Virgin stays with Big Brother

Having taken the sponsorship over from the Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media have once again decided to continue with their Mobile division sponsoring the Big Brother reality programme for series nine.

Carphone Warehouse pulled out of the deal with Big Brother when, in the celebrity show in early 2007, the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty suffered abuse at the hands of Jade Goody and some of the other contestants.

Sponsoring this type of TV show gets some serious coverage for a target audience of 18 to 34 year olds, as the shows normally have around eighty per cent in that age range.

So even though the last series, Big Brother – Celebrity Hijack, was not as successful in viewing figure terms, for a mobile phone and broadband operator like Virgin this is priceless.