PRCA Bites

To offend or not to offend

Imagine, if you will, the field of battle, the Falkland Islands,1982, and a mortar shell falling on a British slit trench occupied by a paratrooper. His plaintive cry of ‘I’ve lost my leg!’ is answered by his mate one hole along; ‘No you haven’t it’s over here!’.

A true story, I am told, and doubtless the Parachute Regiment is yet to be overwhelmed by complaints from limbless ex-servicemen claiming to be ‘offended’.     

Amazing then that Brake and Headway, charities apparently devoted to road safety and head injuries respectively, presume to be offended on behalf of their constituency because Jeremy Clarkson cracked a joke at Richard Hammond’s expense about his well-publicised accident in a dragster. Hammond himself appeared to take no offence at all and certainly did not claim to be representative of all people involved in high speed car accidents resulting in head injuries.

Similarly, we are told, Asians in certain parts of Britain are presumed by their local councils to be ‘offended’ by the notion of Christmas. This offence apparently escaped the owners of my local curry house who happily handed me a card and offered me a hearty ‘Happy Christmas’ as I picked up the final take away of 2006.

Now, forgive my cynicism, but there are an awful lot of people out there who apparently take very easy offence. Doubtless some bright spark in Brake’s press office took an opportunistic moment to do a bit of profile raising. But did they really help their organisation’s reputation? Not from where I’m standing.

Similarly, how about all those who allow themselves to be represented as ‘offended’ by over-zealous councils and the entire industry that has grown around rooting out ‘offence’ wherever it may – or more likely may not – lurk. Is their reputation enhanced by allowing it to happen? I think not. Shake off your apathy and say ‘I’m not offended actually – and even if I was, I might just be big enough to get over it.’      

The 'listing' influence of PR

Lists, such as the Guardian’s recent run down of the country’s top 100 most influential, so often serve only three purposes; entertaining or disappointing those who think they might be in them, filling newspaper space in the dog days of summer, or grist to the pub conversation mill. You know, in your top ten dangerous animals who would win between a Grizzly Bear and a Saltwater Crocodile? That kind of thing.

Either way, unless there’s a tangible involved, most of them are fairly meaningless. At least that’s what I told myself when the Guardian’s latest offering emerged and I failed to find my name.

In fact, PR people in general were as hard to find as that mythical bust-up between the bear and the crocodile. Two did sneak in though, Max Clifford and Matthew Freud but, I asked myself, do they really count?

Both are caught in the swirl of celebrity endorsement, however loosely one defines that term, and the increasingly blurred margins between that world and the outer edges of politics and business. On the night that Blunkett resigned, again, and the two Mitchell Bruvvers of EastEnders infamy were dodging blows from respective partners including the editor of the Sun, Freud and Clifford seemed to crop up an awful lot in the subsequent coverage.  And Freud has once again hit the headlines apparently embroiled in the strange case of Prescott’s ranch trip.

So, it’s probably a relief that PRs great and good failed to feature. After all, influence is best exerted quietly, especially when the dangers of the PR man becoming bigger than the either client or the story have been so perfectly modelled by deposed spin king Alastair Campbell.

No, the greatest satisfaction that a decent PR man should take from lists like the Guardian’s is the quiet knowledge of the effort they put in to getting their client included.  Now THAT’s influence.

Undercutting

Gazing, as I’m sure you are, from your office window at the ceaseless drizzle that constitutes what the water companies are pleased to call a drought, and I’ll risk a few quid on the fact that you’re thinking about holidays.

Funny thing the holiday industry. It’s spent years educating its clients into believing that you can demand more and more for less and less money. It has encouraged impossible expectation for which it must yearly be punished with a flogging in the media for failing to realise. It employs people at a rootless age who come and as quickly go when they realise that the reality doesn’t match the dream.

Its business model  is fatally at the mercy of economic confidence; a confidence that might so easily be shaken by, say, an act of god or, increasingly likely, an act of the godless in some far flung corner of the world  to which a a panic-stricken broker responds by devaluing the company in which you work and on which you depend for your livelihood.

What’s more, when the hard times strike it goes back to the tried and tested and undercuts its already undervalued product to the limits of sustainability. And each year another one bites the dust.

Well, it’s only flogging  a fortnight in Fuerte Ventura. It’s not like working an industry that builds brand value, enhances and protects corporate reputation, shifts goods, motivates workforces is it? Is it?

Patrick Barrow
MD/DG, PRCA

Conflict of interest

Over the past month we’ve now twice faced a situation where we have been asked to turn down a very large piece of business by existing clients because they felt it to be competitive to what they do.  I’m wondering how many other small to medium sized agencies have the same problem and whether it is something for the PRCA to look at. 

