Good news for broadcasters, business and the PR industry: Government to lift ban on product placement on commercial television

Good news for independent broadcasters, businesses and the advertising and PR industries today: the government is likely to overturn the ban on product placement on television programmes, perhaps as early as this week. The Telegraph reports that the move “could lead to celebrity chefs promoting supermarket products in their cooking programmes and soft drinks manufacturers placing their beverages in television talent shows”.

The news will be welcomed by independent broadcasters who will see a rise in revenues through paid-for product placements in their programmes. It ought also to have a positive impact on the PR industry.

Whilst product placement will almost certainly not be allowed in news or current affairs programming, it is worth noting that under the current regulations editorial staff at commercial news outlets have had a tread a very careful line when covering consumer announcements from retailers, manufacturers and others. In our experience, the existing regulations have created a climate in which news editors and producers have been nervous of being accused of offering back-door product endorsements masquerading as news. This, in our view, has often led to the counter-intuitive spectre of stories of legitimate consumer interest finding a home on the BBC and not on commercial television. The decision ought to lead to a reduced level of editorial nervousness when covering announcements which are of real public interest from commercial organisations.

The expected change in the rules this week will only apply to commercial broadcasters, with the BBC still restricted from promoting products, even in programmes made by independent production companies.

Advertisers, broadcasters and the PR industry have long argued that the rules are unnecessarily draconian and that increasingly sophisticated consumers are unlikely to be swayed by brands that are placed in programmes, however overtly.

Shortlisted for Outstanding Small PR Consultancy 2009 (the second year in a row)

We're delighted to have been shortlisted for the Outstanding Small Consultancy of the Year Award again this year in the Chartered Institute of Public Relations PRIDE Awards. We won the award last year in what was our first year of trading.

The news follows a notable success for us last week with the launch of a new version of "Make Do and Mend" for John Lewis. All 28,000 John Lewis Partners collaborated on the creation of an entirely new version of the famous wartime publication, updated to reflect the needs of 21st century homes. The launch attracted extensive media coverage, including BBC Breakfast, BBC News Channel, the Today Programme, The Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express as well as massive amount of online coverage. We have thoroughly enjoyed working on the project with the John Lewis team.

Here are some other highlights from the year:

1. Creating the Reevoo Customer Choice Awards

Reevoo.com publishes authentic customer reviews on the web. We proposed a national awards concept based (uniquely) on feedback from genuine owners of products.

We led the announcement on news that a £16.49 Tesco hi-fi had won the customer choice award in the audio category, beating competition from rival products costing several hundred pounds.

This attracted widespread coverage, including page leads in most tabloids and an appearance on BBC Breakfast for Reevoo’s CEO. We followed up with sector-specific announcements and placed an exclusive in News of the World.

The results:
More than 40 million opportunities to see/hear.
Page leads in the Sun, Mirror, Daily Mail and News of the World.
Hundreds of online reports.
Manufacturer announcements generating more coverage.
The Tesco hi-fi sold out immediately, with further stocks on order.

2. Campaigning to reclaim and rename the Hot Cross Bun

For St Albans Cathedral we took on an assignment:

To raise the profile of the Cathedral among tourists
To identify a commercial opportunity for the Cathedral

We discovered that the Cathedral was the source of the modern Hot Cross Bun. The original “Alban Bun” was baked and offered to the poor by Father Thomas Rockliffe, a monk, in 1361. We advised the cathedral to run a campaign to reclaim and rename the Hot Cross Bun. We negotiated a partnership with Sainsbury's to bake the buns for the Cathedral, which would keep the proceeds.

The campaign was covered by the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, BBC radio stations, ITV lunchtime news, London Tonight, in regional press and online.

The buns sold out within hours. The Cathedral saw a flood of visitors and both parties are negotiating an agreement on national sales of the bun in 2010.

3. Scoring a PR goal for Screwfix with a tongue-in-cheek lookalike competition

Screwfix sponsor the Masters Football tournament on Sky Sports. Screwfix customers are tradesmen. Our task was to engage them with the sponsorship of the tournament.

We launched a tongue-in-cheek search for tradesmen who look like famous footballers to play in a charity football match at the National Masters Final. We announced the search with photos of early entrants alongside actual footballers for comparison. We filmed the match, along with pre and post-match interviews and uploaded the video to YouTube.

Highlights included full-page coverage in the Metro and the Daily Star and a half-page in the Daily Sport, all strong tradesmen’s papers, and 15 regional radio interviews. Hits to the Screwfix website soared and the story generated a huge volume of entries.

The story generated more than £150,000 of publicity, a return on investment of around 25:1.

Outstanding achievements

There are two areas in particular in which we have exceeded expectations:

1. Attracting a disproportionately large number of national, market leading clients for an agency our size.

2. Generating high impact media coverage. Nine in ten announcements this year achieved national press coverage, up from 8 in ten last year, and 1 in 2 were page leads, up from just over 3 in ten last year. One quarter of announcement received national broadcast coverage.

All in all, it has been a great year, despite the challenging economic environment and we're more confident than ever that our approach is the right one to build on our successes to date.

When it all goes horribly wrong: six old world rules for handling a dispute with a journalist

These are in fact, the six things that you shouldn’t do online if you find that the business you represent is caught in the midst of a row with a journalist. These apply, in my view, whether or not the journalist is right, wrong or whether there are shades of grey. What I have learned over time is that all disagreements with the media ought to be handled privately until such time as the matter is resolved or until you are clear that there is no resolution. At that point, you can review your options, having gained distance and perspective. There is no place in the rapid-fire worlds of digital media or social networking for anti-social networking.

With very few exceptions, journalists act with integrity and pride. Questioning that pride and integrity publicly is a very bad idea. The media industry and the methods of engagement are changing at an unparalleled rate and a new generation of digital PR professionals is on the rise. There is still much to learn from old-school media relations, though, and I offer this list as a battle-scarred veteran of many skirmishes with the national media on behalf of brands and as someone with a foot in both the old-school and new-school camps.

1. NEVER engage in a public debate with a journalist if you are a brand guardian, especially if you are refuting the legitimacy of their criticisms of your brand. This will not end well.

2. DO NOT see a conversation with a journalist in a public forum as an evenly-matched contest, especially if you are conversing about something you disagree on. At best you will win the battle but lose the war. You’ll be marked down as a trouble-maker – and the only value to a journalist of a trouble maker is the negative news value.

