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The Year in PR: what to expect from 2013
January brings many things, but most importantly it brings perspective. We all still have the memory of 2012 fresh in our minds, and the learnings from the past 12 months will help to shape our approach to this year.
With that in mind, what can we expect from 2013 in the world of communications? Read more...
The Unilever Effect
First there was M&S with ‘Plan A’. Now there is Unilever’s ‘Sustainable Living’ Plan.
Most would agree that’s a very simplistic view, these two large companies were not the first or only ones to make strides towards genuine sustainability. However, I believe that at the time ‘Plan A’ and ‘Sustainable Living’ were released they were bold, visionary, transparent and honest. These qualities, along with a myriad of other, less influential factors helped both reports lead the dialogue on corporate sustainability and infiltrate the consciousness of the public on a large scale.
As a communications professional it’s interesting to consider how much weight we should place on the other factors that generated such a high level of recognition for these plans: the language used; the campaign budget; the brand’s capital; the scale of engagement with third parties and consumers; CEO support and the personal media profile of that individual; the companies relevance to people’s everyday lives… I could go on, but I won’t. Read more
Things are getting pinteresting...
In hyper-speed social media terms Pinterest has been a bit of a slow burner for some brands as they have struggled to work out how best to use the platform to connect with their consumers and meet their business objectives. But as the site has passed the 20 million users milestone and is now beating Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic, it’s becoming hard for any forward-thinking brand to ignore. Read more...
Striving for a Staycation?
Despite the disappointingly damp summer we are experiencing, I am delighted to continue to see so many visitors to our region. Being lucky enough to live near, and work with, the New Forest National Park it never fails to surprise me how many thousands of people flock to enjoy the Forest year after year. This is something we should all embrace, not only in terms of a sense of pride that our corner of the country is such a big draw to overseas as well as domestic visitors, but also because of the huge financial return the tourism industry brings to our region, especially in these hard times.
‘Staycations’ in this Olympic and Jubilee year are big business. According to Visit England, 2011 saw 5% more domestic holidays in England than in 2010, and this is set to grow by another 4% into 2012. Huge marketing budgets are being pumped into attracting the holiday maker to spend their hard-earned funds here rather than head off in search of sun beyond our shores. A poll undertaken by budget hotel chain Travelodge recently claimed 41% plan to holiday in the UK this year resulting in tourist industry earnings hitting £8.7bn – up by £1.5bn. Read more ...
Can you afford not to engage in Wales?
A recent survey by YouGov and the Wales Governance Centre found that just below 45% of the Welsh population did now know who the leader of the official opposition in the National Assembly for Wales was. It is of course Andrew RT Davies AM. Compare this to the roughly 5% of respondents who claim not to know Ed Miliband MP and you can see that Welsh politics still remains on the periphery, even in Wales.
There are many suggestions to why this is and no doubt the lack of media coverage and analysis goes some way to explaining this. However given the ever enhancing devolved powers, can people, and organisations, afford not to be engaged in the debate here in Wales? Read more...
'Chloe Smith & the media - why substance matters.'
It’s difficult to not feel sorry for Chloe Smith. Admittedly, I am doing rather well at fighting my sympathetic impulses but there is certainly some emotional confusion in the air over the comprehensive mauling she received at the hands of Jeremy Paxman on Wednesday night. It’s easy for even the most heartless and cynical of us to feel a rush of compassion over the spectacle of a woman expected to answer questions like, “Do you ever think you’re incompetent?” Ouch.
A great many column inches have subsequently been devoted to just exactly what went wrong, why it was Chloe Smith and not her boss, George Osborne in the Newsnight hot seat and, indeed, whether Paxman was overly gladiatorial in his style. One thing does appear to have been decided, however, and that is that Chloe Smith did not emerge from this scenario covered in glory. The debate now seems to centre on whether the woman has a career which can be picked out of the Newsnight rubble and salvaged. Read more ...
Brands serve up vending experiences
Who would have guessed a few years back that the humble vending machine – inhabitant of leisure centre lobbies and station platforms – would become one of the hottest experiential marketing tools around?
Coca-Cola led the way with its Happiness Machine, which began life on a college campus in America in 2010 and has since made appearances around the world handing out free coke, sunflowers, pizza and balloons and capturing the surprise and delight of the recipients in a series of well-watched videos. It followed this with a ‘Hug Me’ vending machine giving out free cokes in exchange for hugs. Then a reworking of its classic ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ ad as part of Google’s Project Rebrief, creating mobile ads which allow people to buy a coke for a stranger from a vending machine in a city of their choice and watch it being delivered – a campaign recently awarded the first ever Cannes Mobile Grand Prix. Read more ...
Olympic Torch Relay
Fans of the excellent BBC Olympic comedy Twenty Twelve will be well aware of the epic scale of LOCOG's work in organising the Olympic Torch Relay, particularly in achieving its ambitious aim of travelling within an hour of 95 per cent of people in the UK. In the show, the fictional head of infrastructure Graham Hitchins announced, after much thought, that his solution to the problem was simply: “To move Nottingham a lot closer to Sheffield”.
However, they managed to do it. The Games organisers have turned a logistical nightmare in to a PR coup, particularly for the vast majority of the population that doesn’t live in London. Read more
