Hill+Knowlton Strategies

What sort of training do you think someone needs who is working in PR today?

It’s on my mind as we’re in the middle of developing new training modules for TheHub, our internal training programme. And I got to thinking about just how different the agency workplace is to when I started in the mid-1980s.

For those of you who remember those days we wrote press releases by hand for someone else to transcribe on a golf ball typewriter. (I wish I’d had shares in Tipp-Ex.) The fax was a dazzling new gadget to provide media with content ‘instantly’. And we were all just a little more carefree – and badly dressed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of nostalgia in film and music; but not the workplace. Agency life today is so much more challenging than we could have imagined but its dynamism, variety and the continual expansion of our scope of work is a real rush.

From the days of being a ‘people person’ and a newshound we’ve rocketed into the cloud. And we’re still newshounds.

But we’re more business savvy, more expert. Our insights are deeper. We’ve become business experts not just communications experts – the division no longer exists (if we’re honest, never really did).

So what skills need to be acquired to operate in this brave new world? Digital expertise goes without saying. Client service ditto. But those are just for starters. We’d really like to hear your thoughts.

Launching the world’s first snore absorption room; creating the world’s biggest shave; reinterpreting art with technology; revealing the best place in the UK to bring up a family… As 2011 draws to a close, we take a look back month by month at some H+K Strategies campaigns and work throughout the year.

January: City & Guilds Million Extra

You're hired: Karren Brady+ City & Guilds' Chris Jones

To start the new year, preparations to launch City & Guilds first ever Apprenticeship Summit went underway early on. The aim of the campaign was to help ensure one million Apprenticeship starts by summer 2013.

In January, we commissioned a report to identify the barriers employers face in hiring apprentices with the findings discussed by key political and business leaders at the Summit, hosted by Apprentice star Karren Brady.

Nearly 100 pieces of coverage resulted from this campaign as well as a request from Professor Alison Wolf to receive a copy of the full report after seeing the articles to include in her Government review of 14-19 education.

February: Intel Remastered

Shortlisted for various industry awards, our Technology team created an exciting art campaign- Intel Remastered to showcase the creative application of Intel technology. The project saw 13 modern artists reinterpret iconic masterpieces using digital technology and techniques.

Pushing the boundaries of art and creating one of the most talked about art events on the year, the stories and inspiration behind classics such as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ and Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ were retold and presented to a digital-savvy audience.

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I believe it was contemporary urban philosopher Ferris Bueller who once said ‘Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’ (NB – on reflection, I don’t know why I wrote that; I hate people who ascribe deep significance to the throwaway utterances of fictional characters. IT WAS WRITTEN BY A SCREENWRITER, YOU CHUMP). This edition of Web Curios is brought to you by the whooosh-ing sound that time makes as it flies past your ears; it seems like only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, talking about holidays and the end of summer and stuff. All of a sudden it’s December, I’ve not written a Curios for a month (not that any of you CARE, you unappreciative whelps), and you can’t turn on the television without a famous trying to sell you stinkwater. On an unrelated note, I am yet to eat a mince pie in 2011. If anyone would like to courier some over to H&K towers, I will be very grateful and possibly do a small happy dance in gratitude; thanks (in the unlikely event that HRH Prince Charles is reading this, I am a massive fan of Duchy Originals).

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The pretence that this blog is a weekly thing really has to stop. One month since the last one, fact fans. I’ve had THINGS TO DO. Not least going to Brussels and Croatia, where I went on holiday and did NOTHING other than read and swim and be horizontal. It was awesome, and as a result I now look less like this and more like this. No really, I do.

BUT that was then and this is now; I have returned to a world in which the internet spends all its time railing against the evil of corporations and then…er…goes incontinent with grief over the passing of the head of one of the world’s largest corporations; in which Silvio manages to somehow become even more ridiculous and offensive;  and a world in which somehow one of the members of 1980s pop combo Hue & Cry has become a consultant on games, play and ludic theory. We live in interesting times. Here are some totally insignificant bits of online ephemera to help distract you from what appears to be the total meltdown of civilisation which is going on all around us. Christ, I sound like an old man.

Socially responsible graffiti on a Croatian beach hut

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“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness; close bosom friend of the maturing sun…” – or that’s what Keats said. Personally speaking, I think Keats can do one, as can September and Autumn in general. Everything smells of wet dog and regret, it’s cold and miserable and it’s now just the long, slow trudge towards another season of crass mass-consumerism and endless, interminable, incomprehensible perfume adverts (NB – anyone who works in advertising who reads this, please feel free to explain to me why perfume advertising is so oblique, as I have literally no idea).

Think, then, of this edition of Web Curios as the lightbox to your SAD, the plaster to your axewound (for future reference, an unpleasant conjunction of words to Google), the United Nations to your genocide. I’m here to help. To that end, here are some recommendations for awesome stuff you can do in London over the next few months (NB – that last link is one of the best things I’ve seen in years, very much recommended. Oh, and for an interesting take on Libya, you could do worse than read this). In the real world! NOT ON THE INTERNET! Crazy but true.

