PwC scores elite sponsorship deal with high-performance IRFU players

Media&Marketing: After managing to secure the services of Brian O'Driscoll for another two years, the IRFU this week also managed to secure a three-year sponsor for its newly established high-performance unit for elite players.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has decided to sponsor the unit, although the valuation of the deal has not been disclosed. While the sponsorship of teams like Leinster and Ireland is commonplace, the decision to sponsor a unit within a sport is a relatively novel one.

PwC is not in a position to challenge Permanent TSB for the main IRFU contract just yet, but the deal has shown the resilience of rugby as a sponsorship vehicle, even if the national team's fortunes have waned somewhat in the last year.

The new unit will be responsible for making sure good amateur players make it to the professional ranks. It will have access to specialist coaching but will also monitor individual players throughout underage and senior representative level.

From its perspective, this is PwC's biggest sports sponsorship to date and further elements to the deal are expected to be unveiled in the new year. In practical terms, it will give PwC access to top players from time to time as well as giving the company a profile with senior chief executives and chief financial officers who follow the game closely.

While the high performance unit has not yet got a physical base to work from, it will be strictly branded the PwC high performance unit and that should result in some kind of pay-off. The other benefit from PwC's perspective is that the company will have an enhanced profile among graduates, or at least those who play rugby.

PwC has been trying various approaches to sports sponsorship recently, including sponsoring the old firm game on Setanta between Glasgow Celtic and Rangers. But it was always going to devote most of its resources to rugby, one suspects. Among its leading partners are former internationals like Tom Grace.

Reality TV check

The public does have a pain threshold for reality TV after all. Channel 4's Space Cadets, presented by the ubiquitous Johnny Vaughan, has - to put it mildly - failed to ignite the public imagination in Britain.

Dublin agency AFA O'Meara reports this week that the show's first airing attracted only 2.6 million viewers and an 11 per cent audience share in the UK. This ranked it behind three of the other four shows broadcast at 9pm on Britain's major TV channels. The show is an elaborate hoax which follows a group of contestants who have been duped into thinking they are in Russia training for a space mission.

In reality, they will never leave England - or in fact the ground. Despite huge levels of pre-launch publicity, the show only managed to match the channel's usual ratings for the timeslot.

Meanwhile, back home this year's Budget coverage managed to buck a poor ratings trend to garner a fairly reasonable audience, reports Saor Communications. On average, 417,000 adults watched the Prime Time special on the Budget. At one point the audience peaked at 520,000 adult viewers. On the same night, however, an average of 384,000 adult viewers watched the Champions League tie between Benfica and Manchester United on RTE 2 - representing almost 28 per cent share of viewing on the night.

The 'Star' is 'OK'

The Star recently denied suggestions it might become the victim of the freesheet war in Dublin. The paper's circulation is certainly holding up, but the bigger challenge may be with the Sunday version of the paper, which is operating in a very competitive market.

Already facing challenges from the News of the World and Ireland on Sunday, the paper is hoping to build circulation with co-operation from British publisher Richard Desmond.

Mr Desmond is the owner of Express Newspapers, which has a 50 per cent stake in the Star and Star on Sunday. This gives the two titles access to Mr Desmond's publishing stable.

As a result, Star on Sunday will distribute free copies of the gossip magazine OK with the paper on the last Sunday of every month in 2006. The paper gave readers a free copy of the same magazine last October which proved to be a circulation success.

With free CDs and DVDs increasingly seen as outmoded promotional tools, one wonders if the next wave of promotional activity will revolve around free magazines?