THE partnership of British Airways and the Saatchi brothers, Maurice and Charles, came to an end after 23 years yesterday when the airline switched its £60 million advertising account from M&C Saatchi to the Publicis-backed BBH.

Shares of M&C Saatchi, which coined BA’s “world’s favourite airline” slogan, fell almost 5 per cent after confirmation that it had lost an arduous competitive pitch against BBH. WPP’s J Walter Thompson and Omnicom’s DDB had also competed for the account.

Analysts said that the loss would knock 7 per cent off M&C Saatchi’s sales in 2006, but would have a larger impact on pre-tax profits, reducing them by more than a quarter to £7.1 million.

“It’s a blow, there’s no question. BA was their oldest client and one of the four largest, and this will trigger a substantial downgrade,” Richard Hitchcock, an analyst at Numis Securities, house broker to M&C Saatchi, said.

The agency’s loss of the account had been widely expected, but David Kershaw, the chief executive, said that he was “sad and disappointed” when the news came.

“It’s a relationship that goes back ten years with this agency, and more than two decades with the Saatchis, so it is extremely regrettable. But we wish BA and BBH well,” he said.

Charles Saatchi, who has masterminded several successful advertising campaigns for the Conservatives and was given a peerage in 1996, said that he was “immensely proud of the work we have done to help build BA into one of the world’s great brands . . . We wish them every success for the future.”

M&C Saatchi heralded the end of an era by taking out a double page ad in today’s Times with photographs of some of the best-known BA campaigns. The ad includes the text “Open for airline bookings” and an e-mail address for M&C Saatchi.

Charles and Maurice Saatchi won the BA account for their first agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, in the early 1980s. A decade later, when they left the agency after a power struggle, they founded M&C Saatchi almost solely on the strength of the BA account.

BA almost switched to BBH in 1995, but Maurice persuaded the airline to stick with M&C Saatchi, and the agency went on to create several well-known campaigns.

Martin George, BA’s commercial director, praised M&C Saatchi, but he said that BBH had been “streets ahead” of the other three agencies during the pitch.

“This is all about understanding what our customers want. It’s about looking forward, adapting to the changing environment in which we operate. It’s not a criticism of the work done by M&C Saatchi,” he said.

SIX OF THE BEST

Three of M&C Saatchi’s best campaigns

• Teenage road safety in London: uses the slogan “Don’t die before you’ve lived”, showing what might have happened to teenagers if they hadn’t been killed in road traffic accidents
• BA Club World: launched in 26 markets and still running
• Police: with the slogan “I couldn’t, could you?”, celebrities convey message that not everyone could do a police officer’s job

  Three of BBH’s best campaigns

• Audi’s “Vorsprung durch Technik” has run from 1983 to the present
• Johnny Walker’s “just keep walking” emblem: the agency believes that the walking man on the front of the bottle sums up the brand
• “The Lynx effect”: running since 1996, the campaign has turned around the fortunes of the Unilever brand, with one recent commercial spawning a chart-topping single

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