THE Hunting Association of Ireland (HAI), a body formed last year to promote hunting in the country, is to unveil its first advertising campaign this week at a meeting of European hunting associations in Paris.

The campaign was developed in conjunction with the UK's Vets for Wildlife Management to produce advertising for cinemas and urban areas - presumably because much of the opposition to hunting is generated in urban areas.

HAI's Gavin Duffy told a UK industry publication last week that there is currently "no threat" to hunting in Ireland, but that the agency wants to take a proactive stance.

Somewhat oddly, he said that the HAI didn't want to attract "unwanted" attention, but a run of cinema advertising could do just that. He added that the HAI wants to become a "campaigning and promotional body".

"Despite our huge support, there is a perceived political incorrectness in urban areas about hunting, " added Duffy.

"It's nearly impossible to change that, so we want to educate the public on the differences between animal rights and animal welfare.

We want to explain the threat of terrorism from the Animal Liberation Front and PETA, and the terror tactics used by hunt saboteurs."

LONG CINEMA LINES FOR 'WALK THE LINE'

IRISH cinema admissions rose marginally during March, by 1.2% to over 1.3m admissions, compared to the same month last year.

The highest grossing movie last month was the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which took in 3.39m at the Irish box office, bring its total earnings to date here to 3.62m. Second and third-placed movies remained unchanged, with Big Momma's House 2 holding the number two spot, and Chicken Little at number three.

Admissions in Dublin grew 2.3% year-on-year, to hit 673,601 for the month.

Overall cinema admissions have grown 5.1% in Dublin in the first quarter of 2006 compared to the same period in 2005, while for the country, figures are up 7.2% compared to last year. Big releases such as Mission Impossible: 3 and The Da Vinci Code, which gets its worldwide release next month, are expected to provide a significant boost to movie admissions this year.

Meanwhile, the Irish Film Censor's Office is busy running movie competitions on its website, the most recent for a Da Vinci Code goody bag. Just what a statutory body, especially the Censor's Office, is doing running such competitions is a bit baffling. Ad Lib imagines that at least a semblance of detachment from the industry would be in the best interests of a body that obviously has to remain, and be seen to remain, as objective as possible.

HOLDING FIRM WITH NEW-LOOK ADVERTISING

JCDECAUX is rolling out a new poster technology around the country that it says will cut to two days the time it takes to have an advert on site. The current prism billboards, which rotate to offer a selection of three adverts, have often suffered from peeling that jams up the machinery. The current aluminium prisms are now being replaced on some of JCDecaux's sites by PVC, which, combined with a new process, is expected to eliminate the problem.

The real breakthrough, says JCDecaux, has come from a dry posting technology developed by UK-based SMF Technology, which enables adverts on prism sites to be erected within hours. Traditional wet posting often took up to two days on such sites.

HOLDING FIRM WITH NEW-LOOK ADVERTISING

RTE has announced that food group Glanbia will sponsor its weather bulletins for a two-year period beginning in July.

RTE declined to specify the value of the contract. The bulletins had been sponsored by Eircom, but the firm was forced to drop its promotion of its 11811 directory service on the stings after the BCI upheld a complaint that RTE had broke rules that forbade advertisers promoting specific products on sponsored programmes.

Eircom was paying in the region of 600,000 a year to sponsor the weather bulletins. RTE is understood to have been initially seeking up to 1.25m from a new sponsor, but strong interest in the tendering process may have boosted this figure significantly.