January 20th, 2012 by
David
Wednesday was a momentous day in the history of the Internet. It was a day that saw some of the biggest sites in the world effectively close down in protest at proposed US legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) – a bill designed to fight online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property such as music, films and video games. For 24 hours sites such as Wikipedia, Tumblr and WordPress (to name just a few) “blacked-out” their content in protest to what they feel are measures that go further than stopping online piracy, and instead, censor the internet.
Why is a free Internet so important, and how would a censored Internet affect the PR industry? By placing a bar on the freedom of information and investigation, working with journalists to build stories could become nearly unworkable. While we all know you can’t trust Wikipedia implicitly, for PRs and journos, it is a starting point. The fast-paced world of online journalism would be forever changed without it. It may seem to be a huge leap, but the consequences of there not being a “free internet”, would – in the grand scheme of things – mean that user-built sites whose lifeblood is content created by its users wouldn’t be possible and in turn the sharing of news and information that’s become part of our everyday lives.
You could argue the Internet is now ‘too big’ to be destroyed, however, if SOPA was in place in 11 years ago, sites like Wikipedia would in all likeliness not exist today. Incidentally, Wednesday, my first port of call to find out when Wikipedia launched was to check Wikipedia, which just goes to show how valuable a tool the site has become and how often we can take it for granted. And that was the point of yesterday’s black-out, these sites are as much part of our daily lives as BBC News or Coronation St. If they didn’t exist, our lives would be lesser for it.
Think of how many times a day you Wiki something or look up a video on YouTube. It could be for inspiration for a pitch or because you have to write a press release on the banana export legislation of Costa Rica. We get inspiration and information from the Internet. Hell, you could even think of a great campaign idea based on that video of Hello by Lionel Ritchie made up from film clips that seems to be going around. So what would really happen if SOPA went through?
In a nutshell, more trips to the library – and no wants that.
David Macnamara
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Posted in Digital PR, Eulogy!, Onlinefire, PR industry | No Comments »
November 30th, 2011 by
David
On the 25th October, George Monbiot wrote an astoundingly vitriolic attack against the advertising industry, an industry that Eulogy! is proud to be well acquainted with. Our expertise within the marketing services sector brings us into contact with many agencies and brands who tirelessly work for their clients and companies as well as a plethora of charitable and worthwhile causes, which I’m pretty sure don’t burden us with debt, restrict our freedoms or do any number of things that Mr Monbiot’s article claim.
Of the clients I regularly work with, I see inspirational work that highlights plights and causes the world over. Just a snapshot of these include work with inner-city schoolchildren, leukaemia and cancer sufferers and budding athletes eager for their shot at glory. Advertising plays a huge part in communicating the message that these often ignored areas of society attempt to broadcast, and in doing so bring in attention, funding and advocates.
Just a look down the street in the past few weeks will have shown the sea of poppies that flooded our streets in support of those who give their lives for the UK, a campaign that receives huge support from the advertising industry in terms of creative production as well as advertising placement. Case in point: a slot during X-Factor worth £3m was given to them free of charge for this year’s appeal. A media infrastructure that allows companies to spread such important social messages should not be so readily dismissed.
Yes, Mr Monbiot may dislike many of the products, services and messages (he’d probably just seen another ‘Go Compare’ advert) that are communicated through billboards and TV ad breaks, but there are constantly ideas and reports covered by the mainstream newspapers that could be deemed equally influential, misleading and morally questionable, and so I feel his footing in the argument is far from sound. In the end, surely there are more important things to discuss and critique than the too often used scapegoat-for-society’s-ills that is advertising?
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Tags: advertising
Posted in Eulogy!, PR industry, advertising | No Comments »
My latest guilty pleasure is Katie Price Signed (probably unsurprising coming from the girl that religiously records Jeremy Kyle everyday). Last week’s episode however, was actually educational from a PR’s point of view – that’s dedication for you. It was all about creating viral clips. The final nine hapless contestants were tasked by the Grande Dame of page 3 to “create buzz”. Each group were given 200 quid, a camera phone, a location and told to make a film that would go viral – other than that there were no directions. Whichever clip when posted on t’interweb garnered the most hits would win.
Chaos ensued as only two group members were allowed to star in the video and the other person had to film – inevitably this ensured that the point of the challenge was missed. Instead of spending the eight hours available to them coming up with a creative concept which might warrant spreadability, they bickered about who would be front of camera.
The results were pretty woeful. One group did a skit on Prince William and Kate Windsor (nee Middleton) on their honeymoon night, another also centred on the sex sells theme and spent the afternoon dressed as nuns flashing anyone that passed by and the third took the comic route of having someone dressed in a sumo suit exercising on the edge of a pond who was given a shove by a very Jim Carrey Riddler-type character. Despite being allowed to send the clip to one contact per group to spread the word and get the metaphorical ball rolling between them they didn’t manage even 1,000 hits. As one of the judges waspishly commented: “About as much buzz as wasp flying into a window”.
This just goes to show that creating a viral isn’t easy. What you may consider funny, isn’t to other people. The key is to think about what would make you forward something onto your friends. The programme rightly said that ad agencies (and indeed PR agencies) are increasingly turning to viral as a medium as it is a cost effective route to gaining wide scale awareness – however it is only cost effective if it does create wide scale awareness – otherwise it would probably be cheaper to place an ad in Downstream magazine (a specialist title for the Oil and Gas industry) which has more reach.
