Hill+Knowlton Strategies

It’s Wednesday, the sun is shining over Soho and I thought I’d take a few minutes to share with you some of my favourite PR stories of the last few weeks.

1. Fiat photobombs VW
I couldn’t resist this one I’m afraid. I love the cheekiness of Fiat to take one of their cars and park it directly outside VW’s offices. As well as getting loads of coverage on its little move, they also did something that has some longevity in that Google’s Street View won’t be updated again for quite a while, so whenever you search for VW’s site in Sweden, you’ll get this lovely picture!

2.Hyundai goes bananas
I know it’s another car one but stay with me. As they say in the world of show business “Never work with children or animals“ (W.C. Fields) yet Hyundai seemed to ignore the latter half of this and let a group of monkeys loose on their new car. This simple idea really showed how robust the new Hyundai is. Having witnessed monkey’s tearing bits off cars when I last went to a safari park, I know how destructive they can be! A great photo that generated a lot of online buzz…so it seems that monkeying around can bring success.

3. Beckham plays Beethoven
OK so it’s more of a viral campaign than anything else but the Samsung Galaxy Note film featuring David Beckham playing Beethoven with drums and footballs is definitely worth watching!

Enjoy the sunshine!

Whilst debating (with myself) what to write about for my first blog on hank, I came across a piece on the evolution of the PR pro that I thought was pretty cool.  It turns out that the PR industry is not as old as we think…it is in fact older!

As a graduate of PR, I remember the days when I was stuck with my head in a book reading about Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays who are widely considered to be the founders of PR back in the early 1900s and learning about what the early days of PR were like. But it seems what I learnt at university may not have been the whole story – it seems PR goes back as far as Julius Caesar! Now that is one cool founding father!