3. Relationships with journalists that have an element of acrimony to them should be developed and improved at all costs, but only IN PRIVATE.

4. Journalists are representatives of media organisations and they are bound by all sorts of processes for fact-checking, due diligence and testing for libel or defamation. THEY DO NOT MAKE NEGATIVE ASSERTIONS LIGHTLY. Think eight times and check with others before you react or respond – and again, when you do so, do it directly and privately.

5. Do not personalise your unhappiness with a journalist or impugn his/her honesty publicly. They will fight back and will MAKE MATTERS CONSIDERABLY WORSE.

6. Bear in mind that if you are mad about what a journalist has said about your brand, your level of crossness is usually directly related to their clout. If you wreck the relationship in public, it is very difficult for either side to find a way back. YOU lose a potentially powerful advocate. THEY simply move on to the next story, having perhaps had another go at your brand to validate their position.

Seducing the twittering classes

Some very interesting analysis from Robin Goad at Hitwise here about the downstream traffic from Twitter versus Google, Facebook and Hotmail. It shows that traffic to retail sites is relatively low from Twitter and that most of it goes to news or entertainment sites.

This fits with Twitter’s pure, raw conversational style. It may be verbally transactional, but it isn’t a shop. Because it is hyper-networking (you can be talking with many at the same time) mood also spreads amazingly quickly. The community is very spam averse, as evidenced by the Habitat story this week (Habitat were said to have attached unrelated hashtags – a way of categorising tweets for easier consumption - to commercially orientated tweets with the sole objective of getting a bigger audience for their message and thereby driving traffic to their site. Instead, Habitat was driven into retreat by a none-too-happy community and the story made the national media.)

There are a few interesting lessons emerging from the Hitwise data and the Habitat experience.

Firstly, overt promotional tactics will never work in the Twitter community. It’s a bit like interrupting pub chats with enforced commercial breaks. It just won’t happen.

What’s as interesting is what this says about how brands and brand advocates work on Twitter. It’s too early to say perhaps, but my feeling is that the only promotional tactic that will work in the Twitter universe is the expression of genuine opinion, and then:

a) only if expressed in a raw and compelling way, and
b) only if Twitter is seen to be a secondary or even tertiary influencing tool rather than something more overt and direct.

If a shop sets up a Twitterfeed, for instance, who is going to want to follow it if the content is just about products on offer, however compelling they are? That’s advertising.

The shop needs to create an unspun voice, offer genuinely interesting content and build a community of advocates over time – and time really is the killer punch. This is no overnight medium. Anyone who believes that Twitter will pay rapid commercial dividends for their business is mistaken. It’s a long haul project, based on nuance, as anyone who is familiar with it will know.

The sensitivity with which Twitter must be handled was brought home to me the other day. I was interested in gauging the reaction to a programme on television that had focused heavily on a brand (a sort of crowd-sourced TV review, if you like). I searched all Twitter for references and looked at them chronologically. During the minutes prior to the programme and immediately after it started there were plenty of tweets pointing to the fact that Twitterer A, B, C, etc was about to sit down and watch, to paraphrase, “an interesting programme about brand x on channel y.” These died off after the first 10 or so minutes of the programme to be replaced by reactions to the programme, which in the main were less than favourable and had some pointedly critical reactions to the brand. The point is that the change in mood was very clear - moving from what looked like the staged tweets of relative automatons to the real views of people watching the programme.

I can’t be certain, but it seemed to me that a highly paid digital media consultancy was probably stacking Twitter with references to the programme in order to promote it. And then the real voices came in. What all this says to me is that the raw and unfiltered world of Twitter will be un-exploitable by brands unless their advocates are truly interested in, and able to express a candid, interesting and engaging view about whatever brand they are advocating. Only the unvarnished truth will stand any chance of applying any gloss to a brand’s bottom line.

Bad taste

Another cautionary tale, this time involving Gordon Ramsay the chef. He was interviewed on one of Australia’s leading current affairs programmes recently and in the days that followed is alleged to have said some unsavoury things about the programme’s presenter.

This video is the prologue to her next programme, during which she took the opportunity to respond to Ramsay’s alleged comments. Her response has attracted the support of the Australian PM.



Whether the furore will turn Ramsay’s trip down under into more of a demotional tour than the promotional one that he had intended remains to be seen. Some argue that notoriety is a pretty efficient way of promoting your product. By any measure, though, his alleged comments appear to have been in particularly poor taste, which, let’s face it, is not a happy brand association for a purveyor of fine food.

So-called celebrity is a dangerous affliction and needs to be managed carefully. When arrogance creeps in, there is a temptation to believe that people will like you “warts and all”. Trouble is, most of us are more discerning than that. We’ll see the warts and skip the main course.

A masterclass in handling a confrontational interview

Here's a textbook example of how to handle a potentially difficult interview. Peter Mandelson performed quite brilliantly on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday morning. From the outset he was in complete control of the interview, setting the mood and the pace. Andrew Marr is a fine interviewer and the subject matter provided much scope for confrontation, but Mandelson was controlled, precise and unflappable throughout. His use of language is forensic and he does a great job of setting the pace, asserting his right to control the length of his answers and of deflecting those questions that he chooses not to answer. A classic.

The consequences of passivity

Carl Popper's much-paraphrased definition of democracy is "the ability of citizens to get rid of their Government on a whim". I've always struggled with the idea of whim when it comes to important democratic choice, but whim exercised in the ballot box is infinitely preferable to staying away from the electoral process altogether.

I now think the Government ought to add consideration of compulsory voting to the melting pot of electoral reform. The system worked well in Australia where I grew up. The penalty for not voting wasn’t terribly high, but it was sufficient incentive to catalyse strong turnouts.

Voting is a privilege and a responsibility. The outcome this weekend shows the cost of stay-on-the-sofa passivity. If we need any example of the importance to all of us of our right to vote, we need only look at the consequences of this week's inaction. We pay through our taxes for ALL elected politicians.

The exercise of holding a pencil over a ballot sheet is an important and clarifying experience. All of us should at least turn up and weigh the consequences of our decisions, even if some of us choose to spoil our papers.

