Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Yesterday, I went over to Google for a different kind of APG event. Titled “Dark Arts of Digital: Video Masterclass,” this hands-on session covered the practical principles of YouTube. We all know how important video is in content marketing. And, in the never ending quest to uncover the secrets of what makes something go viral, it’s smart to hear directly from the people that own the data.

The best part of the day was making, uploading and annotating our own video. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to play in the YouTube creator space studio, but I’ve had a tour of it earlier and it is enough to tempt you to into vlogging full time. However, it was the following tips from the YouTube experts that are of most value to our work with brands.

Not surprisingly, Authentic Content (aka a video made specifically for YouTube or online viewing) works best. They listed these five winning categories below: Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure what is in the October air but my goodness it has been busy at H+K Towers this week

Monday saw the external launch of our Aviva S2S Mumsnet campaign which is  centred on encouraging parents to talk to their children about running away from home in order to  raise awareness of the issue, and of the Railway children charity.  As its such an important and topical issue, our launch story has gained lots of media interest including Yahoo.com, Female.First.co.uk and Radio 5 Live and is naturally all over the twittersphere

Mumsnet.com Running Away home page

Also on Monday, we launched Family Investment’s Hotspots report which has received widespread national media coverage including seven of the national newspapers reporting the story. If you have somehow managed to miss it, Wokingham is the best place to live to bring up a family.

Hotspots Report Infographic

Our healthcare team has been working hard at the European Society of Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) annual meeting (a huge event in the world of cancer research) which took place in Vienna last weekend. During ESMO the team supported a media roundtable where two leading experts in the field of bone metastases, a severely painful type of bone cancer often associated with advanced stages, were well received by the audience including 14 top-tier European journalists from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.  Don’t just take our word for it, check out this infographic about the hot topics from the meeting

The Healthcare team also recently won some inspiring new business with The Harley Street Clinic in London. Earlier this week, members of the team had the opportunity to visit the clinic’s recently refurbished Paediatric Intensive Care Unit to see firsthand the importance of the unit in providing complex care to very ill children. The team is excited to be working with H+K offices in Kuwait on this project. See more of the great work done by the clinic here

Our Food + Drink team have also had a rewarding week, after over seven months of campaigning for public votes, yesterday the Transform Your Patch team took Fazer from N-Dubz to Dartford Skate Park to celebrate his triumph in Transform Your Patch – a regeneration campaign from Britivic and PepsiCo that has transformed around 165 outdoor spaces across the UK.  Since March, Fazer has been competing against three other celebrity faces, to win an additional £100,000 for an outdoor space he is passionate about, skate parks. Yesterday saw him emerge triumphant against Densie Van Outen campaigning for playgrounds, Robbie Savage squaring up for five-a-side football pitches and Emma Willis championing picnic areas and parks. The £100,000 will now go towards making sure communities get the most out of the transformed skate parks across the UK. Read more about the campaign here.

Our Energy + Industrials team have also been mega busy, not only did they launch Enphase Energy into the UK at Solar Power UK – we set up and staffed media interviews with the key trades to support the launch. Fantastic response so far!

… But they also provided media support for the launch of Sheringham Shoal wind farm off the coast of Norfolk – resulting in a lovely exclusive with Channel 4 News, take a look at the video

And as if that wasn’t enough, we also helped Pampers® and UNICEF launch their “1 pack = 1 vaccine” initiative for the seventh year running, celebrating that together they have helped eliminate Maternal & Newborn Tetanus (MNT) in eight of the world’s poorest countries.

Roll on the weekend!  Hope you all have a good one!

With almost 30 million users and major buzz for closing a $30 million financing round, Viddy lets users take and share bite-sized videos of 15 seconds or less. Viddy was launched one year ago and gained attention for its celebrity backers like Jay-Z, and celebrity users like Snoop Dogg. Available free for the iPhone and iPad, it is the iTunes app of the week for 12 May 2012 and one of the fastest growing apps around. Promises of an Android version will be under increased pressure to come true, although if I was Google, I would just buy them now.

Inevitably referred to as the Instagram for video due to the easy to add visual effects, soundtracks and other features in their Production Packs, Viddy got a huge boost last month when Facebook began highlighting them (and rival service, Socialcam). No post fails to mention that the fairly private Mark Zuckerberg uploaded a viddy of his dog. Even without the FB love, acquisition as a business model seems more lucrative right now than potential millions from in-app sales of premium Production Packs. I think someone will buy them soon.

