If a client phoned up and said – “we’re buying two new anaerobic digesters, can you get us some coverage – The Sunday Times maybe?” you could be forgiven for guffawing silently before moving into serious expectation management mode.
But there it was, half a page in The Sunday Times business section, a story about two anaerobic digesters. Few of their 1.1 million circulation can even have heard of these methane producing machines, I certainly hadn’t.
Signs that Bruichladdich, the 1881 whisky distillery buying them, is a talented, entrepreneurial business were much in evidence when I toured it back in May. From the slick packaging and innovative products, to the stealthy looking black helicopter parked on the lawn, Bruichladdich smacks of a star brand in the making. More »
McDonald’s has revealed plans for its Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics marketing campaign which will include a Facebook and Twitter scavenger hunt to promote Chicken McNuggets which, according to McDonald’s, is typically the favourite food of athletes at each Olympics.
The online campaign will feature the theme ‘How do you McNugget?’ and other PR activities include a 300 strong all star McDonald’s team, specially selected to run two restaurants at the games, along with celebrity endorsements. Here’s one of their ads:
Coca-Cola has published a guide to engaging with social media for its 92,400 employees worldwide, recognising that its brand reputation is now in the hands of more than just a handful of marketing executives and pr representatives.
There are three tiers of spokespeople in the brand’s ‘Online Social Media Principles’ document; unofficial, official and a shadowy referral unit, known only by an email address, online.relations@na.ko.com.
The official spokespeople will be certified through a Coca-Cola social media certification program before being turned loose to represent the company online.
Unofficial spokespeople, i.e., any employee knocking about on social media sites are urged to remember that anything they say online may reflect on the company and to remain true to the company’s core values. More »
Forget the sludgy single digit percentage growth of traditional PR as predicted by December’s Strongmail survey, how about a piece of the triple figure rocketship that is social media marketing spend?
eMarketer’s interpretation of US figures from the Jack Myers Media business report (left), suggests there is a place for PR at the new marketing high table as social media outreach providers:
“In 2010 and beyond, a substantial portion of marketers’ expenses will go toward creating and maintaining a fan page, managing promotions or public relations outreach within a social network, and measuring the impact of a social network presence on brand health and sales. Paid advertising will not be the primary focus, but it will serve to drive traffic and engagement with the larger social network presence.”
You’re unlikely to hear a PR agent publically criticise a major news outlet, unless they’re feeling commercially suicidal that day, yet sensationally Matthew Freud has made a gloves-off attack on Fox News, the leading US TV news network owned – and this is where it gets even more surprising – by his father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch.
Agreeing to contribute his thoughts to a New York Times profile of Fox founder and boss Roger Ailes, Freud said: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”
Commentators suspect that his comments don’t so much represent a spectacular gaffe by Freud as a tactical move to destabilise the station chief. Michael Wolff, a biographer of Murdoch said “Matthew Freud, a PR man of extraordinary craftiness, is not going to say anything off the cuff, certainly not that.” More »
Converging unusually with my tech pr orbit today is a beauty sector online pr campaign for Lash Allure MD who offered amateur vloggers a prize of $100,000. Competitors had to say what they would do with the money if they won it with the winner selected by public vote.
The winner has just been announced as 19 year old New Yorker Meekakitty, a rising YouTube comedy star, with 135K subscribers to her channel and close to 2 million views of her posts. Here’s the winning entry:
Tiger Woods’s agent Mark Steinberg has won the annual PR BIMBO award for ‘dumb public comments’, awarded by Dallas based agency, Spaeth Communications. In this case, it was what he didn’t say that won him the award.
‘The purpose of the BIMBO awards” says the company, ‘is to remind people that communication is strategic and can have a very real impact, In this instance, Tiger’s lack of communication has cost him his reputation and millions of dollars in endorsements.’
‘Team Tiger earns a failing grade on handling the crisis at Tiger’s house. He didn’t say anything for days, and then had mealy mouth, whiny comments about “transgressions” and “personal sins” on his website. His team also failed at communicating with their key audiences, Tiger himself, and helping Tiger communicate with his key audiences.
“This wasn’t ‘managing’ Tiger’s career,” said Merrie Spaeth. “This was criminal mismanagement. Professionals are hired for their experience and advice, even when the client doesn’t want to hear it.”
Last year’s BIMBO winner was Bear Sterns Chief Executive, Alan Schwartz, who said, in the week the bank was rescued from insolvency by JP Morgan, “we don’t see any pressure on liquidity.”
BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).
While they fluff up the snow reports here, proof that ski resorts have actually been inflating their snow levels has emerged in the US. A Dartmouth College study ‘Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising’ has found that while resorts routinely report 23% deeper snow at weekends, US government weather research show there is no such pattern.
Suspicions of opportunism grow when it’s revealed that it’s the ski resorts without money back guarantees but with local customers that are the worst offenders, rather than resorts whose customers fly in and take a punt on there being lots of the fluffy stuff about. More »
First Pepsi drop their Super Bowl TV ad slot for the first time in 23 years, preferring to create dialogue through a new website www.RefreshEverything.com, now Volvo has launched the first video of its new S60 model on its Facebook pageonly, ahead of it’s official debut at the Geneva Car show in March. Here it is:
If there was an award for best PR campaign by a disgruntled consumer 2009, it would have to go to Dave Carroll, the musician who, frustrated by United Airlines’s refusal to compensate him for a broken guitar, wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. Two weeks and 3 million views later he was on Oprah.
If a client phoned up and said – “we’re buying two new anaerobic digesters, can you get us some coverage – The Sunday Times maybe?” you could be forgiven for guffawing silently before moving into serious expectation management mode.
Coca-Cola has published a guide to engaging with social media for its 92,400 employees worldwide, recognising that its brand reputation is now in the hands of more than just a handful of marketing executives and pr representatives.
You’re unlikely to hear a PR agent publically criticise a major news outlet, unless they’re feeling commercially suicidal that day, yet sensationally Matthew Freud has made a gloves-off attack on Fox News, the leading US TV news network owned – and this is where it gets even more surprising – by his father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch.
Tiger Woods’s agent Mark Steinberg has won the annual PR BIMBO award for ‘dumb public comments’, awarded by Dallas based agency, 
BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).