Accountancy bodies do battle

Media&Marketing:It's ledgers at dawn as the Republic's professional accountancy bodies spend hundreds of thousands of euro on advertising their qualifications. Their aim is to persuade young people not only that accountancy is the best profession but that their training is the best option.

Competition is intense between the accountancy bodies because demand for an accounting qualification has never been higher, according to Ronán O'Loughlin, director of communications and marketing in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the Republic (ICAI). Unlike the legal profession, which has just one representative body, the Law Society, there are nine recognised professional accountancy bodies representing chartered, certified, management, public accountants and accounting technicians.

The combined membership of the nine bodies is more than 24,000 while their combined student numbers exceed 22,000.

The largest organisation is ICAI which represents chartered accountants and has more than 10,400 members in the Republic, according to the 2006 annual report of the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority.

This year the ICAI is advertising on TV for the first time with an ad spend of just over €220,000. Meanwhile, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), which represents management accountants, has increased its ad budget four- fold to €200,000 to recruit member firms and students.

Also in battle mode, albeit with smaller ad budgets, are the Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPA), the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and the Institute of Accounting Technicians in the Republic (IATI). Next year the ACCA in the Republic will benefit as a global campaign launched last month expands to this country.

Accounting and finance courses remain popular for many students, due to the sector's attractive salaries and career opportunities, even though it takes a further three years of studying after graduation to become an accountant. The profession is split into a number of sectors, including financial accountancy, management accountancy, auditing and taxation.

Said O'Loughlin: "The market is very strong because people recognise that accountancy is now a basic business qualification. The days when it was viewed as a career for bean counters is gone and there is intense competition between the various accountancy bodies for member firms and students."

As the competition intensifies, CIMA has even got plans to do a comparison study of the relevance of the ICAI and CPA syllabi to graduates looking to pursue a career in business. Sounds like the gloves are off, but CIMA marketing director Richard Hearn is calling the research a "comparison of fitness for purpose of each qualification" and stresses CIMA is not trying to prove it is better than everyone else but just that its syllabus is best suited to a business career.

"Business strategy is CIMA's unique selling point for students," he said.

The ICAI's television ads were created by ad agency Atomic. The inspiration for the animated ads, which depict a geeky looking young boy speeding up the corporate ladder past all the dull men in grey suits because he's a chartered accountant, comes from a TV campaign previously broadcast a couple of years ago by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia.

To attract the youth audience, the ICAI steered away from the mainstream RTÉ and TV3 channels and opted instead for slots on MTV, Sky One, Paramount, Setanta, and Channel 4/E4. As well as the TV burst, the ICAI bought ad space on cinema, online, radio and national and business press.

O'Loughlin is pleased with the return on his investment. Last year the ICAI attracted 1,500 new entrants to the profession and he expects another 1,650 recruits by the end of this year.

"This is a campaign that will run for three years with bursts in February and October each year. We want to broaden the perception of accountancy to a wider audience," said O'Loughlin.

Over the past few months CIMA has worked with UK advertising agency Orbital to create a global advertising campaign endeavouring to appeal to companies, recruiters and potential students around the world. The ads, built around the theme "in business together", aim to illustrate how CIMA graduates fare in the workplace. The main focus for the ad budget this year has been CIMA's sponsorship of the breakfast show on Newstalk supplemented with national press and trade magazine activity.