Claire Beale On Advertising

Ask a punter anywhere in the world to name an ad agency and chances are they'll pick on Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the few adland brands to have passed into popular consciousness. Ask a punter anywhere in the world to name a British football team and I reckon Manchester United would score most goals.

Now the chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, Lee Daley, is heading off to be the group commercial director of Manchester United. Choice of team aside and assuming that most admen have long since surrendered any ambitions to give Beckham a run for his Predators, this is probably up there as a dream job for many agency blokes. Beats pushing toilet roll for a living.

But footie fans might wonder what an adman can bring to the beautiful game. Simple: football clubs have become some of the world's biggest brands, commanding a lifetime of unswerving loyalty and an insatiable thirst for new brand experiences.

Simple. Obvious. Yet this idea of the football club as product, with incredible badge values and fresh marketing potential, is still wildly underexploited. Clubs are only now beginning to lift their marketing ambitions beyond ticket sales, TV rights and basic merchandising. Football is entertainment, possibly the world's most popular. Last year's World Cup final drew a global audience of 603 million (up 14 per cent on 2002, and 41 per cent of the audience were women); the Champions' League final between Barcelona and Arsenal had a worldwide audience of 209 million. This is event television on the grandest scale. Even football's dark moments, such as the farrago at Manchester United's Champions' League match in northern France last week, underline the power of the game as a social and commercial glue.

What's more, as broadcasters and advertisers struggle to find programme properties that draw mass audiences, football's value continues to soar. And if that wasn't reason enough, then the explosion of new media opportunities (and the spiralling cost of players) is also fuelling clubs' commercial ambitions. Football's elite generate some of the world's most prized content at a time when the opportunities for slicing, repackaging and squeezing extra value from that content are multiplying. So as the media world gets smaller, United fans in China (where the encouraged popularity of English football has become a political instrument of "soft power") are as likely to download webcasts, mobile messages, buy the T-shirt, as the guys in Salford. So the Reds are keen to get on with the squeezing.

Not that United is doing too badly working its brand assets. It might not be the world's richest club any longer (Real Madrid is) but revenues from the club, its merchandising and its media topped £200m last year and the club's shirt sponsor AIG has signed a £56.5m four-year deal for the privilege. Now United's chief executive, David Gill, wants to boost that by a further 50 per cent by 2010, motivated in part by the debt the club inherited when American investment tycoon Malcolm Glazer bought the club back in 2005.

It's not hard to see why they picked Daley. He's compelling and inspiring, and a passionate advocate of new communications techniques and channels. Too passionate sometimes, perhaps. This is after all the man whose agency is responsible for infecting the advertising lexicon with the term cultgeist. But Daley undoubtedly has the vision and energy to unlock new revenue streams for Manchester United and has 20 years of advertising experience to draw on. And, yes, he's a lifelong fan.

Of course, Daley is not the first adman to turn his hand to the terraces. In fact, he's not even the first CEO of Saatchi to do so. Adam Crozier quit Saatchi for the Football Association back in 1999. In fact since Crozier left, Saatchi has had four chief executives; Daley's been in the job for only two years.

This churn has knocked the Saatchi brand and hints at problems at the network's core. In last week's Campaign league tables of the UK's biggest agencies, the Saatchi name dropped out of the top 10 for the first time in 30 years. Saatchi wasn't the only big agency to take a tumble in billings (the tally of money all clients spend on advertising). Many of the world's biggest agencies saw their London offices lose billings of between 10 and 20 per cent. But the Top 10 is an emotional barometer of agency stature and for Saatchis the loss of premier league status will be a body blow.

Daley has got the agency match fit for the digital future but had he stayed he would have had some tough questions to answer about Saatchi's creative and new business performance, both of which still need some serious attention. Perhaps that £300m revenue target at Man U doesn't seem so daunting after all.

IF YOU want to save the planet, call an advertising agency. That's what Al Gore and his team did when they wanted to launch a new global consortium to beat climate change. OK, they called Cameron Diaz and Pharrell as well, but finding an advertising partner was key to getting this new initiative off the ground.

Young & Rubicam got the call, and is now devising the entire positioning and communications strategy for the consortium. Y&R came up with the name, Save Our Selves (grammatical pedants restrain yourselves), and is working on the ads for a global day of live music in July. London will host one of the premier concerts and Keane, Snow Patrol and Duran Duran have already signed up.

Y&R is handling the business on a pro bono basis. The agency supports the effort to reduce carbon emissions (note to Y&R: biking 20 empty sandwich boxes across London to show journalists how successful the Marks & Spencer food advertising is doesn't score highly on the carbon neutral barometer) but there's a shrewd business motive here too.

At a time when major advertisers are scrambling to sort out their environmental policy and then market the hell out of it, an agency with Gore as well as green credentials is an extremely attractive partner. More and more agencies are rushing to go carbon neutral and get a slice of green new business action. Y&R just jumped to the top of the class.

IN THIS column I really try to be positive about all the great work that agencies do, and there's plenty of that. But every so often an ad comes around that deserves a good trashing.

Trident chewing gum. Ouch. The new TV commercial has in a few short days achieved the sort of stand-out in the ad industry that classic turkeys like Coke Zero or Strongbow's whale tongue would be proud of. Adland is buzzing about it; it really is that excruciating.

Sadly it comes from JWT, an agency that certainly doesn't need any more bad publicity and could do with a few friends right now. Sorry. If you haven't seen it, I'll just leave you with the ad's endline, which says it all: "Mastication for the nation."

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign'.

claire.beale@haynet.com

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW LEVI'S (BBH)

There was a time when the launch of a new Levi's ad was event television, and not just for those in advertising. Over the years Levi's relationship with Bartle Bogle Hegarty consistently produced some of the finest, era-defining TV ads and set a new standard for fashion advertising.

Then the bottom fell out of Levi's market as hipper brands moved in and Levi's got caught between the cheap supermarket knock-offs and its continued popularity among older consumers. And as any fashion brand will tell you, a generation of overweight oldies squeezing into your product can be cred death.

So it's fair to say that BBH has been on a challenging journey with Levi's, struggling to remain true to its advertising heritage and revitalise the brand while recognising how the market has changed.

Well, there's a new Levi's ad out that seeks to do all of this as part of a "new from the original" push. But it's not event television. It's not television at all, if you live in the UK. So far you can see only it online (levi.co.uk), but it's worth the effort. Dangerous Liaisons beautifully weaves jeans styles through the decades as a raunchy couple rip each other's clothes off, each strip revealing another classic design.

BBH and Levi's are back on form. This ad has all the slick production values and sexual potency that the best Levi's ads made their own. And it deserves a big TV airing. If Levi's is serious about reclaiming its fashion and advertising heritage it will get it.