28 September, 1979
Abbott Mead Vickers SMS has won two pieces of business this week
totalling pounds 750,000.
The first is from Wella, for the launch of Ultra Care, a new hairpack
conditioner, and the second is from Sainsbury’s, which has appointed AMV
SMS as its third agency to handle a development project on own-label
products.
Peter Davis, the assistant managing director of Sainsbury’s, said: ’We
wanted an agency to look exclusively at the project. We are in no way
unhappy with our existing agencies, Saatchi & Saatchi and Broadbent
Advertising.
They are both doing good work for us.’
Saatchis handles the main corporate account - worth pounds 2
million-plus - which has featured the Discount ’78 and ’79 campaigns.
Broadbent handles around pounds 500,000 of local advertising.
Savacentre, the new hypermarket which is jointly owned by British Home
Stores and Sainsbury’s, is advertised by a local northern agency.
Five-and-a-half years later, Abbott Mead Vickers netted the pounds 3.5
million Sainsbury’s mainstream television and newspaper account, adding
to its own-label and colour magazine work.
The Sainsbury’s win came after the client decided it needed ’a new
creative approach’. AMV pitched against Lowe Howard-Spink
Campbell-Ewald, Wight Collins Rutherford Scott and the incumbent,
Saatchi & Saatchi.
The Sainsbury’s assistant managing director, Peter Davis, said the
decision to appoint Abbott Mead was an ’extremely hard one to make. The
presentations were first rate’.
In the Campaign honours list for 1991, Abbott Mead’s ’celebrity recipe’
TV series for Sainsbury’s was made Campaign of the Year, a hugely
significant win given the agency’s long, and at times agonising,
struggle to crack its TV advertising.
The ads, which featured the likes of Robert Morley, Wendy Craig, Denis
Healey, Selina Scott, Zoe Wanamaker, Catherine Zeta Jones and Ian
McShane, each showed a celebrity making his or her favourite recipe
using fresh products from Sainsbury’s. The ads were so popular that the
store often sold out of the recipe items the next day.
