Cawley Nea/TBWA has won the coveted energy efficiency campaign from the Department of Communications, Marine & Natural Resources after a multi-agency pitch. The multi-million euro campaign, to be launched next month, aims to get people thinking about reducing energy use and buy more energyefficient stuff.

Hopefully minister Noel Dempsey will take a lesson from the British Lib-Dem leader Menzies Campbell, who this week was caught out in an interview touting the benefits of superefficient lightbulbs. Asked how many he had in his own home, Campbell replied that no bulb had burned out for a while: basically, that he had no idea whatsoever.

Fortunately, Edelman has teamed up with Cawley Nea to provide the PR end of the campaign, so Dempsey is in safe hands.

From other stories in TribuneBusiness this week, like the brownouts that threaten to convince multinationals that Ireland is not a safe place in which to locate their factory/data centre/whatever, it sounds like the campaign can't come soon enough.

Now, will there be a campaign to convince ministers to get their finger out and focus on supply as well as demand? Publius would like to pitch for that contract.

LATE LATE LATE SPONSOR

As of writing, RTE was still scrambling to find a replacement for Renault to pony up the 1.3m sponsorship of The Late Late Show, to run through this season. But time is running extremely short.

Pat is set to make a return to screens in just a couple of weeks and, while panic hasn't set in at Montrose, there's certainly mild concern. Rumour has it that several automotive prospects simply thought the show was too closely associated with the previous sponsor to be of much use to them. This might mean the sponsorship is a victim of its own success.

The sales document sent out by RTE Television said that, by last March, one in three people spontaneously identified Renault as the show's sponsor following a 5year run, extended from three by a happy Bill Cullen.

Others, like Universal McCann planner Mark O'Flaherty, wonder of 900,000 might be closer to the media value of the sponsorship.

The Late Late, while retaining an unmatched reach for any weekly show on Irish television, suffers from the perception that its audience is ageing rapidly and Tubridy Tonight looks more the future.

If the eventual sponsor is a family-focused, unchallenging brand like Lyons tea or Eircom, that will confirm it to many observers.

BONO IS A CAPITALIST TOOL

Never thought we'd get to write that without fear of being sued, but surely the deal by his Elevation Partners venture capital outfit to try and save venerable Forbes [motto:

the Capitalist Tool] magazine deserved more than the snore it was met with this week?

Object lesson to other media moguls: don't spend money on a ridiculously quixotic political career like Steve Forbes: invest in your business instead.

RING A DING DING

Well, OK, we can't quite translate the Luas bells into print, but you get the idea . . .

as does JCDecaux (smooth segue, no? ). The outdoor specialist is now selling those ad columns at Luas stations in parcels as small as one giant-sized Ben & Jerry's tub, starting 28 August.

We're not entirely convinced the Luas has as cosmopolitan a ridership as argued . . . yes, Publius is a Dort snob . . . but the skyrocketing house prices along the Luas lines, outpacing the rest of the market as tracked recently by Lisney, certainly suggests there's something to the idea that Luas-served areas are increasingly desres, and thus des-ads.

GOOGLE: MYSPACE OR YOURS, BABY?

Amid all the sturm und drang over Google's whopping $900m deal with Fox Interactive flagship MySpace . . . which, incidentally, has signed up its 100-millionth-user . . .

there was a potentially even bigger story. Bigger because, essentially, MySpace will simply have a "search powered by Google" box on each page, like many traditional media sites already have.

The big news was that Google will now pay the Associated Press to use its wire stories. "They can't afford to commit journalism, " said the AP's chief. The move re-opens a controversy about whether Google News steals something from traditional media by dis- and reaggregating their stories.

So, good news for newspapers and other older media? Maybe not. Google still symbolises . . . and one day will embody. . . the ultimate long-term threat to all newspapers, in terms of classified and other ads.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE PODCAST

Last week we mentioned that Irishelection. com, a collaborative blog pulling together political news and comment in the runup to next year's general election, had posted an interview with Labour's Pat Rabbitte, the first podcast with the leader of an Irish political party.

Turns out Pat's pretty popular. There were 400 downloads of his interview and more than 500 people signed up to receive future podcasts. Which is more punters than voluntarily turned out to see Pat's last speech; kinda makes you think they could be onto something.

The honour across the Irish Sea, by the way, went to the Tories' David Cameron, who made the first podcast of a British party leader earlier this year via The Daily Telegraph.

Which may tell us something significant about the fact that not everyone on this island is content to wait the traditional three year lag time before UK media trends manifest here.

We still stand by our prediction that the Irish blogosphere won't do to Bertie in 2007 what the US blogosphere did to Joe Lieberman this week, but people might ask the question . . . and Pat Rabbitte at least seems to reckon it's a good idea not to get on the bloggers' bad side.

TIPS, BRIBES & ABUSE to rdelevan@tribune. ie Please put Publius in the subject line to distinguish from the other death threats and porn spam.