Fishburn Hedges

Kate Pinder

Blue chip business focus I went along to a recent seminar held by Rainmaker the new business search agency who presented the findings of their annual Intelligent New Business Survey of blue chip companies and some public sector clients. Clients they approached included: COI TfL, DfID, BSkyB, Casio, Heinz, L’Oréal, M&S, Mars, Orange, Peugeot, npower, Sony and Virgin Holidays.Investments for the...

Gordon Hector

I went along to an RSA Thursday talk yesterday, with Professor Renata Salecl talking about the ‘paradox of choice.’ Her argument was, in a nutshell, that too much choice can be a bad thing. Capitalism promotes an ideology of choice, where we are forced to think of ourselves as having choice. We like the idea we’re autonomous beings, and buy into a system that promotes that idea. This hurts ...

This week I spoke to PR Week about the importance of online communities for communications professionals and journalists. You can view the video podcast here:Posted by Alex Pearmain

Paul Hodgson

We pulled off a great event this week for Digital UK – the body overseeing the region by region switch to digital TV.  The panel included Digital UK’s Chief Executive, David Scott, along with DCMS Minister, Ed Vaizey and Age UK’s Chair, Dianne Jeffrey.  A rather nice venue it was too with views of the River Thames and the City, and a terrace, where on a sunny morning – which it was – t...

Paul Raeburn

One of the multitude of events at Editorial Intelligence’s Brand New Britain examined whether we Brits are much trusted abroad.  It’s a topic I’ve touched on in a past post and sits within the context of the new government’s avowedly less ambitious foreign policy. Happily there was a fair amount of disagreement amongst the panellists.  All agreed that Britain’s military exploits in...

Gordon Hector

Ok, maybe it’s not. But bear with me – it’s about auditors, and it’s really interesting, but it might not look that way it first. The FSA has published a consultation, you see. It’s about the contribution that auditors can make to prudential regulation, and asks for contributions on how the ties between audit firms and regulators can be improved. This is quite technical stuff tha...

Peter Sigrist

 In an excellent article in The Guardian, Clay Shirky sets out the big challenges facing social media.Shirky teaches new media at New York University, and is a well-known speaker on issues surrounding the internet, media and communications.  He's a big ideas guy, and has developed an uniquely pithy way of discussing cutting edge issues, but framing them in a way so that they are intuitive and...

Rose Beynon

Last week I attended a talk at the Marketing Week Live event which fulfilled the Philosophy student I once was and the insights guru I hope to be. It looked at some research commissioned by MTV Belgium into how its key audience (13-17 year olds) identifies itself.MTV is known for being a brand that knows its audience inside out. This is a big part of its appeal – being able to communicate with ...

James Gilheany

Tiger Woods Roger Federer Wayne Rooney Cristiano Ronaldo Franck Ribery Theo Walcott Patrice Evra Ronaldinho What’s the link? All had terrible tournaments recently, yes, but the main link is their association with Nike. Federer takes home $13 million a year, Woods $40 million a year, Rooney £1 million a year. As The Guardian points out this week, it has been a disastrous 12 months for the promot...

Pete Sigrist

It was announced yesterday that The Local, a hyperlocal media experiment run by the New York Times, is closing down.The traditional media has been trying to make hyperlocal work, as they can see it’s one area where news may retain value.  Unlike the big stories of the day, such as what footballers’ wives are wearing, local news is unlikely to be served to people via a trending topic on Twitte...

Elle Macgregor-Chatwin

Following its launch just over a month ago, the iPhone’s Fatbooth app has already received over 50,000 downloads. While fun and quirky, it's essentially a one trick pony. On a mission to separate the wheat from the chaff, this blog post will be taking a look at the functional aspects of digital buzz.Unilever’s smile activated ice-cream vending machine Unveiled at Cannes Lions advertisin...

Nicola Conron

A new take on tissue-pack marketing Turning left up Kingsway to get a sandwich the other lunchtime, I hopped, skipped and jumped my way deftly through the crowds of charity representatives all telling me to ‘smile, it’s not that bad.’Suddenly, my London Lunchtime Blinkers came off as I spotted what appeared to be the Milk Tray Man walking next to me as I approached Boots. He was tall, dark,...

