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Author: Scott Cooper Date: 16-09-03 Time: 09.30am

 Last Month, Car and Van Manufactures `Fiat` had an advert for one of their Vans printed in the Sports Section of The Sun.

 wolvesfc.co.uk received complaints about the Advert and so we did a story asking whether Fiat knew anything about Football.

 (Click Here To Read The Article)

 As the season was just a few games old, Wolves Fans believed it was harsh for Fiat to single out Wolves, doom them to relegation and print that our beloved club was "out of its depth" in the Premiership.

 Yesterday, "Fiat Auto UK" reacted to the story on the Advert and told us what their intentions were.

 Fiat Auto UK told wolvesfc.co.uk "The Fiat Commercial Vehicles advertising campaign in Sun Supergoals will be running for the entire season 2003/4

We are planning to feature most if not all Premier League, Nationwide league and possibly some European teams during this period. So far in addition to Wolves, we have already featured other teams such as Newcastle United, Chelsea (Chelski), West Ham, Fulham and Manchester City.

The intention is to show that, far from not knowing anything about football, we do in fact know exactly what all fans know. Our advertising is designed to show that as well as featuring our own products in a traditional way, which we do on another page of each supplement, we are prepared to show "cartoon" style drawings of our products but linked to a football team since the readers, like yourselves, are obviously football fans and a fair proportion of them may also be van drivers or owners. You may be aware that it is fairly well known that a lot of van drivers always have a folded copy of The Sun on their dashboard to read during their breaks. The intention is that fans will see the funny side of each advertisement as the season unfolds and that Birmingham City or Aston Villa fans may have a laugh at the Wolves ad and vice versa. Arsenal fans may have a laugh at the Spurs ad and vice versa and so on.
Later in the season, we may also run a promotion whereby we ask fans to send in their own humorous ideas in return for which the winners will receive Premier league match tickets.

As you may know, the readership of the Sun newspaper is in the region of 3.5million per day and to date, having run this campaign for some 6 weeks, to my knowledge we only have received a small number of complaints, mainly from Wolves fans. In fact one of the other complaints was from a Newcastle supporter and we have already received a letter from the Advertising Standards Authority in response to that complaint which held "The advertisement is likely to be seen as a humorous reference to various newsworthy stories about Newcastle United players. Unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence or be seen as unfairly denigratory".

Obviously, it is not the intention of Fiat to single out any particular person or group or football club or region of the country, but to show that like you we are passionate about football as well as our range of vehicles and fully understand the trials and tribulations of every team and their supporters during the course of a season. We hope that once you have seen several of the other advertisements in the coming weeks and months you too will begin to enjoy the campaign.

FIAT Auto (UK) Ltd"

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