Eurostar reviews £15m account before St Pancras move

by Mark Banham, brandrepublic.com, Thursday, 16 November 2006, 8:30am,

LONDON - Eurostar has put its £15m creative account, currently held by TBWA\London, up for review in advance of next year's move from the services' current home at London Waterloo to the new St Pancras terminal.

TBWA has held the brief for six years since November 2000, and is expected to repitch for the business. It won the 2000 pitch in a shootout against Publicis, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R and Lowe Lintas.

Eurostar services will make an overnight switch from its Waterloo base on November 14 2007, with trains using a new 186mph high-speed line to Brussels and Paris.

The move means journey times will be cut by an average of 25 minutes, meaning a trip from London on Eurostar to Paris will take two hours 15 minutes while it will make Brussels in one hour 51 minutes.

Last September, Aegis agency Vizeum took the £10m Eurostar media account from Omnicom's Manning Gottlieb OMD as part of a three-way pitch, which also involved WPP Group's Mediaedge:cia.

Eurostar recently created a promotional tie-up with Tom Hanks thriller 'The Da Vinci Code'. This included an online competition dubbed "The Eurostar quest" to find "the world's best code-cracker".

It was backed by a £7m TV, press and ambient campaign through TBWA\London, intended to drive consumers to the competition website.

The activity ran across the US, UK, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand. The winner received €200,000 (£137,000), free travel on Eurostar for life and accommodation at The Ritz, Paris, and Claridge's, London for five years.

TBWA confirmed that the business had been put up for pitch before a pending statutory review.

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This article was first published on brandrepublic.com