So why should brands care about Viddy? First, I think the 15 second format has a lot to teach us. Like Twitter, it enforces message discipline. Plus, it is another wide open focus group to follow what what users are doing with video.  Southwest Airlines ran a contest around Sundance Film Festival time. Early adopter General Electric has also hopped on. For Mother’s Day today in the USA, Viddy teamed up with the National Breast Cancer Foundation to encourage users to post a ‘Thank You’ viddy for their moms, similar to their support for Movember. Celebrities as early adopters doesn’t hurt a start-up, but also reminds us that brand ambassadors have never been more in control of their own image, for better or worse. Add Viddy to the list for VIP social media training. While adult content is an au naturel risk with any video platform, there are lots of G-rated possibilities. Clean cut newscasters like Katie Couric are trying the platform and American TV icon Bill Cosby seems quite at home on the tiny screen. Even Disney partnered with Viddy to promote The Muppets. So grab your iPhone and your cat and give Viddy a try.

As the countdown to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games intensifies, Visa Europe unveiled its new 2012 advertising campaign, featuring Usain Bolt, Visa Europe Innovation Ambassador. Visa team athletes, gymnast Louis Smith, BMX rider Shanaze Reade, boxer Khalid Yafai, triple jumper Phillips Idowu, Taekwondo star Aaron Cook and Paralympic athlete Stefanie Reid also feature in the advert.

London 2012 is an opportunity for Visa to showcase its latest payment innovations and the Games will be the first where consumers can choose not to bring cash at all but instead to make contactless payments with either their contactless card or a suitable NFC-enabled (near field communication) mobile phone.

The ‘Flow Faster’ advert depicts Bolt arriving at a London airport and a seemingly ordinary member of the public is challenging him to a race. We then see Bolt and the man race across London with only Visa to help them. Through their purchases using Visa’s mobile, contactless and card services, Bolt is able to transform from a sharp suited traveler to being ready to race whilst the other man smartens up with the purchase of a blazer and tie.

As the race reaches its conclusion the two characters arrive at the Olympic Stadium. We cut inside to see Bolt as he settles into the starting blocks. He looks up and gives a wry smile as he realizes that his competitor across London was in fact the starter for the sprint.

The campaign will bring the Games to life for consumers across Europe with promotions beginning at the same time via Visa Golden Space (www.visa.co.uk/goldenspace) offering the chance to win ticket packages to the London 2012 Olympic Games and other prizes via prize draw and instant win competitions.

I AM BORED OF FOOTBALL. Or at the very least the in-no-way-criminal, potentially racist / definitely racist, stroppy foreigner elements of it. Does anyone remember when football used to be a fun distraction from the woes of the world rather than a major constituent part of said woes? No, me neither, but there must have been a time. Personally I blame social media.  Could everyone stop talking about the DAMN FOOTBALL PLEASE?

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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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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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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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Happy New Year! (I was going to accompany that with an image, but you’d be suprised how NSFW the first Google Image result for that apparently innocent phrase is. Dear God, it’s all just filth on the internet, isn’t it?).

It’s been over a month, webmongs, and, if I’m honest, I’ve not missed you in the slightest. Doubtless, though, you have all been desperately pining for me, and staring blank-eyed into the middle-distance every Friday afternoon, wondering exactly how you are going to be able to fritter away the remaining hours separating you from your regular appointment with a bottle of meths and a cold, lonely evening alone in your bedsit in front of the glowing flicker of a cathode-ray tube.

I, though, have been leading the glamorous life of a jetsetter. Apart from on Christmas Day, where I found myself eating a mediocre lunch, alone, at the soulless Gordon Ramsey franchise at Heathrow Terminal 5. I have been to Rome and Berlin and (unexpectedly, due to being ‘confused’ on new year’s day) Dusseldorf and Amsterdam and San Francisco. I didn’t look at the internet AT ALL for over a fortnight. It was AMAZING.

Now, though, my nose is once again being deprived of multiple epidermal layers as a result of prolonged exposure to the grindstone. I am back ON IT. As such, take a deep breath, make yourselves comfortable, and let me guide you with the assured touch of a skilled lover through this week’s selection of things off the internet. After a picture, to break the monotony:

My vision was a bit like this on New Year's day, hence the Dusseldorf incident

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