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Having just returned from Sibos I am reminded that sometimes, however alluring the alternative, there really is no substitute for just getting out there and talking to people. Whether it be customers, journalists, analysts or random introductions. In this increasingly virtual world, sometimes a little face time with a real human being is worth a million pokes, nudges and emails.
As a primary carer with a mild disdain for playing to the PR stereotype, I’m more likely to be found curled up with a good spreadsheet than, ‘doing lunch’. But in just one week of camping out in Vienna, and yes visiting a few bars, I got to know my customers inside out, met their customers, caught up with the broad community of influencers at large, and engaged in some genuinely interesting dialogue with people that I would just not have met otherwise.
In a business world that’s looking ever more creaky, it’s good to you know you have real friends out there.
Despite the success of my face time initiatives, the traditional one-to-one briefing seems to hold less appeal for an ex-boyfriend. He’s just announced to all his intention to be re-marry via Facebook (so little time, so many ex-girlfriends?) Of course, my natural grace and good breeding doesn’t permit me to publish a link to his home page right here… but under the circumstances, I thought just a passing mention wouldn’t go amiss.
Social media – there’s a time and a place.
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We don’t really have a, down-the-pub-on-a-Friday-afternoon, type of culture; we’d rather keep on trucking and leave for the weekend with a clean conscience and a clean desk.
But this Friday, even for us, was horribly frenetic with just about all of us sporting please-don’t-talk-to-me auras: interns assembling and re-assembling press packs; account execs printing schedules with a flourish only to bin them ten minutes later; AR and PR account managers intent on taking multi-tasking to new levels, seemingly on several calls at once, emailing and IMing all at the same time; harried-looking event planners scuttled around with lengthy guest lists, muttering darkly about being 25% over capacity already; while account directors looked increasingly dismayed at their calendars for the following week and the number of back-to-back briefings wedged in them. As for me, my own concerns cantered around my new smart phone the current embodiment of a contradiction in terms and seemingly designed to thwart me on every level. Owl post would be a definite upgrade. Conversations were terse and the regular flurries of expletives remained unremarked, while Haribos and Americanos were being consumed at the optimum ulcer-inducing capacity.
So what’s all the fuss about?
Sibos innit?
More to the point the 14 clients we are supporting there, the stands we’ve designed, the parties we’ve planned, the 50plus sales appointments we’ve scheduled, the 80plus analyst briefings and the 100plus press interviews that we have organised on their behalf.
It goes without saying the most sought after currency next week in Vienna at the five day super size conference, will be sleep and the following week I expect we’ll be sporting the collective cold for our efforts as the stress and lack of sleep takes its toll on my otherwise chilled out team.
This is the dark underbelly of your PR ‘jolly’, and guess what, we LOVE it.
Whether it’s our 25th Sibos (well done Clare) or our first (welcome to our world Silke) we will wear our ghostly pallor, and facial ticks like badges of honour. Sibos - our ultimate tour of duty.
As for me, I’m particularly looking forward to patrolling the queues of party goers with my clipboard (and possibly an owl on my shoulder if I can’t get my bloody phone to co-operate) fixing the fintec faithful with my icy stare, and uttering those immortal lines, ‘If your name’s not down, you’re not coming in...’
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PR Week recently ran a small piece citing a survey conducted by PR agency Parker Wayne & Kent. The survey found that many PRs still believe off line coverage to be more influential than on line. Apparently only one in ten respondents thought that digital coverage was becoming less relevant to PR campaigns.
Meanwhile this June guardian.co.uk cited over 20 million unique users (print readers about 1.2 million).
Maybe the reasons some PROs still cling to the opinion that digital coverage is not as influential as more traditional media is because they’d just prefer it, if it were so.
I mean, wouldn’t life be easier if the companies with the most PR spend had the most clout? If product messages could be tenderly crafted, engraved in stone and transcribed verbatim, if all we ever had to do was chant the corporate message loudly and repeatedly, and the world would be so.
Ahh to go back in time, to the days before user generated content, when PROs were the rainmakers.
Now the world’s gone mad. A no-name company with a budget that wouldn’t even cover a PRO’s bar bill, throws a phone in a blender, and puts the resulting footage on YouTube. 5 million hits later and it’s the most talked about brand of the era. Our most sacred tool, The CEO, once only rolled out for speaker slots and interviews with the chosen few, blogs daily and takes time to reply to anyone that contacts him. A disgruntled journalist bleats about some pithy laptop malfunction and a global corporate completely revaluates its entire comms strategy.
