The ITV Digital Monkey

In ad breaks though, not sponsoring programmes! And they even advertise on none other than ITV itself.

ITV have every right to promote whatever they like, whenever they like, as long as it is within ITC guidelines. I don't see anything that says that a company cannot promote another company in the same group. Don't forget, ITV Digital is *not* ITV, it is important to remember that. It is an completely seperate company, 100% owned by Carlton and Granada. All Carlton/Granada have to do is give money to themselves in payment for the advertising.

Granada Plus is owned by Granada. Is it part of ITV as well?

From what I've heard, SMG returned the favour by having their own Saturday night sponsorship by one of their websites, S1Play.com. I didn't watch UTV on Saturday so don't know what they did.

As for Granada Plus, it is owned by Granada and Sky jointly, so no it is not part of ITV.

There are loads of ads in the tabloids today featuring the ITV monkey. The best one I have seen was on a big advertising board. It is sort of a before and after type advert. On one side the monkey has an ONdigital T-shirt on with a black wig and moustache, on the other side an ITV Digital T-shirt and a big smile.

At one point last year Sky and OnDigital were going for each other in the broadsheets.
I can remember that in The Times there was a huge advert for OnD saying, 'Sky are jealous of our success'... hmm, likely that isn't it!
Anyway, the next day in The Independent, Sky had a very big advert with the headline 'Jealous, Jealous of what?' or something like that. Then they listed all of the stats proving SkyD was better than OnD, very amusing.
Granada and Carlton will get to a point where they will have to drop ITV Digital. Shareholders will put a hell of a lot of pressure on them to drop it and eventually Sky will buy it.
The only ITV Digital ad. in a paper i've seen was in The Times (odd, considering it's a Murdoch paper) it was that Monkey chap with two t-shirts and one saying ITV digital and then the other saying 'NO LATIGID' - he was looking in a mirror.
Sky did actually send Carlton and Granada a huge box of bananas on the day the Monkey campaign was launched.

This time last year, Sky had an advert in most of the major newspapers saying 'This is what you get for £32 with ONdigital' with a small purple box of channels on the left. Then on the right it said, 'This is what you get for £32 with Sky Digital', with a big yellow box of all Sky's channels. The next week ONdigital had an advert in all (except the News Corp papers IIRC) saying 'Aw, Jelous are we ?' The advert then made a dig at Sky, for not having ITV etc...

Sky repeated the same advert (with price and channel amemndments) only last week, it will be interesting to see what ITV Digital do in repsonse.

Yes, there are loads of them bill-boards about, standard sized and those longer boards both have the same advert.
The monkey also features on some bill-posters as well (you know the sort which get plastered on boarded up shops etc), but not mentioning ITV Digital

Whilst going past one of the big billboards today, whilst on a bus, two people behind me said, 'Oh, have you got On Digital......' (obviously the advert hadn't worked for them!)

I can't see any reason why Sky would be in the least bit worried about On.. ITV Digital (that was a genuine mistake!).
Sky is the largest and most successful pay tv operator on the planet so a minnow like On.. LOL I did it again, ITV Digital isn't going to worry them much.
I did see the advert for Sky in, I think, The Times last week.
It's now £34 and it has 'Previously known as On Digital' at the bottom.
The mistake that Sky made with the advert is not listing all of the free channels, they just wrote 'Plus 20 more free channels', they could have really gone to town and made OnD look a lot smaller.

Well this may surprise you but I am one very happy ITV Digital customer. I will outline my reasons below :

I like the fact that my digibox is portable, I can move it around the house, take it to my Dad's and other places.

I am very happy with my line-up of channels, I get all the news, music, movies, sport, documentaries, comedies that I would ever wish to see. I always find something worth watching and don't feel the need for 100's of channels.

I have access to numerous text / interactive services, like BBC Text, Teletext, ITV Text+ etc, Two-Way-TV. I get my full weekly listings magazine, and the Pay Per View service is excellent.

Also, for a football fan, ITV Digital is the right place for me as it will offer the most football of any platform next season. If I were ITV Digital, I wouldn't be pursuing a carriage deal for the Sports Channel on Sky, as it would be a way of getting more subscribers to the service. And Sky know how big a draw football can be. I understand that 400 pubs a week are signing up to ITV Digital for this purpose alone.

The advertising campaign with the monkey is very effective. In the original ad, the fat guy tells the monkey that he wants more telly, and the monkey says not more, but better. Then the guy makes some reference to the crisp dust not being as good as the actual crisps. That is how I see Sky, they are the crisp dust, and ITV Digital the crisps.

You can only speak as you find, and I am a happy customer, I don't feel the need for copious amounts of channels that I would never watch or to have a dish on the side of my house. All I wanted was 'better telly' and that I have.

The End.

Seems I wasn't far off when I mentioned the ITV Monkey should have his own series, turns out he already has a game.  

Go to www.themonkeygame.com play the 3 games, and stick around for Monkey's final message.  Well worth the download.

'Good monkey'