Rupert Bear – Internet pioneer

I’ve concluded that the inventor of the Internet is not Tim Berners-Lee – it’s Rupert the Bear. Well maybe not, but the format of Rupert books is remarkably modern when held against the structure of the most successful of today’s web pages.

Rupert books can be read on at least three levels – the pictures alone, the pictures captioned with the précis rhymes or the pictures padded out by the “in-depth” narrative in the paragraphs below.

The précis rhymes are a sort of precursor of the hypertext link of today, except that they are arranged as a bridge or heading to the deeper story below.

So in the example here, taken from Rupert and the Castaway, firstly we have the picture of Rupert, Captain Barnacle and Jim wandering back across and expanse of beach towards Mrs Bear; secondly we have the hypertext:

‘“Why look who’s with the Captain there.
It’s my lost son!” cries Mrs Bear.’

- and finally, in the paragraph below the hypertext we have the detail, with Jim having a shave, putting on some of his Uncle’s clothes (innocently) and the three friends actively seeking out Mrs Bear.

It’s a genius construction and it’s difficult to see why there aren’t more books created with this format given that kids are increasingly accustomed to accessing stories and exploring them in this way.

So there you have it: Rupert Bear, Internet pioneer.

Bunfight at the St Albans Tearooms

Every year, Twelve Thirty Eight provides ten days’ senior consultancy support to a worthy cause. This year, we supported St Albans Cathedral, a major cultural landmark, in three inter-related ways:

1. Raising the profile of the Cathedral with potential tourists
2. Identifying a commercial opportunity that could raise significant funds for the Cathedral
3. Supporting the Cathedral’s key messages

The key task, of course, in any of our work, is to find a story that delivers all the messages. In the course of our research, we discovered that the Cathedral is the source of the modern British Christian tradition of the Hot Cross Bun. The original Alban Bun was baked and offered to the local poor by Father Thomas Rockliffe, a monk, in 1361. It has been baked at the Cathedral at Easter and offered to local visitors ever since.

Story found – what next?

It seemed to us that the bun was a potential money-spinner, with its unique, secret recipe and distinctive mediaeval taste and andadvised the Cathedral to launch a campaign to reclaim and rename the Hot Cross Bun, restoring a connection with Easter with the original Alban Bun। Clergy at the Cathedral were prepared to talk about the disappearance of a connection between the Hot Cross Bun at Easter given that it is now available all year round, including at Christmas.

We approached and negotiated a partnership with Sainsbury’s who agreed to bake the Buns on a more commercial scale for the Cathedral locally. Buns were made available at the Sainsbury’s store in St Albans and via the Cathedral Café on Maundy Thursday, with all proceeds going to the Cathedral.

We announced the campaign and the partnership with Sainsbury’s to national, regional and local press and broadcast media. We made the Cathedral and its surroundings available to broadcast crews and we even baked a batch of buns for use in taste tests and as props for broadcast interviews. We arranged photography of the buns and photocalls.

The announcement was covered by the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, BBC Radio 5 Live, Radio 4’s Sunday programme, 18 regional BBC radio stations, ITV lunchtime news, London Tonight, online and in local and regional press.

The buns were a sell-out within hours, with shoppers travelling from Birmingham, requests by phone from Northern Ireland and expressions of interest from the US. The Cathedral had a flood of visitors expressing interest.

We are hopeful, given the success of this year’s trial, that we may be able to secure a commercial agreement with Sainsbury’s for national sales of the bun in 2010.
Value of the media coverage to date has been, by our calculation, in excess of £50,000. The return on investment has been, well, infinite.

Twitter, Sweet Charity and The Rhythm of Life

“Daddy started out in San Francisco,
Tootin' on his trumpet loud and mean.
Suddenly a voice said, "Go forth, Daddy.
Spread the picture on a wider screen."”

Not since Sid Meier’s magnificent Civilization series of video games have we seen such an interesting manifestation of the evolution of a society as we are witnessing with San Francisco start-up Twitter, the remarkably enduring ‘next big thing’ which is now already three years old.

Twitter has reached and passed Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and today pretty much every journalist and commentator in the land is nattering about Twittering. I suspect that birds are going to have to find a new name for their voices or risk perpetual confusion with the 140 character missives of millions of two legged wingless box dwellers. It’s an appropriation we’ve not seen the likes of since ‘hoovering’.
What started as a jeu d’esprit and was initially dismissed by many commentators as little more than the sharing of information about the utterly mundane (“toast this morning”, “bus is late”) has emerged to become one of the interesting, enlivening and aggravating methods of having a genuinely global conversation about virtually everything. If you want to tap into what people are thinking at any given point, abandon your dependency on Google and do a keyword search in Twitter.

Returning to Sid Meier, what we observe, of course, in the emergence of any new society, are ‘issues’ that either become part of the ecosystem or are quickly worked out of the system. No society will be perfect, and oughtn’t be so. I’ve long subscribed to the thesis in Dr Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, that true society is a confection of good and bad, but I digress. As I look at Twitter, which I do throughout most working days, I see a number of things happening on a social level, which point to it pleasures and its irritations.

“And the voice said “Brother, there’s a million pigeons
Ready to be hooked on new religions””

Like all societies, we’re seeing the emergence of some pretty complex social structures and groupings and already we’re seeing the early signs of religions. We have the Evangelicals, the Protestants, the Quakers, the Buddhists and the Atheists, to name but a few. I bet any citizen of the Twittersphere would be able to put a decent number of his or her followers into one of these or other boxes. We have Twitterers who go about their business in a modest and blameless way, participating politely in conversation and leaving their egos behind – and we have an increasing number of Twitterers who spend more time talking about their quantity of ‘followers’ (yes, even the language reeks of religion) than they do adding anything to the conversation. We have Twitterers excitedly proclaiming that they’ll offer prizes for the thousandth or hundred thousandth follower. Perhaps we’ll see the first car offered as a prize for the millionth follower.

Perhaps this evangelical behaviour is all OK, but personally sticks in my craw. I have little interest in whether or not a leading technology blogger has more legitimate followers than the CEO of a start-up, but there it is as a major thread of excited and heated discussion between them and their coterie. I’m equally uneasy to be honest with the weekly round robin tweets from some to welcome the new members of their (self-proclaimed) fan club. It just doesn’t seem right. The emerging Uber-Twitterers often accumulate followers but do not follow in return, with some notable exceptions. They seem content with the adulation.

