Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The Food + Drink team have been working hard on the EMEA-wide ‘Bursting With Flavour’ campaign across UK, Italy, France, Spain and Germany. The activity launches new flavours and marks the brands first foray into interactive video with a series of films showing one brave Pringles® fan going up against the new flavours in a series of humorous challenges. To support local media outreach in each market, the team created 100 Personalised Pringles Packs and seeded these to key consumer and online media in each market. To view the videos, visit https://www.facebook.com/Pringles

Another busy one for our Army team as fourteen new Army recruits from North Wales swore an oath of allegiance to the Queen as part of their official entry into a career with the British Army on Tuesday. The Attestation ceremony took place at the British Army Careers Office on Glynne Road in Bangor, and included a traditional parade of the new recruits in front of their proud friends and family.  Having successfully completed their oaths of allegiance, each candidate received his or her Attestation certificate which marked the final completion of their recruiting process and welcomed them as new members of the British Army.

Recruiting remains one of the Army’s highest priorities. The Army offers a wide variety of careers for both Soldiers and Officers, in the Regular and Territorial Army, with over 200 different roles available and recruits 15,000 people to the Army each year.

And hot off the press, our Retail + Leisure team today held an event which launched the IHG Trends Report, compiled by The Futures Company. The report looks at specific trends and how they are going to affect travel over the next 10 years. The report is called “The new kinship economy: from travel experiences to travel relationships” and identifies travel groups including ‘new global explorers’ – travellers from high-growth countries such as China and India.  The debate was hosted by Simon Calder and the panellists included Richard Solomans IHG CEO, Sarah King from The Futures Company and Dr Miguel Moital of Bournemouth University.

The event took place at the Intercontinental Westminster Hotel and was attended by a range of media across travel, trade and lifestyle press. Stakeholders also attended including Visit England, ABTA, WTTC and Tourism Alliance.

Finally, a shout out to our Financial + Professional services GE Capital team for their simply fantastic piece of coverage in the FT’s special mid-market report this week. This is entirely the product of tenacity from the team that managed to convert a piece with no less than FIVE really positive mentions for GE Capital and the Leading From the Middle research.

The agency has been a hive of activity this week, client work and pitches galore!  Here’s just a few things we have been up to….

Yesterday marked the sixth international Rare Disease Day and to celebrate this milestone, the H+K Healthcare team was busy carrying out a number of activities. Rare Disease Day is coordinated by European Rare Disease patient group, EURORDIS, and organised with rare disease national alliances in 24 European countries. The theme for this year’s Rare Disease Day is ‘Rare Diseases without Borders’ and with that in mind, the H+K team supported the launch of a new idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) community on EURORDIS’ social network platform, RareConnect. It provides a safe environment for people living with rare diseases to share stories, access quality information and communicate with people in other countries and across language barriers (owing to its translation service in five European languages). The launch marks a significant step towards forming a pan-regional coalition of IPF patient groups, a goal H+K has been helping to achieve steadily over the last two years. Please do take the time to have a look at the IPF pages and feel free to share it on Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the relevant icons: https://www.rareconnect.org/en/community/idiopathic-pulmonary-fibrosis

Members of the team have also been working to support the publication of a report on Rare Disease which featured in The Independent on Rare Disease Day. The report included an article, highlighting the new developments on the horizon for patients with IPF and included interviews with two experts in the field.

H+K’s work in support of Rare Disease Day helps to give rare diseases, such as IPF, the attention they deserve as they are often overlooked.  Good job guys!

The Belvita team in Food+Drink has been busy following up with leading experts this week, after hosting a successful round table meeting at the Savoy Hotel with five of the UK’s top media medics.  Hosted by BBC Radio 5 Live’s Dr Rob Hicks, our guests participated in a briefing on the science behind Belvita Breakfast, by the brand’s marketing and nutrition teams as well as an open discussion around modern breakfast habits.  Guests included Channel 4 Embarrassing Bodies’ Dr Dawn Harper and Dr Pixie McKenna; The Sun’s Dr Carol Cooper; This Morning’s Dr Gill Jenkins and Dr Roger Henderson who regularly appears on a number of broadcast programmes. The feedback was strong with attendees being impressed by the wealth of nutrition science behind the brand.  Nutritious and yummy!!

Our Energy + Industrial’s team hosted an event at the Royal Geographical Society for Statoil on the topic of natural gas last night.   The panel was chaired by Anthea Pitt, Executive Editor, Petroleum Economist, and included Rune Bjørnson, Senior Vice President for Natural Gas, Statoil; David Odling, Oil & Gas UK’s Energy Policy Manager; Alastair Reid, Business Analyst, IHS and Guy Newey, Head of Energy and Environment at Policy Exchange. Guy was very much the saviour of the day, having stepped in only two hours previously when Energy Minister John Hayes had to cancel due to a three line whip!

