DUBLIN portable advertising firm Adwalker secured what is surely one of its biggest breaks last week, when it agreed a three-year deal with airport operator BAA that will allow the firm to use its products at Heathrow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow airports.

The deal represents a significant shift forward for the company, which has had to really plug its technology, and with Heathrow being the world's third-busiest passenger airport, Adwalker will to get a wide audience.

Its staff use two screens strapped to their body while walking around areas such as shopping centres, with the screens displaying advertising messages and enabling them to take details from people interested in promotions or printing out vouchers. The system was developed by Keith Jordan, who founded the company with current chief executive Simon Crisp.

Former Dunnes Stores executive Michael Irwin backed the firm.

Adwalker, which is quoted on London's Alternative Investment Market, has previously indicated that it hopes to have generated 1m in revenue in the 12 months to this February.

TIVO BOSS SPEAKS OUT ON SKIPPING ADS

INTERVIEWED by Bloomberg radio last week, Tivo chief executive Tom Rogers said he foresees that one of the key aspects of the digital video recorder technology will remain the ability to fast forward through advertising.

In Ireland, Sky+ viewers use equipment similar to the Tivo. Rogers said that, as little as a year ago, the company was still seen as a "pariah" by the advertising industry, but that the sector has now come to embrace the technology.

"We have about 60 major advertisers that have done business with Tivo, " said Rogers, explaining that they are using it as a platform to target consumers. "The question is how do you create a new relationship with viewers?" he added, pointing out that roughly eight million American homes now use either Tivo or other brands of DVRs and the figure is expected to rise to anywhere between 40% and 70% of households within about five years. A new Tivo to be launched soon will have a broadband facility to enable users to download programmes from the internet and watch them on their televisions.

HECTOR'S 'MAD' NEW SHOW FOR TG4

LOVE him or loathe him, Hector O hEochagain has proved a big draw for RTE, with figures last week showing that the Hanging with Hector episode on 8 February, which featured Republic of Ireland goalkeeper Shay Given, drew an average of 421,000 adult viewers.

Hector is off to somewhat sunnier climes in Australia over the next few weeks to film an eight-part 30-minute travel show for TG4 to be shown in the autumn.

Produced by Good Company Productions, Hector will be circumnavigating the country, starting from Sydney, over about seven weeks. The production company is currently soliciting in Oz for "Mad stories, unusual people to interview, weird things, interesting, off track, wacky stories. . . anything that would be really mad television viewing". Mad.

RYANAIR TREATS 'EM MEAN, KEEPS 'EM KEEN

A LOT of people love to hate Ryanair. The Channel 4 Dispatches programme last week in which two reporters went undercover and threatened to expose a litany of failings was regarded as a damp squib by observers.

At any rate, a professor of marketing research at the University of Ulster, Stephen Brown, claims in a paper, 'On a Wing and a Swear, , carried in a new book called Brand Culture, that Michael O'Leary might have in fact got it all right and that irritating passengers might be a more productive pastime than cosying up to them.

"When every other organisation is expressing its undying love for the consumer . . . love that promises more than it provides . . . being told to piss off is, perversely, much more honest and much more authentic, or at least less hypocritical".