As Wailin Wong points out in her column in the Chicago Tribune, “Celebrities take to Twitter, but for most, it's a one-way tweet” this week: “The normal rules of engagement do not apply to celebrities. [Ashton] Kutcher follows 55 people and has more than 292,000 followers, for example. This is not two-way communication.”


“Daddy was the new sensation, got himself a congregation,
Built up quite an operation down below.
With the pie-eyed piper blowing, while the muscatel was flowing,
All the cats were go, go, going down below.”

The trouble with the focus on numbers, it seems to me, is that it runs counter to the point of Twitter, which is chat, debate, dialogue. Once an Uber-Twitter gets into the stratosphere, how can he or she hope to engage in any sort of chat with his or her Twitterees. I suppose, in a way, it becomes self-regulating in that a brand built on numbers, unless carefully managed, will lose its lustre. Twittering depends more than pretty much any conversational means on having something interesting to say, and unless you’re designed to say it in 140 characters with some regularity, the interest in you is going to drop like a stone.

So the best of Twitter is a two-way street and the very best of it emerges from true exchange. Most of this for me comes through on a micro level, but this week we’ve also seen plenty of good emerge on a macro level. With Red Nose Day today, we’ve seen a string of clever uses of Twitter to engage the community in raising funds for charity. This includes in all fairness a decent number of celebrities and journalists giving up their time, and as importantly engaging in true two-way dialogue with the community. Twitterati as varied as Peter Serafinowicz, Chris Moyles and Rory Cellan-Jones, have conversed with the Twittersphere and created a real sense of a community that can be marshalled to achieve a great deal and share. [It’s not too late to donate incidentally – here’s a link]. The recent global Twestivals – parties of Twitterers in cities around the world – successfully raised money for a water charity in Africa.

One interesting way to deal with the cult / lemming element of Twitter was suggested by one of my Twitter friends last weekend. He suggested that Twitter might stop telling anyone how many followers they have. That would be a great leveller, in my view, and would be an effective way of puncturing some of the pomposity. But maybe that’s just my gripe and I should get over it. After all, as with all societies, there is a self-correcting element and an escape key. If I don’t like what somebody is saying, I can choose not to listen.

Giving fans and critics a voice online

The Government’s announcement that it is launching an online review mechanic for public services is an interesting move. It’s an eye-catching initiative, although providing customers with a voice in relation to very specific service experiences is a risky enterprise unless handled very carefully.

The key issues are:

Authenticity – Can readers be certain that the reviews come from bona fide customers of the service? Too many online review services are prone to manipulation, bias and blatant falsehood. What is required is a closed loop system that guarantees the authenticity of the customer. Reevoo is a perfect example of this type of service and is building a widely trusted brand.

Independence – Any review process that is not managed independently will be open to accusations that it contains politicised content.

Politicisation – By individualising criticism – bringing it down to a personal level for both the customer and the provider – there is a risk that it takes some of the most acute responsibility away from Government and places it on the desk of the individual provider. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in that it places greater scrutiny on local delivery and enables more rapid organisational response to failure, but it does potentially change the nature of political debate in relation to public service delivery in this country.

Reputation – There are two points here: (1)Research commissioned by Reevoo shows that reviews have several times more influence on purchasing decisions online than advertising. (2) The internet creates a context within which all of our decisions ought to be more informed.

Both make the case for the implementation of minimum standards in any review service. Recently, there have several incidents that have the potential to undermine the effectiveness or erode trust in online reviews. An electronics manufacturer was found to have paid for positive reviews of products and a popular listings site was found to have solicited payment from client companies in order to remove negative reviews.

There is a better way and my hope is that the Government will look carefully at process and make any review service that it implements watertight and unimpeachable. Enabling customers to mark your card is a brave and sensible move in the age of opinion. We just need confidence that we can believe what we read.

The Volcanic Verses

I’ve never met Julie Myerson. My partner has once – at a writing retreat – and one of my partner’s friends has a child at the school that the Myerson kids attend in south London. We knew of them enough, even at this rather cursory level, to spot pretty much immediately that the Guardian’s “Living with Teenagers” columns were written by her.

We enjoyed them. They chimed with many of our own experiences as parents of teenagers – but we were also uneasy with the idea that even at this rather distant proximity we were able to identify the author without the need for forensics. It seemed to us after a while that this was a poorly concealed betrayal of the intimacies of family life.

Now Julie Myerson finds herself in the maelstrom surrounding the publication of her book about her oldest boy. Whether she felt a confidence in the righteousness/rectitude of publication as a result of the relatively straightforward reaction to her anonymous column (it was, it transpires, the worst kept secret in literary circles) who can say? What is clear is that she has been slammed from almost every conceivable direction, the charges ranging from inexcusable maternal betrayal to the putting of profit ahead of familial loyalty.

Doubtless there are fresh stories about the risks of Skunk to be told - although there is no shortage of literature on the subject – but does offering your own boy as the poster child at such a sensitive point in his own development justify this action?

It is difficult to see how Julie Myerson, an accomplished wordsmith who once made the long list for the Booker Prize, can emerge from this with her reputation maintained or improved. She has now taken the step from relative literary fame to infamy and the runes do not make for happy reading.

One bold stroke, in my view, can best be countered by another. Given the blaze of pre-publicity, with which she has conspired, sales of her book are likely to be huge. If she wishes to begin to rebuild her credibility, she and her publishers could do an awful lot worse than signing over all income from the book to charities that deal with the scourge of addiction. And if I were her, I’d get back to fiction.

Predictive text

After four months of you-couldn’t-have-made-it-up news I’m left with rather a lot of flexibility when it comes to making predictions about the year ahead. Flexibility, because I can make the most outlandish predictions and they will probably seem plausible, at least from this vantage point.

I’ll limit the scope to my trade – so it will be about things that are to do with reputation, news management, news delivery and PR – but as you’ll see, that takes in subjects as diverse as former prime ministers, national newspapers, snake oil salesmen and rock star journalists. Let’s have a go:

1. Disintermediated media will create significant risks for large and small media organisations. In other words, journalists will get closer to their readers as the tools to follow their output improve. In the last 12 months I have seen several stories break via new media channels – Twitter, websites, blogs – that I suspect would not make it through the conventional editorial channels that apply at broadcasters, wires and national newspapers. The risks are self evident – libel and invasion of privacy prominent amongst them. The combination of a leaner editorial process (no editors, no subs, no back bench), the growth in self-publishing, the shift of eyeballs to the websites of papers, the rapid dissemination of links via services like Twitter and the relentless scramble to be first will create a noxious and expensive mess or two that some of our finest media institutions will find themselves having to clean up.