The purpose of the evening was to bring to life the conversations going on every day across the globe in Statoil’s LinkedIn group – Energy Innovation by Statoil (for which we help manage, generate content and drive membership). The group has over 27,000 members and has become one of LinkedIn’s flagship groups. With around 3,000 of those members based in the UK we decided to hold the first live debate.

And finally, our Sport’s team marked 100 days to the start of the ICC Champions Trophy this week. Working with the three grounds to create a unique 100 days image either using their scoreboard or taking the trophy out into the city centres. The images were released with regionally targeted quotes from Boris Johnson, Cllr Ian Ward – Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council and The First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones AM. We also asked fans on the ICC facebook page facebook.com/cricketicc to vote for their favourite century of the tournament to date and produced a special 100 days newsletter featuring an exclusive interview with England cricketer James Anderson.

Enjoy the first weekend in March everyone, I’m hoping Spring is just around the corner now!

This week, rather than sharing a variety of work, I am just focusing on one as I think it is for such a fantastic cause:

This weekend Norwich City FC will proudly wear the logo of charity Railway Children on their shirts for their Premier League clash with Everton at Carrow Road. The Canaries will be lending their support for club sponsor Aviva’s UK charity partner, to raise awareness of the fact that one child runs away from home every five minutes in the UK.

Along with fans, NCFC Director Stephen Fry will show his support via Twitter to help raise much-needed funds for the charity. For every tweet or re-tweet posted on Twitter on match day including the hashtag #1every5, Aviva will donate £1 to Railway Children.

H+K worked on this project from the ideas stage right through to executing the activity in conjunction with Railway Children, Norwich City and our client, Aviva. This involved planning activity with the media and, crucially, over social media with a particular focus on Twitter. In order to help promote the activity the team visited the Norwich City training ground on this week (Thursday) to oversee an interview session with the club’s manager Chris Houghton and a photo shoot with him, star striker Grant Holt and representatives of the Railway Children charity.

We will all be on Twitter this weekend to do our bit to help raise as much money for the Railway Children as possible, we hope you will be too.

Also our Pampers team worked out that parents lose up to 4 hours of sleep every night due to their baby waking up but despite this sleep deprivation the mornings are a parents most favourite time to spend with their little ones.   I must say cuddles with my boys are the best way to wake up!

Also just to note, this coming Monday Tim Luckett our Crisis and Issues head honcho will present part of a social media seminar to the Arts Law Forum in London. The Arts Law Forum is part of the alumni of the law firm Squire Sanders,  who also run the event. Guests will include representatives from the National Theatre, Tate, British Museum, Royal Opera House, English National Opera and Comic Relief.

Three main topics will be covered during the day, of which Tim will present the third:

• “Inside and outside the workplace” – how to fairly deal with employees who abuse Social Media and IT (Ramez Moussa)
• “Internet defamation” – the remedies available to commercial organisations (Simon Garbett)
• “How to crisis manage: A case study” –  Global PR and communications agency, Hill & Knowlton Strategies (part of WPP Group), will share some practical advice on how to protect your brand, manage communications and respond to incidents and negative criticism in a systematic and planned manner.

Tim will present two case studies of companies who ‘got it wrong’ and before going on to outline the lessons learned and top tips for protecting brands and mitigating reputational risk.

Have a great weekend all, wrap up warm!

I don’t know about love being in the air over at H+K Towers this week, we have been way too busy delivering some great work for our lovely clients.   Its been a crazy one!

The H+K team had an extra spring in their step this week as they helped adidas launch its revolutionary new running shoe.  adidas BOOST™ is a groundbreaking innovation in cushioning technology, providing the most energy return in the running industry and the team supported the global launch event that took place in New York this week.  Find out more at http://youtu.be/YgMYSi-eQOc

Back by popular demand, Belvita Facebook team in Food+Drink has launched the Valentine’s Day Fruit Machine app this week, where fans play to win fantastic prizes for two weeks. Following the success of the first Fruit Machine, Belvita is spreading love by offering their 50,000 fans the chance to win Belvita Breakfast Biscuits; a Tassimo Coffee Maker; a Kindle; or the ultimate grand prize…a trip to Paris, the city of love!

The app was designed and built by the digital studio at H+K and since launching on Monday, has been played 11,821 times…and the numbers just keep going up!  Visit http://www.facebook.com/BelvitaUK to have a go yourself…good luck!