But for now it’s still all about the internet. Well, on this particular blog it is, anyway. If you don’t like it, you know what you can do (though I’d prefer it if you didn’t; I’m needy, and low-to-moderate traffic figures are all that’s standing between me and a P45).

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Guess who’s back? NO, IT IS NOT EMINEM! IT IS ME! (Though in fairness our level of musical / performing talent is comparable) Stop gawping at the back – I AM NOT DEAD! I wish that there was some sort of exciting reason for Web Curios’ long absence – an enthralling, Willy Fog-esque journey, an unexpected temporary career change, an unforeseen visit to chokey…but no, nothing so thrilling. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, Web Curios’ existence was momentarily uncertain – but now I am most definitely here. I think.

Anyway, there’s a lot to catch up on. Some people’s phones got hacked and everyone got VERY ANGRY; the most powerful man in the world turned 50; my new favourite rapper released a mixtape; I went to Boston and saw none of it (but did get to fly business class and thus received a pair of complimentary pyjamas – THANKS VIRGIN –  which was well worth the £3,000 that the flights apparently cost); oh, God, loads of things.

None of that matters, though. What does matter is that you immediately click on this link and donate money to stop people dying of starvation in Somalia. Thanks.

Frankly nothing that you’re going to read from hereon in matters one iota compared to the above, but it’s probably going to be marginally more cheering. Read on, and make your Friday afternoon of wageslavery marginally less soul-crushingly worthless than it might otherwise be.

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HELLO! This Friday marks what, as far as I’m concerned, is the end of the last working week in April. Next weekend we have death, resurrection and ceremonial chocolate sweats; the weekend afterwards we have a nation descending into drunken, vomitous chaos in the name of a patriotic spirit long-forgotten (oh, and there’s a wedding happening too). As a result of people indulging in this sort of behaviour, it’s unlikely any of us will have got over the jaundice before May at the earliest (NB – Web Curios does not condone excessive drinking unless it’s as an expression of royalist fervour, in which case go for your lives webmongs).

But that is all before us. Here, we look back – back at the week that was on the internet, a week in which people got very upset about a 17 year-old London woman’s *ahem* full and frank discussion of her personal life on a rap freestyle (NB – it really is full and frank and very NSFW); in which, through listening to this man’s voice, I learnt that I occasionally get this; in which I totally failed to get on a plane to Amsterdam to deliver a presentation at a conference (thus incurring a debt to The Man unto the bargain); in which it was proven that £50million does not always guarantee quality;  that it’s entirely possible to make clothes from blow-up dolls; and in which a former boss of mine was bathed, naked, by a strange, bearded man in the name of art. It’s been interesting.

As a result of the imminent HOLIDAY, this week’s Curios is going to be relatively light on work-related stuff. Obviously, though, it’s all still GOLD. ENJOY, DAMN YOU.

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The power of Four in traditional business...

Investment bank UBS turned the spotlight onto supermarkets this week with a report claiming food inflation is higher in the UK than anywhere else in the OECD. The report inferred this was the result of the ‘Big Four’ supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s & Morrisons) using their market dominance to inflate prices above the actual increases stemming from food inflation.

By contrast, in other European markets where the food market is more segmented, prices haven’t risen as fast – strong stuff, which led to a swift response from trade body the British Retail Consortium, as well as a wealth of media comment.

This issue got me thinking though, for it’s not only in the supermarket sector where four big players hold sway in the UK. Accountancy is dominated by a Big Four (Deloitte, PwC, KPMG & Ernst & Young) and so is mobile telecoms (Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile, now joined commercially as ‘Everything Everywhere’).

High street banking was similarly controlled by Four (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyd’s and RBS) until Santander went on its recent spending spree. Four then, seems a very powerful number in the business world, even if the positive impact of it on consumers remains up for debate.

But what about the power of Four on the internet?

As my Issues & Crisis colleague Duncan Gallagher pointed out yesterday, the evidence for the power of Four on the internet seems scant to non-existent. Instead, it increasingly seems to be the power of One.

...versus the power of One on the internet

Look at the big internet success stories – Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter. Yes, some of them have competitors but they have much smaller market shares and/or offer a more limited suite of products.

Governments historically tend to get quite nervous about monopolies developing in traditional offline sectors and so do consumers. Curiously though, there doesn’t appear to be a similar feeling about these dominant online brands yet. Nor have there been sustained questions about whether the power of the digital One is good for consumers.

Will this change?

Maybe, although who exactly would initiate a monopoly ruling on a transnational, digital company is unclear. There is one other question though.

Last week we blogged about a possible bubble forming amongst social media and online companies as investors queued up and valuations soared. So here goes – if you were an investor considering a stake in one of these companies, how much risk would you attribute to a potential monopoly investigation and would that affect your decision to take the plunge?