2. A dozen “sole traders” or small groups of journalists will command more advertising revenue individually than one or more national newspapers. This is an extension of the point above. The growth of blogging and the rise of vlogging is old news. When it is put in the hands of the UK’s finest journalists, you have to ask how long it will be before they take their contact books and their content and start to self-publish. Media is not a capital intensive industry anymore. Printing presses are becoming modern day dinosaurs, the technology that enables programme creation and production is now in the Christmas stockings of 12 year olds, self-design or template websites or blogs are either free or low cost. Building a credible, robust web-based business can now be achieved for thousands, not millions of pounds. At the turn of the millennium, the mantra was that “content is king”. Today, content is the king of kings and we are witnessing the creation of a generation of rock star hacks. These stadium fillers have the opportunity to create some real personal wealth.

3. A national newspaper will go to the wall, possibly after a brief shot at being a free-sheet. I’m not alone in predicting this.

4. The PR industry will face an onslaught on several fronts. Front 1: Traditional marketing consultancies and advertising agencies will be falling over themselves to set up digital PR divisions. These will invariably look very slick and sophisticated – and we will see an explosion in new jargon. Unfortunately, these new services will not have storytelling at their heart. The messages will be didactic and ineffective and much client money will be wasted. Front 2: Client budget reductions, a post- Flat Earth News culture in newsrooms and a continuing focus on macro-news with a leaning to the negative will make it more challenging for agencies to flourish. Front 3: Quality will out, as will those agencies that are able to mobilise and apply talent whilst keeping their overheads low.

5. They say it won’t be as bad as they say it will be. PR is the trade of the pragmatic optimist (that’s not quite an oxymoron – it’s more about our rock-dodging tendencies). The year ahead won’t be as bad as we’re set to believe for many of us. Many businesses thrive in the thick of battle or in the face of adversity. Digital media creates an incredible new toolkit for our profession. I suspect that the all-encompassing Mordor-like cloud cover will puncture by the end of the first quarter and that things will start to look a little better by then. To the economist that says that this is bunkum, I would simply say that bunkum was the foundation of much sentiment throughout the boom years. Bunkum – or faith (in a religious or non-religious sense) – works and it will make a comeback. Talk of, and references to , the crunch will crumble.

6. Out on a limb time: Twitter will raise a pile of money and buy or merge with Facebook. Things will happen quickly in cyberspace this year. Twitter was the media darling of 2008 and shows no sign of losing its lustre. It is compelling, alive and nomadic – a sort of active, out-there 16-30 year old to Facebook’s slightly indoorsy safeness. Twitter is an untamed newswire, full of interest, intrigue, nibbles and bytes – the fisherman’s perfect electronic stream. It is also perfect for a world at the cross roads of mobility and ubiquity – its 140 character limit means that it makes sense on the screen of a mobile phone. Whilst Twitter may not buy Facebook really (after all, I don’t think it makes any money right now), it will become more and more powerful and popular. It is good enough that people would probably pay to use it. What a strange idea.

7. The greening of UK PLC will be more closely scrutinised than it has been to date. Businesses have done well from the reputational dividend of the green agenda. Many have grabbed forest-loads of column inches (well there’s a logical inconsistency for starters), garnered (or garnished) through the announcement of eye-catching initiatives. The trouble is that sometimes the praise outweighs the commitment – and I sense that the media will be casting a somewhat more discerning eye over the detail of some of the pronouncements. Looking back over the last year or so, one of the most eye-catching announcements was Marks and Spencers’ decision to charge for plastic bags, a move that attracted widespread praise across the establishment. Of course, placed in a wider context, this move, whilst welcome, actually delivers a relatively small reduction in plastic waste. By contrast, a change in the way that milk is packaged in the UK – away from the plastic bottle and into plastic bags (a move that Sainsbury’s have been trialling) would dwarf the amount of plastic used in bags. Carrier bags are of course more emblematic and visible manifestations of the waste culture – and the coverage was well-earned. I would though suggest that it is inadvisable for Marks and Spencer to make a virtue out of occasional free bag offers (made to me at at least three M&S stores in the last 8 weeks). The growing risk is that sensible initiatives will be presented as shams if the detail is not worked through robustly. And that sort of outcome would make in house PR teams green around the gills.

8. Person pick: It will be a defining year for Tony Blair. OK, let’s finish with a big ‘un. The former prime minister has been on something of a redemptive crusade as Middle East envoy. Rumours have it, in parallel, that a mooted Tony Blair institute of International Relations at the LSE was rejected as any sort of credible option for the School. Middle East progress has been evidently insubstantial, and the developments in the last few weeks put pay to any claims of progress in the last 12 months. Blair is challenged by the imminent inauguration of a president who will be keen to draw as many lines in as many sandpits as possible for good reason. Whether Blair, who is now part of the pre-crunch era, and is deeply associated with the decision to go to war in Iraq, will have any role in future Middle East peace efforts must be up for debate. He is close to the in-coming Secretary of State, but will that be enough to safeguard his opportunity to influence a lasting settlement in the Middle East? I expect him to be marginalised, but he has gone into PR overdrive in the last 48hrs.

Bruised Apple

Apple have made a number of cardinal errors that have combined to make a noxious cocktail in the last few weeks.

The first is in allowing too much of the value of the business over time to be vested in the CEO.

There are many other businesses, of course, that take similar risks by putting their CEO front and center at every opportunity and having he/she lead all communications with the outside world. The trouble is that when it comes to valuation, it soon becomes difficult to separate the enterprise and the leader.

It is far better for a business in the medium / long term to let people see and hear from a cross-section of talent from the leadership team.

Ultimately, this is better for the business as it mitigates investor concerns if the CEO is unwell or decides to leave the business. It is also better for customer perceptions.

In Apple's case, the issue is compounded by two factors:

First, they run what looks to many journalists like a dysfunctionally tight ship when it comes to media relations (information is hard to get, access is restricted - all acceptable in the context of a product launch of course, but it is actually a wider problem as any google search or glance at the twittersphere will confirm).