The British Army team have been working on a nationwide recruitment campaign for the Territorial Army, with over 150 separate events taking place up and down the country this month. The campaign includes taking over the city centres in London, Liverpool, Birmingham,  Cardiff, Glasgow, Newcastle and Portsmouth this Saturday 16th February. These extensive TA open events are designed to demonstrate to the public what the TA is all about, and showcase the opportunities available

The team in Food+Drink have also been busy launching Splenda’s ‘Small Steps’ campaign. The team commissioned a piece of research into women’s diets to generate newsworthy hooks that would create context and relevance to the overarching brand platform. Results were sold into key media, creating relevant dialogue with journalists and driving coverage for the brand campaign. To bolster campaign awareness, brand ambassador Nadia Sawalha conducted broadcast interviews using the research as a base from which to drive deeper messaging of the campaign and brand ethos. Results were extensive across national online and print media, and key consumer titles including The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Sun, The Express and the Mail online. Find out more at www.splenda.co.uk

And finally, with four months to go to the ICC Champions Trophy 2013, a tournament that features the world’s top 8 cricket teams and the world’s best players, the H+K team took Radio 1 DJ – DJ Nihal – on a tour of The Oval, which is one of the three host grounds for the tournament. The aim was to get some shots with DJ Nihal and the Championship Trophy and facilitate media interviews to help raise awareness of the tournament and promote the fact that fans can buy their tickets now from www.icc-cricket.com. Nihal, an avid Sri Lanka fan commented that he “hoped that he wouldn’t be the only Sri Lankan to get his hands on the ICC Champions Trophy this summer”.

Hope some of the teams have a nice romantic weekend planned to recover from the week!

Shhhhhhhh its been a busy week of planning for lots of teams this week (and sadly I am not allowed to reveal the output of those sessions just yet….) so just a brief mention of a couple of projects we are proud to have been part of:

Last Wednesday, we helped to launch the first phase of NCS 2013. Events held simultaneously at Koko in London and Victoria Baths in Manchester saw celebrity ambassadors, including Olympian Gemma Gibbons, X Factor favorite Tulisa and, MIC regular, Francis Boulle, encouraging 16-17 year olds to say YES and sign up to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build skills for work and life and boost their job chances. National print, consumer and broadcast media including MTV, Metro, Capital Radio, Huffington Post and Reveal were also in attendance, resulting in great coverage the following day. The team is now working hard on Phase Two, so watch this space.

Inspired by Valentine’s day, our Braun team sent out ‘loved up’ themed mailers to key grooming online titles and bloggers to generate positive word of mouth and drive coverage opportunities for the Braun Series 3 in any up-coming gift guide features.

H+K helped with the launch of the new Army Careers Office in Birmingham, which coincided with an Attestation Ceremony for the region’s latest Army recruits in front of their friends and family. The ceremony was attended by the Lord Mayor John Lines, who unveiled a plaque to mark the official opening of the office.’

This week there has been a real cross section of work undertaken within the agency.  Here are just a few highlights

H+K has supported Brand South Africa over at the World Economic Forum in Davos, working on media engagements for ministers and South African business leaders with interviews lined up with Sky, the BBC, CNBC, the FT and Caijing, to name a few!

Our Food + Drink team coordinated nine advertorials across national and consumer media, including The Sun, Metro and OK!, to mark the launch of new Cranberry Belvita Breakfast Biscuits. Featuring hints and tips from Belvita Breakfast ambassador Lisa Snowdon, along with nutritionist Fiona Hunter and fitness expert Vinnie Freeman, the advertorials were designed to inspire readers to adopt a New Year’s resolution that will be easy to keep all year – eating a balanced breakfast.  I do love these breakfast biscuits and the cranberry addition sounds yummy!!

On to a different kind of biscuit…. The Invisalign team here at H+K decided to make a difference on Blue Monday by sending out some ‘perfect smile’ shaped biscuits to our top journalists… Smile and the World Smiles With You!!

As well as all of that we have also been busy monitoring media and social media coverage of the events in Algeria for one of our clients, designing training courses for wind power developers, watching and analysing the committee hearings around the Energy Bill and Vicky McPhail from our Beauty + Grooming team pulled on her snow boots and trotted off to Iceland to introduce some of the most glamorous beauty directors to our amazing new products at a cross agency event hosted by Talk PR.

PHEW!! Is it the weekend yet??