Viral isn’t easy and it just goes to show that not everyone with a camera can generate buzz; it is all about understanding how to get the clip correctly seeded out so that it does get those all important views. It is here that PR comes into its own. We have the skillset, the contacts and the heritage in creating conversations – both online and offline.
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Tags: Creativity, Digital, Katie Price Signed, TV, Viral Marketing
Posted in Consumer communications, Creativity, Digital PR, Eulogy!, PR industry, TV, Virals | No Comments »
Baking is my hobby. Unlike most hobbies you undertake after office hours, it’s not something that helps you lose weight or meet new people. Baking is a hobby that gives you great culinary skills but best of all it gives you the ability to put huge smiles on faces with lovely cake.
I’ve baked a few cakes and jam tarts for the office and I’m proud to say the discerning palettes at Eulogy! polished them off in minutes. I feel I’m doing a service for the agency by giving them a bit of sugar to get the creative juices flowing and create some excellent PR!
When I was asked by the Grand Marnier account team to have a go at making the brands chocolate fondant recipe I was delighted to take part. At the time I was hooked by the British bake off and considered applying, so I was treating this task as though I was competing in the competition. That was until I realised I was being judged on producing a type of cake slightly out of the realms of my signature bakes. The image from the recipe looked like something Raymond Blanc would whip up without looking. While I feel confident with sponge and pastry, getting the gooey soft centre and silky hard casing correct for the fondant would prove a challenge.
Armed with my ingredients and Cath Kidston apron, I pre heated the oven and carefully read the recipe instructions three times. As the mixture started to emerge into what I felt was the correct consistency I threw caution to the wind and divided the carefully crafted chocolate goo into individual pots. After placing the fondants in the oven I had one eye on Coronation Street and the other watching every millimetre of the mixture rise.
When the seven minutes of cooking time was up I pulled the cakes out of the oven and plopped onto a plate with whipped cream and icing sugar. Initial reviews were very good as the piping hot runny chocolate centre went down a storm with my first critic, my possibly biased boyfriend. However after sitting in the fridge all night waiting to come to the office the cakes did not look their best. I should not have worried so much, while they might not have looked like something from Pierre Hermé in Paris; they were devoured by the Eulogy! cake lovers in seconds. As I like to say, it’s not what it looks like it’s how it tastes…well that’s what I like to think anyway. The fondants provided a little sugar to fuel our excellent creative PR ideas.
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Tags: Creativity, Eulogy!, Grand Marnier
Posted in A bit of fun, Eulogy! | 1 Comment »
On Thursday I boarded a plane with trepidation. Not because I am a nervous flier, but because I was headed up to Edinburgh for the final instalment of my MBA – Organisation Behaviour. Having been a model student and completed my homework my nerves didn’t stem from being unprepared, but because the subject matter seemed extremely green for a red and I feared I was in for four days of hell.
If that last sentence was utter gobbledygook to you, you’re not alone. I also stumped my fellow study groupers with the same sentiment. Following a lecture on individual difference, we were allotted our syndicate teams and asked to discuss the kinds of individual data we captured and acted upon within our organisations (for those of you that know me, the word data meant I was up out of my seat and in the break-out room before anyone else had even gathered their files – if there’s anything I know its data, so all my fears evaporated – this would be a breeze).
I shared my group with people from huge organisations such as British Gas, J&J, Royal Bank of Canada and people from smaller companies including a steel manufacturer and vaccine producer. Spurred on by data collection, I set about mining the information from my colleagues – although none of them had much to say (until we went on to discuss data privacy – but that’s a whole other blog post) further than discussing what happens to the information collected at interview and during appraisals. I on the other hand was fit to bursting with oodles of individual difference information on my fellow Eulogites. This is because we use a psychometric testing tool called Insights. However, where some organisations seemed to use similar tests for candidate selection, at Eulogy! we use it to understand ourselves and team mates. In a nutshell (and at a very basic level) Insights through a series of multiple choice questions assigns you a colour either Red, Green, Yellow or Blue and attached to each colour are a series of traits which suggest how you manage people and how you yourself like to be managed – from your communication preferences through to your speed of work. This has become a part of Eulogy! culture. We all joke about our colours and are constantly reminded by our blue colleagues to TIDY UP or encouraged by our more yellow ones to come for a drink, however, behind the fun facade it really has helped us at an operational level. We are all aware of each others’ colour and make a conscious effort to work in the ways that suit that person, making a very harmonious (most of the time) and conflict free work place. One of our common sayings is that it PR not ER, but this reminds us that the job itself is stressful enough without having to worry about team conflicts – and Insights has helped us to eradicate this.
I was astonished to find that Eulogy! (and indeed the PR industry as a whole) was well ahead of the game when it came to Organisational Behaviour (particularly given the size of companies and range of sectors represented on the programme who in my mind were the guys to follow) – however, given our PR Week Best Places to Work accolade last week, I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. Lesson learnt. At least I’ve now got something to write about in the exam in December – not bad for an uncaring red. I’ll be fascinated to see whether my green side increases as a result of my stint in Edinburgh.
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Tags: Best Place to Work, culture, Eulogy!, Insight training, Organisational Behaviour
Posted in Eulogy!, Training | No Comments »