The second factor - and one where I have more sympathy is in relation to Steve Jobs' health. He values his privacy, which I respect.

However, if - as seems to be the case with Mr Jobs - you see yourself as the brand, you run external "communications" with a rod of iron and you add a deep desire for privacy to the mix - well, you're asking for trouble.

Winner, outstanding small consultancy of the year 2008

We're proud to have won this major endorsement from our industry body, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. We have also been shortlisted for the CIPR President's Grand Prix, 2009, the winner of which will be announced in March 2009.

In the words of the judges: “An ambitious and committed team, with excellent media relations at the heart of its creative thinking. In just twelve months it has firmly placed itself on the key players’ radar. The judges were impressed at the use of solid journalistic skills to drive the media agenda. Very much one to watch.”

It’s a fitting celebration to mark our first year in business.

Teaching young dogs old tricks

Last week we worked with RoadTour to launch a new satellite navigation guide that advises parents on locations throughout the UK that are child-friendly. What was interesting about the launch was that an online launch the previous week using targeted distribution to blogs and online gadget and shopping sites hadn’t worked. We were called in to apply a bit of traditional media magic, and here’s what we did:

We recrafted the story, starting with devising a media-friendly name for the product: “Tot-Nav.”

Next, we assembled a list of 10 tourist sites that scored poorly with children. For this, we asked our kids to quiz their social networks – MySpace, Windows Live, Bebo, Facebook and text – for ideas for the list, along with their reasons why. This was extremely effective. Some of the kids have a network of more than 500 friends on MySpace alone and when you consider the viral possibilities of asking friends a question that gives them the chance to vent their spleen… Well, suffice to say that we had plenty of choice. We looked for overlaps and we were able to assemble a credible top ten list very quickly.

Third, we targeted national print media, especially those papers that have a popular web presence. We offered photography and verbatim comments from kids on less-than-satisfactory “places of interest”.

The results? Page lead in the Daily Mail. Coverage in most tabloids and some broadsheets. Print circulation? More than 10 million. Online references? More than 40 on day one (and I don’t mean Uzbekistan gadget news). It’s this latter impact that is the most interesting and satisfying. It demonstrates that in the rush for online eyeballs it isn’t always the online distribution services that deliver. Good old fashioned media relations can bring a story to life, make it live in print and reach a quality online audience in substantial volumes.

The CEO, the City and the Media: A Twelve Thirty Eight White Paper

Vision Express launches rose-tinting service for specs

With all the gloom around, it's good to see that some businesses are helping to engender a bit of positive thinking. Our client, Vision Express, has just announced a rose-tinting service for glasses for those amongst us, me included, that choose to stroll on the sunnier side of the street. The story made the national press, notably the Mirror, and BBC radio. With many of the broadsheets and tabloids leaden with gloomy news, there will be a growing gap in the market for carefully-placed lighter stories...

The Fakeaway

Gratifying to read that one of our coinages on behalf of our client Sainsbury's looks destined for the dictionary. The Scotsman reports in its recent “Layman’s guide to Cityspeak”:

“FAKEAWAY: A homemade version of a takeaway to save money, according to Sainsbury's. Likely to involve a jar of own-label curry paste and a pack of naan bread, washed down with supermarket lager.”

Need for Speed

There was an interesting article by John Harris in the Guardian on Monday (The new seriousness) charting the decline in the circulation of long lead titles concerned with what he describes as “the invincible tyranny of celebrity culture” (Heat down 16%, Zoo down 13.6%, FHM down 10% and Closer down 7.5%). Circulation of the higher brow opinion-rich media on the other hand has seen an upswing. The Economist’s circulation is up 5.6% and Prospect’s is up 10.7%.

John Harris argues that consumers are seeking a more detailed understanding of weighty matters in a more complex and uncertain world.

I’m sure this is the case judging by my train carriage test this morning (1 Newsweek, 3 broadsheets, a couple of trade titles, a copy of Foreign Policy Review and a Private Eye), but I think it also has much to do with changes to the way in which we are exposed to, and engage with, the news.

Being in touch today means being ultra-in-touch and that doesn’t square with the consumption of long-lead titles with contents that are six-eight weeks behind the times.

There is so much going on that we are running fast to keep up with what is going on in the world. When the most recent earthquake hit China, many people received their first reports via Twitter, pinging in the corner of their screens, rather than news agencies or the beeb.

This two-way interconnectedness has also created an explosion in the exchange of opinion. The points of contact that most of us find ourselves managing on a minute-by-minute basis are wider and more varied than they have ever been. To keep the dialogue fresh with our contacts we need to keep up to date with what is happening.
We tell more people what we think about more things more often.

In turn this has weaned our consumption habits towards those media that enable us to maintain higher than traditional levels of awareness of what’s going on in the world around us. Who do we know today that is unlikely to have some view on the rise of the Hockey Mom, the role of sub-prime in current belt-tightening, or the aesthetic credentials of Damien Hirst? Even for that matter, a view on Victoria Beckham’s barnet. The old fashioned notion of the deadline in newsrooms is disappearing. Content changes on websites all the time. They’re palimpsests. News is now about being first to market, not just with breaking news, but with things that might have otherwise waited a bit.

The by-product is changes in other behaviours. Our shopping habits are also being moulded and honed by opinion like never before. Research we commissioned for a client last year confirmed that shoppers are far more likely (as much as six times) to be influenced by opinion that they are by advertising. How many of us see advertising as anything more than a reminder or a prompt anymore? Our buying decisions are made in partnership with others. Their experiences count. We are buying in opinionated packs.

This is an important consideration for brands and public relations professionals. I am convinced that the most effective public relations activity is now focused on the immediate - the national daily media – print, broadcast and online – alongside the more earnest opinion-rich titles that carry more weight of influence with increasingly discerning and opinionated readers. I am equally convinced that in a challenging climate, less effort should be expended on the grinding process of carving out brand mentions in the rather more sedate glossy long lead titles. PR spend, I’d contend, ought to be focused on the now.