On Wednesday, we helped launch a new HSBC Expat service called HSBC Expat Hints & Tips. Featuring hundreds of tips written by expats for expats,HSBC Expat Hints & Tips is the bank’s first crowdsourcing platform aimed especially at those about to move abroad or currently living or working overseas. At launch, the new tool contains over 800 bite size pieces of information, curated from almost 20,000 individual tips from expats who took part in the bank’s annual Expat Explorer survey over the past five years, as well as from expat bloggers.  The new tool allows users to browse and filter the tips by country, life stage and topics to help expats find the hints and tips that are most relevant to them, as well as allowing expats to add their own hint or list of tips.  My inlaws are Expats and are loving it!

Have a look at the site, and feel free to add your own tip and share across your own social media networks: https://expatexplorer.hsbc.com/hintsandtips/

Recovered from the Olympics frenzy of 2012, our Sports team launched the first Managers & Coaches Forum with Castrol & the LMA this week.  The Forum was the first of its kind and saw 20 football managers from across Europe and the UK join up to discuss key aspects of the game.

The Castrol LMA European Managers & Coaches Forum, a landmark and pioneering event was supported and facilitated by Sir Alex Ferguson, a long standing LMA Board Member, and Howard Wilkinson, Chairman of the LMA, and took place at St George’s Park, the new state-of-the-art home of training, education and development for football in England from 13 -15 January 2013.

And although not strictly this week, right at the end of last week, the Beauty + Grooming head&shoulders team held a media event with new ambassador Joe Hart, inviting key journalists up to Manchester! The day was an absolute success, with coverage generated across broadcast, print, radio and online.

Our Energy + Industrials team arranged a number of media interviews for the Egyptian Minister of Investment Osama Saleh to update on the investment outlook in Egypt earlier this week. Interviews were held with BBC World News TV, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist and Bloomberg.

2013 is back in full swing already at H+K Towers but in addition to sharing a couple of great bits of work from this week, I also wanted to look back on some of the campaigns that are my H+K highlights of 2012

But first, this week….

Our Retail + Leisure team, the team behind the #nameourplane campaign for Tui, have struck gold with their latest campaign.  The ultimate job search is on: to be First Choice’s SplashWorld waterslide tester http://t.co/x7ytHkPc.  It’s got huge media attention, gone viral and better still, already had a massive amount of applications!

In addition, as part of our work for the Mayor’s Fund, we launched the Mayor’s Fund Magic Breakfast programme.  With the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson at the helm, this healthy eating initiative will fuel 5,000 hungry children with free, healthy breakfasts in 50 schools across London’s most disadvantaged areas.

So stepping back into the not too distant past, below are just a few of my favourite H+K Campaigns of 2012

First up, has to be our idea to surprise some shoppers at Westfield who were taking advantage of the adidas #takethestage photobooth with none other than Mr Beckham himself: the shoppers couldn’t believe it, the media loved it, it went viral and went global. AMAZING

Next up:  The P&G Capital Clean Up campaign. As part of P&G’s 10 year partnership with the IOC they wanted to demonstrate its commitment to helping London look its best ahead of the London 2012 Olympic Games. P&G’s household brands Flash, Ariel and Febreze joined with Greater London Authority to launch the P&G Capital Clean Up, a 3 month campaign to clean up London. Actress Keeley Hawes and over 1,600 community champions took part in 20 clean up events, sprucing up 10 square miles over 20 of London’s boroughs.  A great initiative that made a real difference!

Next, a great creative idea that was original, simple and flawlessly executed:  To support the launch of Hotel Indigo Newcastle, H+K replaced the traditional Gideon’s Bible in each hotel room with a Kindle e-reader pre-loaded with an electronic version of The Bible. The initiative was inspired by Hotel Indigo Newcastle’s history as a publishing area and the hotel’s close proximity to the renowned Literary & Philosophical society (Lit & Phil). More than 200 pieces of coverage were achieved in the UK and beyond, as well as more than 500 twitter interactions

To build excitement about Thomson Airways being the first UK airline to fly the Boeing 787 Dreamliner ahead of the delivery of its fleet, H+K came up with the idea to invite the British public to name the first in the fleet using a Twitter hashtag. In line with the wider marketing strategy  to modernise the Thomson brand, it became the first airline to crowd source the name of one of its planes using a Twitter hashtag: #nameourplane. Major media coverage was generated across national  and international print and online media and naturally, social media played a key part in spreading the word.

And then there was our launch of the fifth annual Global Peace Index (GPI).  The GPI ranks 158 countries based on 23 indicators of peace. H+K set up a Parliamentary Early Day Motion, stakeholder dinner at the House of Commons, and organised the official GPI launch event at Chatham House, which was attended by over 100 delegates and included a panel consisting of Martin Bell and Lord St. John of Blesto.  Relieved to see we seem to be getting more peaceful overall!

