Ebow, an Irish Web development company whose clients include Aras an Uachtarain and the Brown Thomas group, says it is the first to advertise through an above-the-line consumer campaign.

Its outdoor campaign, devised by Bloom Advertising, is being bought by Shanley Media and begins this week on 48-sheets and DART sites.

Owens DDB has won the Friends First account in a three-way pitch with QMP Darcy and Grey Advertising.

The account is estimated to be worth £500,000 (€630,520) in billings and will include strategic and creative development and media planning and buying.

Any strike action in St James's Gate is likely to force a media review - in the short term at least - for the Guinness and Budweiser brands, two of the biggest advertising spenders in the market.

This should give the competition an opportunity to beef up their schedules.

Murphy is introducing an international campaign for Coors Light this week, with three 30-second commercials and a total outlay of £1.5 million.

Beamish & Crawford is currently putting a similar amount behind a new campaign for Miller.

Poster Management Ltd, working with MRBI, has established a new system for measuring the effectiveness of outdoor advertising as a medium.

Its new Miriad system is based on 1,802 outdoor campaigns and the reaction of 17,700 people to them.

The system can integrate information from different sources and explore the relationship between variables such as weight of campaign, duration, seasonality and recall.

Part of its new system includes "foresight", a programme which it says will estimate future poster recall from past findings.