As a client of PR agencies before jumping the fence a year ago to set up this business, I sat through dozens of presentations from agencies touting the strategic merits of a long-lead engagement programme with all of its time-consuming processes and vague promises of its impact on brand perceptions - supported by 150 page powerpoint presentations. I was for a time persuaded that there was merit in the application of this costly time and effort, but I now take the view that a war of attrition, designed to place a case study with the odd brand mention on page 46 of a monthly glossy is mostly and largely a waste of time, effort and budget.
Alongside the decline in the circulation of celebrity mags are many of the biggest brands on the newsstand – women’s magazines, homestyle titles, fashion glossies and others. Few magazines are managing to achieve growth in circulation.
If you have something meaningful to say, I suspect your audience will expect you to say it louder and more quickly.

Media consumption habits would appear to support this. We rarely take to the sofa to read a glossy. By the time they’re being read, Victoria Beckham could have an aubergine afro.

Today we channel hop, we listen to podcasts, we surf at work, at home and on the move, we read the free sheets, the dailies and listen to the radio. We social network, tweet, text. All of these processes are two-way, through letters pages, comment postings, votes and text or phone ins – something that long-leads can’t deliver in the same way.

I don’t discount the value of coverage in long leads entirely – after all, all coverage has its value, assuming that it is positive and that a target audience remains. What I do reject though is the idea that it has either parity to or greater value that a solid story in the national media. Nor do I think that PR professionals should spend months dining and gradually courting a long lead editor with a view to name check for their brand buried deep in a feature.

Some may claim that a tacit endorsement for a brand by a fashion editor can do wonders for sales. My argument is that the nationals are more current, their reporters more able to quickly chart the daily nuances in trend - and the leading fashion brands themselves are amongst the most active in cultivating coverage in the national media. Fashion is rarely about the leisurely.

Better for brand owners and managers to keep their businesses topical, keep creating and delivering a pipeline of interesting, challenging announcements and keep their sights focused on the parts of the media where the new opinionated are likely to sit up, take notice, internalise and pass on your news to others. That means running with the dailies.

The days when the coffee table was the repository for truly influential messages about brands are behind us. PR budgets are better spent on the here and now, which after all is where customers make most of their decisions.

Don't I know you from somewhere?

Here's a video, featuring edited highlights of a charity football match featuring lookalike players. The match was arranged for our client Screwfix as part of their sponsorship of the Masters Football tournament on Sky Sports.

We arranged a national hunt for tradesmen who look like famous footballers in the lead up to the game. The search generated full page coverage in the Daily Star, the Metro and half page in the Sport, all strong builders' titles. We also arranged a programm of radio interviews.

The match itself was played at the NEC in Birmingham just prior to the Masters final, raising money for Children in Need.

Shortlisted for Chartered Institute of Public Relations Awards

We're delighted to have been shortlisted in the Outstanding Consultancy of the Year category at this year's Chartered Institute of Public Relatons PRIDE Awards. It's especially gratifying to have been shortlisted after only one year of trading. We've worked with some fantastic clients - from FTSE 100 businesses to start-ups - and the results have been very positive.

Highlights have included:

Putting technology start-up RoadTour on the map, securing national broadcast coverage on BBC One's One O'Clock News and extensive radio coverage, along with widespread newspaper and online coverage.

Launching Milk in Bag for Sainsbury's, securing a full page in the Times and extensive television coverage on BBC One, Sky News and Channel 4. This was all the more pleasing because the concept had been launched by a competitor two months earlier.

Running a football lookalike competition for Screwfix, securing full page coverage in the Metro, the Daily Star and coverage in other tabloids.

Identifying the emergence of "suspecs" - plain glasses wearers - for Vision Express, generating national coverage, including a full page article in the Scotsman and editorial mention, and extensive regional coverage.

Front page coverage in the Daily Telegraph for PC World's launch of RoboShop, along with substantial tabloid coverage.

Other highlights have included launching the Children's Charter for PC World, spotting the emergence of the home-cooked "fakeaway" for Sainsbury's, plotting the rise of the knork (a fork used like a hybrid knife and fork) for Sainsbury's and announcing the demise of the analogue TV at DSG international.

Here's to a successful year ahead!

Sainsbury's launches milk in a bag

Here's a clip from BBC Breakfast last week featuring Sainsbury's launch of milk in a bag. Twelve Thirty Eight handled the launch for Sainsbury's, generating national print coverage as well, including a full page in the Times. The story was also covered on Sky News, Channel 4 News and BBC Radio 5 Live.

The potential environmental benefits of a shift to bags are huge. If everyone bought milk in a bag as opposed to plastic bottles, it would save 100,000 tonnes of plastic a year, which is equivalent to the amount used to create all carrier bags in the UK.

It's a great idea - and we wish Sainsbury's all the best with it. Early indications are that customers love the new format.

The "S word"

Perhaps it’s why we have one of the most adversarial fourth estates in the world: politicians of all persuasions just won’t say in crystal clear terms that they’re wrong when they’re wrong. There’s always some nuance in the language, some exit clause. It’s immensely frustrating to reporters, no doubt, and no less so to listeners and readers. A clear acceptance of error, an explanation – however codified - and a description of the route-map to fixing the problem has always been an effective way of moving on and taking the wind out of the sails of the critics.

The argument runs that you don’t want to give your opponents political capital or ammunition – but does it? Apologies are mostly bracketed with a solution – and create a context in which a listener is far more likely to take account of the context, the apologiser’s track record, etc - and form views about his or her integrity.

I remember apologising on national radio on behalf of a business I was working with, explaining the root cause, accepting responsibility and outlining what we were doing to put it right. What was set to be a five minute chargrilling turned in to a two minute confessional, concluding with the interviewer complimenting the organisation on its refreshing honesty and evident commitment to putting things right for its customers.

I spent time with a leading technology venture capitalist last week – and he was talking passionately about the attractiveness of entrepreneurs who have failed, especially those who have accepted their failures, learned from them and have moved on to try again. Even those that have failed serially, but have the capacity to accept it and the determination to try again are attractive prospects – perhaps even more so.

I regularly advise clients who find themselves attracting criticism to accept it, assuming of course that it is reasonable. It is disarming, heartening and honest. I fail to understand why politics is really that different. Why shy away from evident truths? A façade of implausible invincibility serves no purpose as far as I can see – and simply serves to erode credibility.