And lastly, I just loved the P&G Thank You Mum campaign – all elements were great but I thought the Mother’s Day campaign was just perfect! It still gets me a little teary!

There are loads more I could, and probably should, mention, but I will leave it at that for now.  Do let us know which are your favourite campaigns of 2012

As we start the countdown to Christmas, it is still ridiculously busy here at H+K

The Schwartz team from Food and Drink visited L’Altelier des Chefs this week, where they were lucky enough to get stuck in with an hour long cooking class run by an expert chef! The team really put their cooking skills to the test  and learnt how to bring flavours to life when they rustled up a gourmet dish of Moroccan spiced guinea fowl with cous cous royale, accompanied by Schwartz Cumin flavoured carrots and a Mint and Coriander dressing….de-lish!

The London Eye team recreated a snow globe inside the London Eye on Monday to celebrate the opening of Eyeskate, the ice rink.

The Viakal team have sold in a survey finding that nearly half of us have a nosey through other people’s bathroom cabinets. It has been included on Express.co.uk

H+K was approached by Vale to manage the press conference at Vale Day 2012 in London. To ensure a good turnout and a successful event, H+K London invited key UK national, newswires and trade publications to the event, securing attendance by 13 reporters. The calibre of reporters who attended Vale Day was extremely good and included individuals from Bloomberg, Reuters, and Platts. The press conference led to 23 pieces of coverage.

And to wrap up our week, we had our Keeping the Flame Alive Panel Event last night at  our Soho Square offices.  A lively debate around the likely legacy left by the games with our very own WPP head honcho Sir Martin Sorrell, Olympic Gold Medallist Helen Glover and Sports Editor from The Telegraph Ben Clissit

To mark the end of Movember, experts at Gillette calculated that a record breaking 1000 extra miles worth of Mo hair was shaved at the end of last week, as ‘Mo Bro’s’ across the UK bid a fond farewell to a month’s worth of moustache. To mark the occasion an equivalent mound of hair has been created outside the Gillette Research and Development Facility in Reading.

Our Financial + Professional Services team made the most out of Mega Monday for Visa Europe.  Working with John Lewis, Visa Europe predicted that £320million would be spent online as transactions top 6.8million, making 3^rd December the busiest online shopping day in history. The result? The media loved it and we got blanket coverage including Bloomberg, The Guardian, FT and The Daily Mirror

This week we have also launched the inaugural Global Terrorism Index for our client the Institute for Economics & Peace this week.   Analysing terrorism since 9/11 and ranking countries for the first time, the Index examines trends to help inform a positive and practical debate about the future of terrorism and appropriate policy responses. We secured interviews on the Today programme, and with outlets including CNBC the Daily Telegraph, Reuters, the Express, the Daily Mail, and the Huffington Post. These resulted in hundreds of media and social media hits within the first 24 hours. An event in the House of Commons with the All-Party Parliamentary Group of Tackling Terrorism for over 80 policy-makers and executives crowned the launch.”

On behalf of the South Africa Maritime Safety Association, the Energy+Industrials team organised a drinks reception on Monday for around 80 people aboard the first ever African-dedicated Commercial Training Vessel, the SA Agulhas. The evening provided an opportunity for people from the shipping world to hear more about South Africa’s maritime industry, allowing for collaboration with London’s industry and South Africa’s National Cadetship Programme. Speakers included the Deputy Minister for Transport, Sindisiwe Chikunga and the CEO of the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA), Commander Tsietsi Mokhele.

For new client Pöyry the E+I team set up a number of briefings with national press off the back of the Government’s long-awaited Energy Bill, so that Pöyry analysts could show the depth of their understanding of the policy and signpost  some of the less well-known but still significant aspects of the much trailed legislation. Pöyry  experts were quoted in the Financial Times, The Times, Platts and Bloomberg.

Last week the Invisalign team invited journalists to an exclusive Ultimate Social Flirting Masterclass at the Archers Street Cocktail Lounge. Hosted by Invisalign ambassador and body language expert, Judi James, the night revealed how to up the ante with expert ‘social flirting’ skills and explored the power of a great smile when it comes to social attraction. The session demonstrated that flirting goes beyond the familiar batting of mascara laced lashes to give attendees the confidence to shine in all social situations.

Our head of Energy + Industrials Simon Whitehead also presented on a panel at the London Business School Energy Summit last Friday, discussing the prospects for shale gas in Europe and some of the communications challenges that the industry will face.