Premier inn hypnos beds series#
Premier inn hypnos beds tv#

In 2015 the budget was up to £25m for more new ads with Lenny (though quite a lot less of him), ‘Beautiful Mornings’. The campaign was refreshed with new ads that featured Lenny Henry in a bed which mysteriously appeared in unlikely places, a beach, a railway station. In 2014 the media budget was increased to £15m. Hamish Pringle also chose it as no 25 in Campaign’s ’50 best celebrity campaigns’. Russell Braterman joined from Vodafone as the new marketing director, but chose to stick with RKCR and Lenny Henry – a decision that seemed justified in 2014 when the case history won Silver in the IPA Effectiveness Awards. In 2012 Gerard Tempest, who had been responsible for the creation of the Premier Inn brand from the beginning, left to work for a cruise line. In 2009 Lenny Henry appeared in a parody of Psycho and then in 2010 a parody of The Shinin g – another Campaign Turkey, though research conducted by TNS seemed to show it was quite popular with the public. No mean feat.'ĭespite this damning judgment, Marketing Director Gerard Tempest persevered with the campaign, though the financial crisis later that year must have made this a difficult trading period.

Premier inn hypnos beds series#

But by adding a series of utterly cringeworthy one-liners and the inexplicable appearance of a rubber duck, the agency has successfully turned this spot into an early contender for the worst celebrity ad of the year.

Premier inn hypnos beds tv#

Campaign chose it as their ‘Turkey of the Week’: Larissa Vince is hoping that Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R's first work for Premier Inn is also the agency's last: 'Lenny Henry is never going to stay in a Premier Inn, so picking the TV star as the new face of the brand is bad enough. In early 2008 the first commercial appeared, featuring Lenny Henry and a yellow rubber duck.

And they appointed RKCR/Y&R as their ad agency. In 2007, they further simplified the name to Premier Inn, invested in new design and room standards throughout the estate, and added stars and a distinctive purple background to the existing Travel Inn logo of a crescent moon. In 2004, Whitbread merged the two brands as Premier Travel Inn, creating the largest brand in the sector with 38% of capacity and 490 hotels. (As their main competitor, then as now, was called Travelodge, you can already see part of the problem). Whitbread owned a budget hotel chain called Travel Inn, then they bought another called Premier Lodge. To begin with, it surprised me that the Premier Inn brand has only been around since 2007. Based purely on sources available to me online, here’s what I found. But having just published a book about advertisingwhich (among other themes) has a lot to say both about celebrities and about the idea of ‘distinctive assets’, I found myself becoming curious about the events that led up to that headline and picture. Perhaps that was all he was prepared to do? I have no inside knowledge about this campaign. So I admit I felt a bit let down when I went on to read that he was only actually doing the voiceover in the new ad. It was illustrated with a photograph of Sir Lenny, blissfully asleep in his plum silk pyjamas.

This was a headline in last Friday’s Times.