Now it’s all about ‘transparency’, ‘listening’, ‘responsiveness’ and, heaven forbid, ‘creating a dialogue’.
These days the world and his dog have a view, a means to communicate it and an attentive online audience to lap it up. Increasingly, it is the maddeningly authentic voice of the individual whether they be consumer or supplier that has more clout than that of the seasoned and oh so reasoned PRO.
So if you worked in PR what would you do?
Judging by the survey results, going into denial is definitely an option and it does seem to work for all the alcoholics I know. And while I still squeal with pleasure when we get coverage in the FT and have I do have to stroke the glossy pages of The Banker should it have a client mugshot within it - in such invigorating times shouldn’t us old rainmakers have a slightly more thought out approach than just to hide behind our umbrellas?
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I’ve been crowdsourced!
Sadly this doesn’t involve leaping off the main stage to be held aloft by the Glastonbury faithful. Indeed, I feel that moment may have passed me by. But it did involve a cute campaign and an unscheduled retro chocolate purchase.
So there I am tapping away on the laptop when a very simple pop-up pops up with a choice of six voting buttons and asks, ‘Which Revel will you vote out?’ Now, while I’m not that clear on the relative merits of our main political parties and a fair few religious faiths, I do have an instant opinion on which lack-lustre flavour should be summarily evicted.
As soon as I’d voted, the pop-up disappeared. No one demanded my details, my socio-demographics or to know how I’d heard about them. And no one wanted me to create a password that was a mixture of letters and numbers and to type it in twice. Those nice people at Mars just wanted to hear which chocolate I wanted out and I was happy to tell them. That’s crowdsourcing.
No doubt the results will provide the next installment of the print and TV campaign. Then it will be back online to vote for a new flavour to replace the hapless evictee with the results of that survey be pumped back into offline vehicles again. And at that point I’m just going to have to buy a bloody bag because I’m engaged now, I have a stake in this, and I need to have a view on the new flavour on the block. Clever.
I’m explaining all this to Lynne, my very world-weary and delightfully cynical friend, as we queue for the flicks. But as we head over to the popcorn, she stops and stares ruefully at the sweetie stall before saying, “But what if orange really is evicted. This might be our last ever chance…”
As for rock-and-roll moments, I may never have got to crowd surf, but last week, as I finally extracted myself from a rather messy team karaoke session, I did get to say, ‘My name’s Sam Howard. Goodnight!’
And I have ALWAYS wanted to do that.
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So this weekend we had friends to stay and my eight year old is keen to show off his newly acquired tea and coffee making skills. He quickly builds a small but loyal customer base. Next up a bit of market research in order to establish new revenue streams: “How much would you pay me to make your tea and coffee all weekend?” Come Sunday and he’s charging 19p for a mug of coffee and 22p for a cup of tea (additional stirring required). At the end of the weekend, having turned a healthy profit, I promote him to EVP of Hot Beverages…
Meanwhile at work, we’ve hired Cat, complete with one year’s work experience and a shiny first from Bournemouth University. A month into her new job, “Cat,” I say, with loaded intent, “Would you like to take over our social committee?” All sparkly-eyed and full of first-job enthusiasm, she leaps at the chance. And so last Thursday, 18 of us herded into The Comedy Store, with our jugs of beer and hamburgers balanced on our knees for a bit of jolly team bonding. So far so good. Then Jason Rouse takes the mike. Titanium-toothed and tattooed-encrusted, Jas zeroes in on boundaries and tramples all over them. And as he charges manically from one really-no-go-subject to another, annihilating every single one of your cherished values, I watch our collective team smile become ever more strained.
And I can hear Cat whimpering beside me as she contemplates an alternative career, one based primarily around asking, “And would you like fries with that?”
As it turns out, I have spent far too much time living in the U-rated world of Harry Potter, so I really rather enjoyed my exposure to (way) beyond the fringe humour. So for now, her voluntary job title as head of our social committee stands. But Cat, and here’s the rub, what are you going to do to top that? I feel exotic ladies adorned in little more than sushi really is the only way to go…
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August, that favourite child - lazy days, long evenings, quality family time and recuperative holidays… in theory.
That is until the genius that is SWIFT decided to bring Sibos forward to mid September.
Now, if you are into financial transaction and payments technology, it’s unquestionably one of the biggest and most prestigious events in the calendar, but Sibos is eye-wateringly pricey to exhibit and quite often the dearest line item by a mile in any marketing budget. So if you’re going to do it, you need to extract maximum value from it, just going because all your competitors go, surely can’t still be the only validation you need, even the aim of ‘creating awareness’ seems a bit fuzzy to me. If you are exhibiting at Sibos, shouldn’t it be with the concept of contributing to the payments debate, helping to set the agenda for 2009 and initiating a dialogue that ultimately leads to sales?