Hello All! Welcome to another edition of the Financial and Professional Services team’s Friday Fiver. Big thanks this week to Linzi Goldthorpe, Karen Butcher, Chris Pratt and Jonathan Henderson.

Joanna gears up again…Monday saw the Bar Council and Law Society launch their campaign against government cuts to legal aid. The lobbyist group Sound off for Justice, which is championed by actress and rights activist Joanna Lumley, aims to put pressure on the government to reconsider the cuts which were unveiled in November of last year.

Guess who's back for round two?

Currently the UK provides free legal advice for those people fighting civil cases that don’t have sufficient funds to cover legal costs. The Ministry of Justice plans to cut the £2.1bn legal aid bill by £350m within four years, reducing the number of people of people able to seek help by up to 500,000.

So far the propositions have been dubbed ‘brutal’ and ‘devasting’ by the legal community who are calling for the plans to be scrapped. Enter Joanna to weave her magic again…

Bribery is still bribery…Some of us attended the British American Business’s Law Forum UK Bribery Act event this week. Given the new date for the guidelines on the Act are yet to be confirmed the seminar focussed on what businesses need to  be thinking about before implementation comes into force.

The focus was very much on laying minds at rest following the confusion around the Act’s implementation. Two messages were clearly played out through the seminar:

1. Facilitation payments always have and always will be a crime. The Bribery Act isn’t changing that.

Care is still needed when choosing a hotel for business guests

2. The reaction to the Act’s hospitality element has been blown well out of proportion. Sensible and proportionate expenditure remains lawful but flying a potential new business partner halfway around the world with their family and putting them in a deluxe hotel is not.

Confusion remains on events such as the Olympics though – the clock is ticking on this one, so watch this space.

Confused about petrol…This week we received an email from price comparison site confused.com about their partnership with The Sun for their new ‘Do Your Duty’ campaign. It seems to have won a lot of support from readers of the paper and has been well shared on Confused.com’s website. This week’s inflation figures can only have heightened support for it as well.

The campaign looks like a no-brainer for Confused.com then doesn’t it? We do wonder though if it doesn’t look somewhat self-serving for organisations if they choose an issue that isn’t well-aligned with their business. We’ve been running a successful campaign for Hymans Robertson on pension reform recently. But then being pension consultants they can lead that debate and offer well-respected opinions – the risk of falling short in the credibility stakes is low.

Well done to confused.com for showing the nerve to embrace an issue though. Not all organisations are willing to do so, but we hope they build on this position and develop their credentials as an organisation that represents consumers interests in keeping prices low, including insurance prices.

Goodbye Western investment returns…Barely a day goes past without reports of the fundamental shift in global wealth and productivity from the developed to the developing world.

This week the London Business School weighed in. Their new report indicated that the equity risk premium (the additional return generated by investing rather than taking a risk-free option such as cash) is set to fall in developed markets. They believe that investors can expect a future return of around 3 to 3.5% from equities in the developed world, the lowest rate in 110 years, down on the historic average of 4.5%.

The report comes as Barclays Capital predicted foreign investors can however expect annual returns of 10.5% from developing economies. The findings are likely to have significant repercussions for where western pension funds invest their money as younger generations search for returns further afield than the western blue chips that have traditionally been a staple of pension portfolios.

Money Saving ‘Expert’…Martin Lewis and his website have been a big success in recent years, by offering a new approach to personal finance. Lewis has binned the jargon and offers simple rules of thumb on saving and investing. Now however, there are questions being asked about his credentials following a slip-up on ITV’s Daybreak show this week.

An expert yes, but a qualified one?

The whole issue of financial advice is under the spotlight at the moment thanks to something called the ‘Retail Distribution Review’. This proposes to change the way financial advisers earn their keep – from taking commission on selling products, to billing clients (people like us) for their time. As the ever excellent Anthony Hilton pointed out recently though, this could put advisers out of the financial reach of most people.

That means the majority will have to turn to Mr Lewis and others like him for their money advice. The first test on the horizon in this brave new world? Explaining to 7m workers why their pay checks are suddenly 4% lighter following the start of auto-enrolment in 2012. Good luck guys…

Today the Futures Company put out some stats about what people think are the top characteristics of a leading brand. Bit of a cluster around the top spot – no surprises that being ‘a brand that everyone trusts’ is up there. So too is ‘It always puts right its mistakes.’ Doesn’t sound like rocket science, but really you’d be surprised. 

It’s not unusual for companies to turn to PR agencies when something hits the fan – good comms experts can contain a mistake, ensuring its public appearance is avoided, limited or turned into an opportunity.  All good stuff. But you’d be surprised at just how few companies actually focus on fixing the mistake. Yes, good PR is key both before and after – making you’re you’re ready if an issue occurs, managing the impact of the issue and then rebuilding reputation once it’s over. But there’s little point doing all that if you’re not going to fix the problem that got you there in the first place. Actions speak louder than words. Fix it, ’fess up to whoever you need to and start making friends again. Stuff happens – it’s the way you react to said stuff that counts.