These weeks were always going to be closely watched ones for Renault and The Late Late Show – though not in the way it has turned out.
Last August, the car maker announced the renewal of its sponsorship for the 2022-23 season of the chatshow for a figure believed to be in the region of €750,000. The actual amount is not released by the broadcaster. RTÉ has a long track record of not revealing details of commercial arrangements.
At the time Patrick Magee, Renault’s country operations director, noted that the relationship had been “a great success for the brand”. The chat early last week among media watchers centred on Renault’s sponsorship renewal. If it signed on the dotted line, it would be a vote of confidence in Ryan Tubridy’s successor, Patrick Kielty; if it didn’t, well, the damaging opposite could be inferred and the broadcaster would have to scramble around for a new deep-pocket brand for an untested presenter.
And if the show is to be shortened, as has been speculated, from its difficult-to-fill three hours to end 30 minutes earlier, that would surely see the sponsorship package rejigged with a lower asking price to reflect that.
Oh for those innocent times. Such speculation seems quaint now given the seismic revelations of last week where we learned a lot more about how sponsorship works at the public service broadcaster and how it’s not what those of us who studied advertising learned in the textbooks.
The Tubridy payment scandal: what happens next?
We know now that as part of Tubridy’s contract renewal negotiations in 2020, he was paid a secret top-up of €75,000 in addition to his publicly declared salary “in exchange for a number of personal appearances a year”. The money would be paid by Renault, thereby linking his pay to the sponsor – something you might see in a digital start-up, not a State broadcaster – and the car maker would get a credit note, likely for future advertising, in return.
That the Late Late sponsorship deal should include personal appearances by the “talent” isn’t surprising but typically such appearances would simply be a contractual element of Tubridy’s pay deal as agreed between him and RTÉ and not a secret payment involving a brand.
Renault soon cancelled that extra payment arrangement – Covid put a stop to public events and pushing car sales when no one was going anywhere would have been tin eared – but as RTÉ had, for some reason, underwritten the deal, the station ended up secretly funding the annual €75,000 payments for two years to boost Tubridy’s income beyond the publicly declared figure. And so the personal appearances continued post-Covid with, for example, an event in March 2022 where Tubridy was the star attraction at Keary’s Renault dealership in Fermoy for an evening with more than 200 customers.
Among the many questions now to be teased out on the commercial side – and even after all the coverage of this story, much is still unknown – is if this sort of structure exists for other commercial deals.
Meanwhile in the sponsorship world, that hoary old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity has never been less true.
Brands fear contagion – if something negative, no matter how small, has been uncovered about an asset they’ve paid to be associated with, the risk of that negativity engulfing the brand like a bad smell rises with each mention.
Renault has not commented on the controversy which sees its name mentioned in nearly every report on the scandal. No brand wants to find itself within column-inch distance of words such as “secret payments”, “lack of trust”, “failure of governance” – all used to describe RTÉ; it is not what any company pays good money for when it enters a brand burnishing deal.
The car maker has sponsored the Late Late for the past eight years, signing up for a three-year deal in 2018, and renegotiating year on year since. It is The Late Late Show’s most faithful sponsor – it also had a five-year stint ending in 2006 when it was reported that the brand considered the sponsorship had run its course.
It was always unclear if it would stick around for Kielty although his first few programmes at least will deliver strong figures, if only for curiosity sake. Tubridy experienced a brief bump in viewership when he took over from Pat Kenny in 2009 – his first sponsor was Quinn Insurance in a €1.2 million a year deal.
Or will Renault want to put some distance between it and the Late Late, the broadcaster’s biggest asset now also tarnished by the debacle?
Meanwhile, RTÉ has put a call out for a sponsor for its new Insights with Sean O’Rourke podcast. The veteran broadcaster had expected that as one of the top “talents”, he would go on to present other programmes for his old boss after retirement from his morning radio show. However, the reputational fallout after “golfgate”, where he had attended a Covid rule-breaking function with politicians in the midst of the pandemic, put paid to that.
As controversy raged and public anger grew, the broadcaster decided not to proceed with the new contract for O’Rourke. The view in Montrose appears to be that there is now clear blue water from that episode and so its one-time star presenter is back, hosting a 40-part interview-based podcast that will run from June until February. Sponsorship for the entire run costs a modest €20,000. To date there have been no takers.