This will be our twentieth Sibos, and we’re representing 14 clients, with a view to creating one-to-one appointments with key analysts, global trade & regional press and also, most importantly, setting up one-to-one sales appointments with their prospects.
Which is great. No, it is really. It just means that, since several of these campaigns need a good six weeks to set up, we are up and running already.
And that’s my point, running, in August? That must be a contradiction in terms, aren’t I liable to spill my drink?
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So we are twenty.
While Steve and Clare plotted world domination, I was taking a more scenic route to my career development, selling buns, high class buns mind, I was a supervisor in Harrods Bakery and it was a killer of a job.
It was very hot, it was very busy, it was very long hours and the pay was erm, not very good. The fridges were constantly overheating and leaking water all over the floor, the staff were permanently exhausted, and as for the seasonal stuff - the hot cross buns, the mince pies the Christmas pudding - the phrase ‘bun fight’ had to have been invented in Harrods bakery on a Saturday afternoon.
The celebration cake section was like the Bermuda triangle with orders constantly being lost or miss-interpreted, ‘Oh you’re getting married this weekend…’ ‘Oh the sponge can be any flavour apart from coffee… ‘ We even had a three tier wedding cake stolen once, right off the shop floor, just as we were ordering the taxi to deliver it, we had to send a dummy wooden one over instead, the bride was very calm. Then she sued us.
It was during this time I developed my addiction for chocolate éclairs, I would chain munch them, I always had one on the go, in our shoe box office where I squinted at my very messy staff rota, and wondered who I could possibly persuade to do late till, again.
I look back on those long, sweaty, stressful, poorly paid hours obviously with some relief that they are behind me, but also I think, actually what a very good apprenticeship they were for later years. I learned all about customer service at the coal face, how to streamline tedious processes, and the true value of team work. Although to this day I’m not convinced my natural talent to box up a foot long millefeuille, complete with string handle in less than five minutes, has ever truly been appreciated.
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I’ve just got back from a mad weekend at Camp Bestival. Bestival takes fancy dress very seriously, hosting what must be the world’s biggest fancy dress party for the last five years. Last year in the Isle of Wight, I witnessed a divinely surreal moment when, headlining act, The Beasty Boys bounded across the stage and hollered, ‘All the pirates in the house say ‘yo’!’ And about 20,000 pirates returned the call with gusto.
Camp Bestival, (son of Bestival, held in deepest, darkest Dorset) continued to wave the flamboyant flag with this year’s theme based on Alice In Wonderland. Elliot (my eight year old) and I took our brief very seriously and so, all last week in-between client meetings and planning sessions I was scuttling around the West End purchasing bunny ears, spotted hankies and large time pieces, bizarrely encountering a city acquaintance in the same shop asking if it stocked any blue frocks and white knee socks suited to his 6ft 2in burly frame…
And so, after hours of titivation, there we all were in our fancy dress best, 10,000 Mad Hatters, Alices, Tweedle Dums and Tweedle Dees, whole packs of cards, very large mushrooms and very round cup cakes - all flaunting it. And what did the, oh so clever, Sunday Times do?
It set up a Style Tent and into the fields of preening populace, sent out a roving snapper and asked people if they would mind being papped?
Mind?
These normally bashful Middle English types were only too delighted to be forever immortalised as a doped up caterpillar or a super-size tea pot. Each of us was then given a card with a unique reference number so we could log on to www.timesonline.co.uk and see our photo mocked up as the front cover of Style Magazine – genius.
Back at base, before I even thought of running a shower and I really did need one, I was checking in to check myself out.
So now, not only has The Times inflated its online audience by several (albeit, slightly eccentric) thousand, in terms of promoting the brand, some may even go so far as to say it’s The Cheshire Cat’s whiskers… 
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I read it in Metro, so it must be true, it seems the latest casualty of the credit crunch is the mistress.
Apparently the City mistress, the ultimate affluent proof point, is one of the first luxuries to be jettisoned when tightening the personal budget belt.
In lean years, it can sometimes feel like PR is viewed in the same way. In times of corporate stress a common reaction is to view PR activity as a nice to have, rather than a necessary tool for corporate survival.