The first instance involved a direct competitor to an existing client.  Even though we were being asked to work on a different side of the business than we do for our client, we reluctantly agreed to their request.  The second situation involved a client objecting to us working for another company indirectly in the same sector, with the argument that this may be a big area for them one day.

I know a lot of larger agencies manage to use the Chinese walls / different servers argument.  With 22 of us, that’s a non starter, especially since one of the selling points of an agency of our size is that everyone is in some way involved in clients’ business. 

Like every consultancy, we’d prefer not to get into these wrangles in the first place.  Which is why it would be helpful for the PRCA to look at this and produce a best practice guide on what does and doesn’t constitute a conflict of interest.  This could go into different degrees (indirect conflict, direct conflict etc) along with guidelines of what PRCA members commit to doing internally when there are two similar pieces of business in the agency.  We’d then have something in black and white and that’s industry approved to show clients when this happens in future.

Dirk Singer, Cow PR

What's in a reputation?

Background
Marketing Week will be conducting a Reputation Survey of PR based on clients' perceptions of the industry and of consultancies.  The results will then be presented as league tables.

How important are league tables?  Love them or hate them they do serve a purpose - whether it be to show off or to shut up.

Vitamin C(hristmas) Campaign

Congratulations to Andy Poole from Weber Shandwick North for winning the Christmas competition with his ‘refreshing’ festivity campaign:

To help fend of the effects of the PC crazed diplomats intent on banning Christmas, and to boost Christmas cheer, we'll be urging people to top up on Vitamin C(hristmas) and highlighting the dangers of Vitamin C(hristmas) deficiency with spoof health warnings.  i.e. laugh at cr*p cracker jokes and smile when you hear Slade to avoid December depression.  Top up on Vitamin C(hristmas) in all good pubs, at family dinners and even school nativity plays.

Blogging Can’t Be Ignored

At the Edelman and JCPR debate (11 November) on how blogging is changing the world of communications the importance of Bloggers as an audience for corporations and public relations professionals was strongly emphasised. The panel included Stuart Smith, CEO of Edelman London and Richard Edelman, President & Global CEO, Charles Pretzik of the Financial Times, Suw Charman, a blog consultant, journalist and author and Kevin Anderson of the BBC.

According to the latest Edelman/Technorati Study, 34% of bloggers blog in order to be seen as visible authorities in their field.  Bloggers are highly engaged, seeking the best sources of information and bring a natural desire to participate and advance the discussion in their field. Crucially, at least 48% of bloggers are never contacted by companies or their PR representatives. The survey highlighted bloggers interest in products and companies with 51% of bloggers posting about companies, their employees and their products – at least once a week. Many bloggers consider companies to be trusted sources of information about their own products: 45% think company communications are "somewhat trusted" and 35% think they are highly trustworthy.

However 33% of bloggers do not trust communications from PR firms, though 21% do consider information from PR firms to be trust worthy. Only 15% of bloggers receive press releases, 85% see corporate blogs as somewhat or occasionally trustworthy, but 18% think employee written blogs are very trustworthy. Blogs by senior company executives are viewed to be only half as believable (19%) as blogs by a company employee (35%).

Trust is becoming far more personal: bloggers trust information from their peers more than any other source. Bloggers prefer learning from other bloggers by about 3 to 1 (63% to 21%) over hearing from a corporation. The data challenges the preconception that bloggers are irresponsibly careless with facts and don't care about accuracy as much as speed to market. In fact, 39% of bloggers will strike through an error and correct it, 25% will create a post with new information and 24% will leave the error but add a correction.

Click on: https://extranet.edelman.com/bloggerstudy/ to see the complete findings

Click on: http://www.edelman.com/events/UK_Blog to see a webcast of the event

To find out more about how Edelman is approaching blogging, contact Charlie Cannell, Director of Edelman Interactive Solutions on 020 7344 1293.

Having fun – the ultimate PR challenge?

Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night just gone, Christmas yet to come. Everybody happy? No, apparently. Each year, the reputation of each of the main autumn/ winter festivals seems to slip another notch.

Hallowe’en is condemned simply as ‘American’ for reasons I’ve never quite understood. True, lanterns in England were traditionally made from turnips or swedes where now the pumpkin is preferred and the awful practice of ‘trick or treating’ – turned by some into the great British art of demanding money with menaces - is one straight from Stateside but Hallowe’en is not intrinsically American.

Someone, generally one of the more obscure bishops, will always mutter something about a ‘celebration of the occult’. This never quite adds up either. Hallowe’en is a corruption of All Hallows Eve, the day before All Saints day, a Christian festival. Christmas, on the other hand traces its pagan origins to well before Christ and yet, in the Western Church, is one of the two high points of the Christian calendar.

