BMW sponsors deadly European cold snap An advertising agency working for BMW, the owners of the Mini brand, managed to get the front called Cooper under an "adopt-a-vortex" scheme run by the meteorological department at Berlin's Free University. Sassenbach Advertising, the agency, paid £165 for the honour of having the iconic Cooper name on weather maps. The naming of the weather system was part of the advertising campaign for the launch of the new open-top Mini Cooper Roadster. As the front's "Godfather" BMW would also get the weather maps charting its "life story" as it moved across the continent. People were even encouraged to follow Cooper's "beautiful weather" online. But then Cooper turned nasty. Temperatures went into free fall, hitting as low as -25 Fahrenheit (-32 Celsius), and the front started to claim dozens of lives. On Wednesday night it killed another nine people in Poland, bringing the total number of fatalities across Europe to over a 100. It has also disrupted transport and forced authorities into providing emergency accommodation and meals for thousands of homeless people. BMW said it was sorry, but added that "you cannot tell what a weather system will do." But despite the link with the Cooper brand and the cold front, advertising experts said that it might not all be bad news for BMW. Some pointed out that the old axiom "there's no such thing as bad publicity" still applies, and so the publicity surrounding Cooper's lethal qualities could "seed" more interest in Mini cars. The adopt-a-vertox scheme has been run since 2002, and uses the money raised to help fund weather monitoring by students at the university. BMW still has plans to use the scheme to name a low front Minnie later in the year.