The tectonics of news

A recent article in the New York Times, “Start Writing the Eulogies for Encyclopedias”, reminded me of the time that my dad momentarily abandoned his prescient insistence that there was no place for the encyclopaedia in the modern home because it was so prone to date. That was in the early seventies, and in caving in to our demands he allowed in to our home the 28 or so volumes of the World Book Encyclopaedia.

The encyclopaedia salesman was my 5th grade teacher, a lanky gnarled silver-topped Australian gent called Mr Deards, who routinely boasted that he was a mere 16 due to a birthday on February 29th. I expect that the small fortune that my dad paid for the books went some way to supporting Mr Deards’ imminent retirement at the ripe old age of 17.

I can still remember the detail of the books, the gold page trim, the smell of the ink, and the way that the inner pages remained chilled even on a forty degree summer’s day – the balming character of knowledge.

The books served their purpose decently, forming, shall we say, a detailed template for numerous history, science and geography essays during my remaining school years.

The reason I raise this is that I was reminded again of my dad’s foresight this week - though the catalyst this time was the unfolding and deeply depressing news of the tragic events in China.

The first word of the earthquake was from Twitter, the next from my news stalwart, the BBC. There was nothing terribly remarkable in the way in which the information was received, nor that the story evolved and grew as news filtered through. What did feel remarkable, though, was the speed with which the information changed and morphed - and the precision with which it did so - progressively for the worst it must be said, as the toll expressed as casualties and estimates of the missing mounted.

At one point during the day, I refreshed the home page on the BBC, I think twice in relatively short succession, and the total leapt appallingly each time. So too did the contextual news - eyewitness accounts, photographs of damaged buildings, individual tragedies - many no doubt delivered by citizen journalists.

Now I know that the encyclopaedia is, or rather was, a compendium of news from a distance, given time for scholars and editors to apply perspective and wider social an cultural interpretation, but I was suddenly struck by how antiquated the concept felt – even, for that matter, the shiny Encarta discs that I bought for my children as recently as five or six years ago.

In its place we have the factual termite mound that is Wikipedia (which, it must be said, handles its reference to its ancestors with detached, if somewhat barbed, decorum - “the opinions and world views of a particular generation can be observed in the encyclopedic writing of the time. For these reasons, old encyclopedias are a useful source of historical information, especially for a record of changes in science and technology.”- like a polite child passing judgement on its parent).

The reality today is that information will no longer accept stasis, news – even history - will never be pinned down. Any position at any time is merely a snapshot, prone to events and shifts in perception in moments, rather than weeks, months or years.

For communicators it is worth reflecting on this massive change - especially in the wake of blogging, social networking, twittering and more - and remembering that in cyberspace, the ink never dries and it constantly smudges. The days of Mr Deards and World Book belong to the fossil record.

Twelve Thirty Eight TV

This is the first of what will be a series of short films that examine the changing shape of the British media.

We intend to cover many perspectives, and I’m delighted that our first interviewee is Harry Wallop, the consumer affairs correspondent at the Daily Telegraph.

Harry has packed a lot into what is still a relatively short career, having been a business reporter at both the Telegraph and the Investors’ Chronicle. He recently won a prestigious industry award for his reporting and is rapidly building a reputation as one Britain’s leading consumer affairs journalists.

Turning the tables and doing the interviewing reveals to me how difficult the job is, so please forgive the decidedly low production values and somewhat stilted questioning.

All of those caveats aside, I hope you find it interesting and useful. Feedback welcomed!

Buzzkiller

As a community service to fellow PR practitioners and marketeers, I offer this link to a site “lovingly” maintained by frustrated US hacks. The site lists a range of bête noire phrases, regularly featured in press releases that have crossed their desks en route to the waste paper bin.

It is worth a browse around the rest of the site. The Hall of Shame ought to be standard reading for new recruits to media relations and the PR profession. Read and weep.

Be warned, friends, and bear in mind that they have yet to get their saw teeth into the whole blog/social/network/two point whatever phenomenon. It’s only a matter of time…..

Peckham couture

I dare say they did the minute calculations. “If you don’t wear one, Minister, it will look as though police are being diverted from their duties to protect you on the streets of your own constituency. If you do wear one, it will look as though you are afraid to walk the streets of Peckham without protection.”

The arguments, I’m sure, were very finely balanced on each side. Advisors will no doubt have concluded that neither felt like the absolutely right decision.

In cases like this, it is seductive to assume that fine balance in the arguments will equate to a similarly finely balanced reaction, with no scope for hyperbole, extremes of view, etc, leading in turn to a negligible, neutral reaction. At times like this, it is worth returning to the original “what if” statements and thinking again.

This story is an object lesson in the need to be even more cautious when the “right thing” is difficult to define.

Once the story had broken, Harriet Harman was right to put her flak jacket back on and enter the Today programme to defend her decision. It was an opportunity to make the simple case for doing so, and in my view she used analogies to good effect to dismantle the story – though by this stage, of course, it was damage limitation more than anything else.

Quite what will happen when she stands in today at PMQs is anyone’s guess, though she should be prepared for predictable double-edged remarks about the cut of her jacket from the benches opposite.

Latest Sainsbury's campaign: "Feed your family for a fiver"

Opinions worth investing in

Further evidence of the power of opinion online today. The influential French-based venture capitalists, Banexi Ventures Partners, have today announced an investment in Reevoo, the online publishers of genuine customer reviews.

What's significant is that Banexi successfully backed Kelkoo, the price comparison site, that subsequently sold to Yahoo for nearly 500m Euros a few years ago. In the announcement of the investment, out this morning, Banexi have said the following:

“Online promotional strategies need to engage with what the customer is
thinking and wanting. Other promotional mechanics, such as price comparison,
have been damaged by a very mixed quality of execution. The strength of
Reevoo is that the published customer opinions are always real and unvarnished,
which means that the model is untarnished. This creates a win/win/win ecosystem: shoppers want clarity about the products they’re thinking of buying, retailers are more credible for hosting real opinions and product manufacturers are looking for direct and meaningful feedback from consumers.”

To me, this is further evidence that the web is becoming an increasingly qualitative medium - it's opinions as opposed to quanitiative measures that have the most powerful impact on user behaviour. There's no better evidence than Reevoo's feedback from their retail partners, that include a host of UK household names. Retailers report that conversion rates for products are 80-100% higher when they sit adjacent to genuine customer reviews from Revoo.

It's almost as though customers have been put in charge of the stores - now there's an idea.