Saatchi scrums down

Saatchi & Saatchi SA has won the local leg of the competition against other top agencies and will now travel to Australia to pitch against the winning Australian and New Zealand agencies (one of which is Saatchi & Saatchi NZ) for the account.

Saatchi & Saatchi SA managing director Ian Young says: "Well, it's hardly neutral territory, but that's only going to motivate us to fight even harder. We want this one for SA."

The winning agency will make the television commercial for SANZAR (South Africa, New Zealand, Australia Rugby) that will run for two years across all three countries.

Saatchi & Saatchi SA's David Malan and Quinton Miller took the idea behind the agency brief - 'anticipation' - to new heights when they warned a team of agency rugby fans they would be abseiling from the top of Table Mountain the next day. The agency brief was done on the mountain to some 'very worried creatives' before they jumped - literally.

Adrenaline obviously stimulates the creative gene because the team won the pitch the next day and are off to Sydney, Australia, on October 28.

The Super 12 competition was created by SANZAR in 1996 and was the first fully professional provincial rugby competition between countries in the world. From 2006, two new teams will be added to the Super 12 - one each from SA and Australia - to create the Super 14.

Young says that whilst the competition is largely unchanged, the step up from Super 12 to Super 14 creates an excellent opportunity for the SANZAR partners to work together to produce a joint advertising campaign which will launch, position and support this new competition across all three markets.