Lee Findell

In a startling day in Australian politics yesterday, Kevin Rudd the Labor Prime Minister resigned before he was set to lose a leadership challenge to his deputy.  The question is did the Australian Labor Party see what had happened when the British Labour Party failed to follow through on a number of attempted coups against Gordon Brown and instead limped to electoral defeat, and decided they did...

Clare Moore-Bridger

The chancellor's tie may have been green, but otherwise, the Budget left environmentalists feeling rather blue. Nothing substantial bar some vagueness on the Green Investment Bank news, and other individualised commitments, such as the promise to review airline passenger tax and an increase in landfill costs.  Interesting though to ponder, is the VAT increase.  You could argue that a tax on co...

Andy Berry

So we’ve had confirmation this week of plans for the sale of High Speed One – the rail link between St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel – as the wider 12 month programme of transferring state-owned assets to the private sector gathers pace.Is this the start of the return of the good (or is that bad?) old days of privatisations, when those landmark sales of BT, BA and British Gas, to name just ...

Gordon Hector

Iain Dale’s expressed something which will resonate with a lot of politics-watchers, saying he’s disappointed to see so many leaks about the budget. It’s unsurprising to see content trailed: the media will talk about the budget for days and weeks in advance, so you don’t want an information vacuum. But one of the most depressing aspects to the last Government was the way policy was reveale...

Alex Pearmain

Social media is presenting unrivalled opportunities for companies and customers. But there are dark clouds gathering, and the PR industry needs to ensure the case for the benefits of social media as a channel for customer relationships is clearly made. Imagine these scenarios, for example...Scenario AQ: Do you like the idea of a product's marketers watching everything you say about a brand to your...

Nicola Conron

Employee engagement is about action, not just satisfactionThe staff survey is a much-used tool to provide internal comms and HR teams with a barometer to measure levels of employee satisfaction, motivation and engagement. It’s often only these hard stats – and how they benchmark against previous years – that get senior bosses to sit up and listen to potential employee problems.Unfortunately,...

Rob O'Halloran

The coalition government is now fully up and running, despite a few hiccups (David Laws’ resignation being the loudest).  But one nagging question for the Lib Dems is how to retain an independent voice?  Some would say they’ve been ‘swallowed up’ by the Conservatives – with those excluded from Ministerial position left to languish on the backbenches without a clear role.  In a move th...

Jason Nisse

Financial regulators need to communicate with their end users “Macro-prudential regulation”. It is a long and important phrase and is at the centre of the shake-up announced by George Osborne, which sees the Bank of England regain its place as top dog in the City regulatory pile after a dozen years of the Financial Service Authority’s predominance.The move was cheered by bankers at the M...

Jason Nisse

Bad feeling about banks has been gushing like a leak from a deep sea oil well for the last couple of years, and the Which? Future of Banking Commission is the latest piece of negativity to wash up on the banks’ doorstops. I won’t go into the detail of the report – read any one of a couple of dozen pieces of analysis in the media – save to say that some recommendations banks can live with ...

It's been a busy week in the media.  iPad fever may have abated somewhat, but it has been followed by further indications that people are consuming media in new ways, both online and offline.Here is our two-minute round-up of what's new.

Alex Pearmain

Foursquare – it’s just hit the second wave of attention, as it begins to reach a critical mass of early adopters sufficient to mean mainstream press start covering it, and before you know it, everyone will have piled in. (Passim – Twitter.) We’ve  been using it for many months at Fishburn Hedges, as is routine amongst our crack team of digital crash test-dummies. You’ve read Simon’s ...

Peter Sigrist

Emergency patients are too likely to return to hospital after being discharged, according to health minister Andrew Lansley.  Today he has announced plans to reduce readmissions, which grew by more than 50 per cent between 1998 and 2008.The previous Government was committed to targets as a way of driving performance in the NHS.  Lansley says the focus on making beds available has been partly res...

Adrian Day

The City has reacted today to the announcement of Terry Leahy’s retirement by marking down Tesco’s shares, probably more as a testament to his performance over the past 14 years than any real concern about the long-term future of the organisation.  Leahy has done a fantastic job of building the Tesco brand into a world-class leader. He’s done it by doing what most companies know they should...

