Advertising agency CDP has made eight staff members redundant, cutting its workforce by one-third. The agency's major clients are ESB, Aer Rianta, Nestle and Citroen cars. The cuts can be linked to changes in two of the company's accounts - long-time client Gallagher and more recent addition Ocean.

CDP handled the Benson & Hedges brand for Gallagher but in July last, when the ban on cigarette advertising came into effect, activity on what had been a £1 million (€1.27 million) account simply disappeared. In December, Ocean was subsumed into East Fusion and is now handled by Esat's agency, Irish International. Both accounts had been lucrative for CDP because they involved high media spends. In 1999, Ocean launched a major brand-building campaign across all media and in just one week last year spent £120,000 on a campaign to announce its first birthday. Another blow for the agency came late last year when it lost the VHI account to QMP D'Arcy.

The irony for CDP managing director Mr Peter O'Keeffe is that the clever and memorable Ocean campaign won advertising effectiveness awards. In 1999, the agency was the 13th-largest buyer on TV and the seventh on radio, and in 2000 was a finalist in the Advertising Agency of the Year Award.

"What has happened is very much a function of business developments outside our control and is not a reflection on the agency," said Mr O'Keeffe. CDP is part of the CDP international network but that has not yielded new accounts for the Dublin company as the network is used mostly for a sharing of information rather than accounts. One industry insider said the redundancies were a wake-up call for people who had come into advertising in the past buoyant five years. "In the 1980s and 1990s, redundancies happened all the time as accounts moved or clients stopped spending....this is a lesson for people who have never seen it to realise that it can happen."