Bonfire Night, in our age of heightened religious sensitivities, is increasingly attracting suspicion as an inherently anti-Catholic celebration and in the current atmosphere is even being woven into the great anti-terrorism debate.

Every year a child blows his hand off, probably while trying to attach a banger to a cat, the underclass start buying overpowered fireworks in September to throw at each other until at least November 30, the RSPCA warn of hedgehogs nesting in  the firewood, air traffic control forbid rockets near the flight path, and dogs bark dementedly and crap on the carpet.

In Lewes, societies like the Cliffe Bonfire boys march the streets by torchlight, shouting ‘no pot pourri’. I quite agree but I may be missing something.

And as for Christmas, take your pick from; it starts in September, it’s sooo commercialised, we’ve lost the meaning, drink driving, domestic violence, family rows, loneliness, increased suicides, bloody office parties, credit card frenzy, all that stress for just one day, BandAid/Slade/John Lennon delete as appropriate, Winterval ‘cos we might offend someone, no camcorders at the school Nativity, too drunk for Midnight Mass and the priest mumbling that he’d like to know where all these people are for the rest of the year.

Now, we all know that this curmudgeonliness is to some extent the by-product of an evil blend of the behaviour of ‘others’, of commercial exploitation,  of oversensitivity and the fact that in our hyper-stimulated times we thrill-seek so constantly that simple pleasures have lost their very basic appeal. But have we also just forgotten how to have fun?

Here then is the PR challenge. Six bottles of festive champers to the reader who can come up with best campaign to refresh the old-fashioned idea of festive fun outlined in seventy-five words or less. 

Respond by e-mail to pressoffice@prca.org.uk, the winner to be decide w/c 19 December, judges decision final. Judges to consist of B Eelzebub, G Fawkes and F Christmas or their very near counterparts.

Today Programme - don' do wha' it oughta

Far less frequently than once I used to, and perhaps I ought, I tune into the Today programme. It is quite enough of a fan of itself not to need my regular support. However, last Friday was one of those occasions. By way of a bit of TGIF levity, the wacky boys in the production office had a moment of ‘cor, you couldn’t make it up’ tabloid fun with the Rebekah Wade/Ross Kemp fight night. (Subscribe now on Sky Pay-Per-View, special discount to Sun readers)

Chuckling away in pally fashion were Jim Naughtie, Roy Greenslade and Max Clifford as they revelled in accounts that the Ginger Ninja and her Ultimate Force husband moved on from vodka with the Freuds to a sympathetic supper with David Blunkett during which hostilities had first broken out. The evening culminated, as we now know, in Rebekah unloading the big right. All this while her newspaper was mounting a campaign against domestic violence. Yer ‘avin a laaaarf incha?

Meanwhile, cross taaahn, Kemp’s Mitchell brother co-star Steve McFadden was hoping for a long count as he hit the canvas to a jab/hook/right cross combo from his ex. Blimey. Chuck in the towel, our boys have had enough.   

All good fun and worth remembering next time you read a thundering editorial on yob-plagued Britain. 

More amusing still was the Sun telling the BBC it had ‘no comment’. What, no door-stepping?

One thought occurred though; vodka and caviar parties, domestic violence, the tabloids and a bit of Max Clifford. Somewhere, even as we speak, the scriptwriters for Absolute Power’s Prentiss McCabe are frantically scribbling.    

As a footnote, why,  if the stories are to be believed, was the erstwhile Work and Pension Minister chowing down with the editor of the Sun but hours after blaming the media for his demise?

Touch the Devil, as they say in Ireland, and you can’t let go.

Ever felt like writing an angry letter to The Times?

Members who caught Caroline Merrell’s pointless full page piece in Monday’s business section lumping various marketing, advertising and  strategic management errors under the banner ‘PR campaigns’ will already be well past the ‘Dear Sir’ phase. ‘PR campaigns are intended to improve the profile of business. Sometimes they have the opposite effect’ sniggered Merrell before citing, among others, M&S’s ‘I’m normal’ ads and Hoover’s free flight fiasco as examples. The newsletter will shortly be printing a piece subheaded; journalism is supposed to leave people better informed but sometimes it has the opposite effect.

   

The Times is once again unto my bosom after its City Diary (2 Nov) published the following having read, I can but assume, my thoughts on balancing the age profile of the work force: "Overheard at my local Sainsbury's as chief executive Justin King tries to turn round the ailing grocer; man in mid-60s to assistant - "Why are there no grapefruit?" Assistant - "Young people don't buy them."