Simon Redfern

I love Foursquare.  People find this irritating.  “Who cares where you are?” they cry,  in exactly the same way they used to say “who cares what you think?” whenever Twitter was mentioned.  Well pishtosh.  Foursquare is big and it’s going to get bigger. All Foursquare does is allow you to check in where you are, and tell your friends.  It’s another social tool that rewards you wi...

I’ve never been a massive fan of Prospect – Private Eye or The Beano is more my style – but I do respect what David Goodhart has achieved over the last 15 years, creating a forum for serious debate in the printed media. Now must be the right time to pass on the baton, with the New Labour era, which Prospect so ably critiqued, replaced by coalition politics. However a smart guy like David mus...

Jo Bradley

The only thing that can be predicted about the impending World Cup with certainty is that at some point, there will be a Daily Mail headline about drunken British louts. Watching football with a pint in hand (or a glass of wine for the ladies out there), is something of a national pastime and the World Cup presents huge opportunities for retailers and pubs alike.But the ready availability of cheap...

Paul Sweetman

An interesting and bold move from Walmart this week – the company has been holding an employee conference and enabled employees to report from it live on Twitter. Follow #WMT2010 for all the details. The concert sounds like it was fun…This step just illustrates the way in which social media platforms are breaking down the boundaries between internal and external communication. In times gone by...

Paul French

The release of the iPad in Europe has once again focused attention on news providers’ plans to increase their multi-media content. The complete elision of broadcast and print, long since forecast, will be with us very soon.Yet for all the progress in online video quality and streaming capability, decent video content search still remains elusive. Google’s Audio Indexing project is still in de...

Laura Wyld

David Cameron’s first PMQs as the boss won’t go down as a classic, but he gave a typically polished performance.  With the details of the Cumbrian shootings still emerging, and the world’s eyes on Israel, stand-in Labour Leader Harriet Harman didn’t have a huge opportunity for a knockabout session.  Where she tried to land some punches, Cameron easily avoided them, often cheered on by hi...

Adam Keal

COI campaigns always seem to benefit from more evaluation rigour than much of those in the private sector.   So now that the Government has unsurprisingly taken the axe to its PR spend, the industry has been warned that it has to show clearer evidence of tangible benefits for any communications. Are the budget cuts a good thing or a bad thing for us?  Clearly it’s going to hurt some agencies...

James Gilheany

The FA has had a tough couple of weeks. Lord Treisman stands down for comments made about rival bidders for the World Cup in 2018 – see Paul Raeburn’s analysis of the impact here. Fabio Capello is courted by Inter Milan following the departure of the Special One. Even the England team itself appears to be spluttering its way to the finals in South Africa. Surely, surely the FA could redeem its...

Andrew Lewin

It is the most tired cliché that a week is a long time in politics, but the three short weeks since the forging of the coalition must seem like an eternity to David Laws.  In the increasingly frenetic pace of our politics, there will be little time to reflect on his short career in government; the focus is already on his successor who faced the cameras this morning, and on assessing the impact t...

Jason Nisse

Icarus had nothing on David Laws. A month ago few outside the Westminster Village would have been able to identify the now former Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The Lib Dem fixer emerged from the shadows, had a brief moment in the limelight and then, for a fraction of the tax he pays annually on his personal fortune, he has returned to the shadows, taking with him one of the few reservoirs of ge...

Andrew Marshall

Post May 6th, we’ve seen a fair bit of comment about the time it can take in Europe to negotiate a coalition.  But very little on the key question of what political parties should say about coalitions before elections.  For all the outrage about the coalition, there’s been precious little useful advice on what the LibDems should have said. And just as the LibDems didn’t say anything meanin...

Ok, maybe not. But the 1922 Committee is a very important institution in the parliamentary Conservative Party, with a fiercely-defended role in representing backbenchers’ views to the party leadership. That’s why Cameron’s attempt to redraw its voting is such a big deal: it’s picking a fight – and it is a fight – with a big beast. It’s also more powerful with Graham Brady as chai...

