Editco.net

According to a new survey they do, anyway. 78 per cent of 133 national advertisers surveyed for this week's Association of National Advertisers event in the States said they thought TV advertising was less effective than it was two years ago. As these people spend $20bn on advertising this is presumably bad news for TV.

Almost 70 per cent of them think that DVRs (personal video recorders) and Video on Demand will reduce or destroy the effectiveness of traditional 30-second commercials and are choosing to consider alternatives such as branded entertainment, sponsorship and interactive advertising (full survey on www.adage.com).

Apax Partners, which is advised by Greg Dyke whose credits include DG of the Beeb, md of London Weekend Television and sponsor of Roland Rat, is one of three venture capitals firms bidding for ITV (the others are a part of Goldman Sachs and fellow American firm Blackstone).

Everyone is assuming that Dyke would be the leader in this and there's no doubt that he'd like to get his hands on ITV and, in the process, dump current CEO Charles Allen who, with his then boss at Granada, Gerry Robinson, snatched Dyke's beloved LWT away in a bitter takeover battle back in the 90s.

The three companies have proposed paying £1.5bn for around 30 per cent of the company and then returning a borrowed £3.55bn to shareholders with ITV remaining a listed company. £3.55bn sounds like an eye-watering amount of debt but ITV is still highly cash-generative and likely to remain so for a decade or so.

G14, the association of the top 18 European football clubs (don't ask, but at least Chelsea's not a member) is displeased with the current Champions League format and wants a change.

Its opponents think it wants a closed league, just as the UK's Zurich Premiership rugby clubs do, because it's much easier to invest in a sports club when you're guaranteed a seat at the top table. NFL teams in the States are, of course, but they also have a salary cap and a system whereby the bottom teams get the first pick of American college players, thereby ensuring that the teams at the bottom have the chance of rising to the top. The same teams don't appear in the Super Bowl year after year.

Generally speaking news doesn't happen on a Saturday so Sunday papers have to manufacture the stuff. The News of the World being the classic example.

But the current 'peerages for loans' affair is manna from heaven for the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph in particular. The Sunday Times, as far as I can discern, started the hare running and the Sunday Telegraph this weekend took the lead with some damning stuff implicating No 10. Others have had their say too, of course, but there's nothing quite like a right-wing Sunday broadsheet when it thinks it's found Labour's smoking gun. And they might have.

Channel 4, the thinking person's alternative TV channel, appears to have been playing fast and loose with the amount of advertising it's running in some of its popular reality programmes and, more worryingly, its kids' slots. Ofcom is accused of taking its 'light' regulation ideal too far and only slapping C4 over the wrist with a limp camelia.

Terrestrial TV stations are supposed to run an average of seven ad minutes an hour and no more than 12 in any one hour. C4 says this is difficult because lots of its shows are American, which have ad breaks after the titles or are like sports programmes where you can show ads when nothing much is going on (like Big Brother). Quite what sport Big Brother might represent could spawn a whole new Stephen Fry quiz show.

AMV chairman Michael Baulk, the world's smoothest account man, is retiring although he says he'll be back doing something else. Bet you he ships up at WPP in about six months' time.

Always immaculately suited and booted (Italian I'd guess rather than Saville Row) Baulk was instrumental in lifting AMV to the top of the agency tree. It became the UK replacement for J.Walter Thompson which had been the top agency here for ages and was the spiritual home of the account man, or 'suit' as they are known to the irreverent younger generation.

At one time account men - the people who glue in the clients - were known at JWT as 'account representatives' and were said to have been armed with a pocket list of Bordeaux's finer vintages so they didn't embarrass themselves over lunch with the client. One-time adman Len Deighton may have claimed that JWT, which hailed from Madison Avenue of course, introduced button down collars to the UK but JWT account men tended to be double-barrelled and chalk-striped. You could always spot them at King's Cross station as they entrained to see the Rowntrees client in York.

£2.8bn profits, 1.33 million cars sold, £800m in dividends and a £500m share buy-back - and all from a company that was supposed to be up for sale when it dropped £3bn on the benighted Rover.

Actually BMW has done quite well out of Rover, taking with it the Mini brand and successfully invading the volume sector (with its customary price premium). And its no good arguing that the short-lived new Rover that BMW rather generously funded might have done better with the Mini, John Towers and his mates would have cocked this up too. Even so the Mini brand is probably worth £3bn to BMW.

Its new cars may look lumpy, if not downright ugly in some cases, but most BMW fans don't seem to mind. Its 3,5 and 7 ranges have all been upgraded, the 1 series has been added successfully and the 6 revived. All it's missing is a new 8, the luxury sports car which didn't work a few years ago, but with the Z4 sports car it might not want one. Then you've got the horrible X3 andf X5 SUVs but these modern-day menaces seem to be everywhere. Apart from a people mover it's got the lot and I suppose the X range doubles as this. It's even got Rolls Royce, if you want a hearse to drive around in.

It looks as though Unilever is moving its PG Tips ad account from DDB to independent agency Mother. So what?

Well PG Tips used to be ITV's most famous campaign, those loveable chimps used to sell more tea than, well, anything resembling tea (ie coffee). The chimps became the UK's favourite ad campaign at a time when Desmond Morris, on his Zoo Time TV programme, was pulling in ginormous family ratings because he was usually surrounded by, er, chimps.

The agency that first enlisted the chimps on behalf of PG Tips was called Davidson Pearce Berry and Spottiswoode, an offshoot of Ogilvy & Mather (now part of WPP). I've no idea who Davidson, Pearce or Spottiswoode were but the Berry was one Norman Berry, who was the quintessential 60s creative director. Norman used to sport black and white polo collars under his Saville Row jackets and generally be the person that Peter Sellers would have liked to be.

More monkey business. The UK's last independent big player in posters, Maiden, has been sold for about £10m plus four times that in debt. Six years ago Maiden led the market in innovation and the good opinions of the City. Its CEO, American Ron Zeghibe, was running rings round his competitors and its marketing wizard Francis Goodwin was getting more clumn inches than even he knew what do with with.

It pioneered premium back-lit 48-sheet posters, the stuff that litters most of our streets, and moved confidently into the transport sector, chiefly railways, with a bunch of new products and long-term deals. It also won the first six-sheet, ie small, posters on the outsides of supermarkets - a pretty good place to be.

It's now accepted in the world of TV that terrestrial television, ie the stuff you still get without buying another gizmo and/or service, depends on events. Well, as Harold MacMillan, the PM at the time of the Profumo scandal famously put it, when asked what could upset the political applecart, 'events, dear boy, events'.

Supermac, as the cartoonists then described him, was right. Events rule the world. So Sir Martin Sorrell will link advertising fortunes to things like the World Cup and the Olympics and even US senatorial and presidential elections. He knows that events chuck money into the market.