vegetables when in season, which involved the development of a website, social media and radio campaign to support launch of new brand.

Sally Ann has also extensive client side experience and was Marketing Director for Mount Falcon Hotel and Residential development for a contract period and held a Board position as Marketing Director at Xtra-Vision PLC. Prior to these roles, she was MD at McConnells Direct working for Kelloggs, The Irish Times, IDA, Walt Disney, Ballygowan and Bord na Mona on effective 360’ campaigns bringing ideas right through the line, seamlessly and effectively.

As-well as being a brilliant strategic and effective marketer, Sally Ann also has an interest in the theatre, photography and the outdoors.

“Daddy, what happens to Good Ideas when they Die?”

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Ray.Swan

“Well son, some of those ideas just disappear, never to be seen again. But sometimes those ideas – you know, the really extra special good ones…well, they live on forever kiddo. You see son, there ain’t no point in just letting a good idea die in vain. Heck, it wasn’t the ideas fault that it died. No sir. So we immortalise them the only way we advertising folk know how – in a retro 1970s Viewmaster toy.”

Check out our “Good Ideas that Mostly Got Away” Viewmaster next time you’re in our reception.

Artists in Residence…

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Andrea.Galligan

My colleague Jen Maher and I joined Colin Doyle and Amanda Moran in the Residence Bar for the Eclipse Media Christmas bash back in December. It was great to celebrate with the guys and see our work for Coca Cola given such prominence on the night.

We have run several high profile outdoor campaigns with Eclipse on behalf of Three Mobile, Nescafe and Coca Cola and are always blown away at how they turn every challenge into an opportunity.

And it’s not just our clients they do superb work for – I especially liked the ‘industry first’ work they did for Philadelphia last year, where we saw touch screens embedded into 6 sheets. Consumers could navigate their way around the recipes and ingredients with an option to email the recipes to themselves. This allowed the client the ability to capture data as the software had a built in tracker for the most popular sites, days, recipes and amount of time spent on each page.

Here’s to another great year of innovation guys!

December 2011, Coca Cola, Open Happiness can dispenser

April 2011, Three Mobile, i-phone campaign

November 2011, Philadelphia ‘Love it’ campaign

McCann Erickson Dublin add 4 new clients.

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Administrator

McCann Erickson Dublin has added 4 new clients to the agency in the last six weeks. The new business wins include Hidden Hearing and The Association of Compliance in Ireland and two pieces of government business; safefood and The Health and Safety Authority. McCann were already on the roster for safefood agencies and competed for a mini-tender and were awarded a project for 2011/2012.

These new wins reflect our agency focus and commitment to supporting businesses to find pragmatic solutions to business challenges. We thoroughly enjoyed working with Dolores Madden at Hidden Hearing, particularly as this is a business that is already growing and has further high growth potential. We have exciting plans for Hidden Hearing in 2012 and to be honest, we can’t wait to get going.

We have also added The Health and Safety Authority (HSA) account and safefood to our client list. The safefood contract is for 2 years for the provision of advertising services in respect of an integrated all-island food safety awareness campaign. This is the first project for McCann since we were appointed to the safefood roster earlier this year.
Martin Murray, Chief Executive, The Association of Compliance Officers in Ireland also appointed us to promote compliance education and training. The work for ACOI will include digital activity by our strategic partner, Zoo Digital. These are great local wins for us

GODFATHER OF IRISH PLANNING, Sean Whitaker joins McCann Erickson Dublin

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Orlaith.Blaney

Seán Whitaker, one of the most experienced Strategic Planners in the Irish market joins McCann Erickson as Head of Planning. Seán was the first person in Ireland to adopt and formalise the discipline of advertising planning while he was working at Saatchi & Saatchi Dublin in the 80’s so perhaps he could be called the “Godfather of Irish Planning”. He went on to be Planning Director at DDFH&B and latterly was a planning consultant at Irish International BBDO where he was one of the key strategic minds behind the resurgence of the Guinness brand. He also held the position of Global Planning Director with JWT/DDFH&B on the Bailey’s brand from 1998 to 2003 where he gained considerable international experience particularly in the British, US and Spanish markets.

Whitaker has been closely involved in all the Guinness advertising produced by Irish International BBDO over the last eight years, including the current “Area 22” and “Life in the Dark” campaigns. His strategic experience in the alcohol category cannot be matched in the Irish market but he has also worked on Bank of Ireland, Aer Lingus, Unilever, Nestle, TV3, Irish Life, P&G and many other famous brand driven companies over the course of his career. By his own admission he is a creative planner and is hugely motivated and passionate about great ideas and the role of planning in helping creative teams to produce powerful, effective and compelling work.

We are absolutely thrilled to have a talent of Seán’s calibre join the McCann team. His track record and huge reputation are well deserved and we’re excited to get an opportunity to work with him.