Obviously, I’m going to argue in favour of the latter. A good agency should align every activity to growing the client’s business and offer genuine, quantifiable commercial value that enhances reputation, secures market position and ultimately drives leads. PR has historically always been better placed than advertising in economic downturns, add to this the trend toward digital outreach – a new factor in the equation – and it’ll be fascinating to see which marketing disciplines do best at retaining their share of client budgets.
Curiously, despite the gloom in the business press, we are seeing a surge in new business calls as tech companies wonder if their incumbent agency has become complacent, or whether it can an offer the strategic council and additional services necessary to help them prosper through a downturn in the cycle.
Assuming ours is not an isolated experience, we can expect to see a fair amount of revolving doors in our industry for the foreseeable future, which, while nobody ever likes to re-pitch, is healthy for the PR business, forcing the agencies to re-evaluate their performance and service offerings, and their genuine hunger for the business.
As for those City mistresses, I’d guess they are a wiley breed and quite resilient enough to ride out any economic blip. Meanwhile, perhaps one or two might want to consider giving master classes in the provision of value added services, loyalty programmes and performance-related pricing structures.
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Was really pleased to see a story in PR Week recently which celebrated how three people who had joined their agencies as graduate trainees were, some years later, pretty much heading them up. In an industry where you’re made to feel complacent if you don’t up sticks every twelve months for greener grass. It’s great to see the home paddock promoted for a change.
In tech PR there’s no getting away from the fact that the subject matter is complicated, possibly nowhere more so than B2B technology, where not only has there to be a strong understanding of the client’s technology offering, but also all the business functions and the market issues that affect their audiences. And this understanding then has to be articulated succinctly and elegantly to an extremely savvy media. So much investment is required by an agency to get its people up and running, it’s really rather depressing to watch someone skip off for another £2k and tomorrow’s job title.
For myself I’m virtually unemployable, so when I find somewhere that’s culturally cosy enough to feel welcoming and yet big enough to give me my head, I Sellotape my name on my stapler and dig in for the long haul. And it’s great, I can just get on with my job. I don’t have to spend forever trying to impress new bosses, agonise about offending anyone in politically correct emails, wrap my head round a different culture or preface all my sentences with ‘in my last agency…’ I’ve made lifetime friends, and despite the comfort of the familiar, this is still PR and every day brings a new challenge, just one I can face with a team I know and trust.
Fortunately I’m not the only home girl and we can happily boast several Account Directors who started as account execs and have worked their way up through the ranks, and it’s no surprise that these ADs are some of the most technically competent leads that we have. Coming right up on the inside are some really strong juniors that we are looking to fast track and reward, for their talents and their loyalty.
Anyone who has ever been to a festival and tried to find a better plot in an overflowing camp ground can tell you, sometimes the grass is only greener, cos it’s a whole lot wetter…
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At an industry do last night Lauren and I found ourselves being pitched to/on/at. Being PR people, this is a rare and slightly surreal experience, this one made all the more marvelous by its ineptness...
Propping up the bar next to us were several guys from a clippings agency.
So one of them says to the other, ‘I’ve done the room, mate and there is absolutely no one here worth talking to.’
We look after about 30 clients so I think I might have been gaping at them openly now. So they squinted at our name badges but none the wiser as it was obvious they’d never heard of us. Unfortunate, given that we used to be a client.
Having established we were a tech agency and little us, one of them launches into a full on pitch about his evaluation module, I’m not sure why as my body language was imploring him to stop. His colleague was terribly busy on his Blackberry so was unavailable to rescue us, although he did look up to offer that, ‘We get 90% of the regionals,’ Not exactly a key target for us, but then how were they to know?
All my gentle attempts to wean our pitcher off his pitch were to no avail so, so in desperation I said, ‘That is a nasty bump, how did you get that?’
The bump in question was on his forehead and his colleague had already drawn attention to it, so I figured it was a reasonable diversionary tactic to use.
‘Rugby,’ he replied. Ha! I had finally got him off the worthy subject of monitoring tools. ‘I’ve had it about two years…’
And the ground did not swallow me up, more is the pity.
This slightly mortifying experience reminded me of some total basics - be courteous to everyone, it’s a very small industry, know who you’re talking to and never pitch out of hours – it’s thoroughly tedious. If you are drawn into a new business conversation ask questions and provide agnostic answers, prove your credibility and your counterparty might even start asking you questions. Finally, just follow my mum’s advice - always leave them wanting more.
As for the clippings agency, due to my fantastic faux pas, we have enthusiastically agreed to a free trial of both the clipping and the monitoring service.
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Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:28:36 G9T
Wed, 21 May 2008 09:25:04 G5T
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:25:29 G4T
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:53:15 G2T
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:45:57 G1T
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