This Friday sees the international launch of the Apple iPad. Although there might be a bit less hype surrounding the launch on this side of the Atlantic – in part due to the fact that many UK and European newspaper and magazine publishers will be adopting a wait-and-see approach to the development of new apps – the event is significant nonetheless. For the PR industry, the arrival of the...

The twittersphere certainly hasn’t been short of comment today following the unveiling of the new Times and Sunday Times websites. On his blog, Rory Cellan-Jones has one of the best summaries of the look and feel of both sites and of the main points in the paywall debate (which continues to rage on). Existing Times fans will be pleased to see that all the old favourite sections remain and ar...

I wonder if Woodward and Bernstein, facing another late night in the office hard at work bringing down the Nixon administration, ever thought, "to hell with it, let's just do a rip off of that weather story on PA instead". Is the news exclusive a luxury from an era before newsroom cuts limited the intrepid reporter's investigative time and their editor's patience? An anachronism of a pre-Twitt...

Gordon Hector

The Labour government that recently passed away (1997-2010. RIP.) had a much-noted habit of talking about investment, rather than spending. We’re in a new era now. Arguments have started to bubble up about how to make cuts politically acceptable, and pundits are asking how the communication of cuts can ease the pain and avoid an electoral backlash. Fraser Nelson argues George Osborne needs...

Joanna Heath

Today’s announcement on public spending seemed to promise the impossible – deep, sharp and swift cuts that are drastic enough to make a difference to the deficit and keep the City happy, but without hurting that much.All in all a total of £6.25 billion worth of savings have been ‘discovered’ by the new administration after just 13 days in office, with the majority coming from cuts in depa...

Paul Sweetman on lessons to be learnt from the private sector

The CBI has today called on public sector employers to learn lessons from the private sector and avoid a “bloodbath in change”. Strong stuff - but a call with real urgency and relevance, given that today could mark the start of a new age of austerity across the sector.The spectre of spending cuts to tackle the budget deficit loomed large throughout the election campaign. Various rumours have ...

With the news agenda beginning to settle post election, some of us thought we'd vlog about the news stories that have caught our eye this week. Posted by Dan McLoughlin, Alex Pearmain, Simon Redfern & Elle Macgregor-Chatwin

Personality in corporate advertising should be allowed, argues Nick Wright

Now I don't travel too much in my job, but I travel a bit, usually to glamorous far-flung locations such as Slough, Watford or sometimes even Bristol.  So when I actually have the opportunity to go a bit further afield (usually air, sometimes train) it's good to be reminded that the absolutely dreadful state of corporate advertising isn't just confined to the pages of the FT.Heathrow and Geneva a...

The latest twist in the BA/Unite story is a classic case of supply driven communication says Paul Sweetman

The British Airways/Unite story took another twist today with employment lawyers suggesting that the union did not do enough to inform its members of the ballot result. The suggestion is that better use of electronic communication with members could have helped avert the injunction – even simply sending an email to members with information. It’s an interesting point. In employee engagement, on...

When was the last time you checked your Facebook privacy settings asks Alex Pearmain

Facebook. Privacy. The two words have been in close (usually critical) proximity of late.But why the sudden fuss, and what does it say about our attitudes toward communication?Facebook have a fine history of frustrating users with frequent changes to the site’s operations, terms and conditions and privacy settings. These changes are often criticised for being poorly explained and tricky to under...

The ash cloud may have a silver lining for communicators, says Dan McLoughlin

Airports closed, knock-on disruption on the wider transport network and angry customers taking to Twitter. Yes, the ash cloud was back this weekend, taunting travellers and generally causing chaos. Reporters camped outside emptying airports are all repeating the mantra “check with your airline before you leave home”.  But how are those airlines preparing their people to respond to a deluge of...

Peter Sigrist on the behavioural shift of corporate treasurers following the banking crisis

There is an interesting story in today’s Financial Times about corporate treasurers, which sheds light on the relationship between corporate reputation and behaviour change.As unlikely as this may sound, please bear with me. Corporate reputation and behaviour change are both core areas of specialism at Fishburn Hedges, so it’s interesting to show how one may affect the other.Neither lenders no...