What does the Occupy movement really mean?

Posted Colin Byrne on October 19th, 2011 | Filed under Current Affairs, Financial, Politics | Comment now »

I am in LA for the first time in twenty years. Last time I was looking at how community groups, local government and businesses helped heal the wounds of the LA riots. Only a few months ago American colleagues and friends were asking what the hell was going on in the UK with the looting and riots. Now they are scratching their heads to try and figure out what the Occupy Wall Street movement and its US, European and Asian spin offs mean. The front page of today's (Tuesday) New York Times has a photo montage of protesters airing various causes, from graduate unemployment to anti-war and anti-bank to anti-Obama. One picture has an attractive young woman holding one of those cardboard hand drawn signs American protesters seem to like. It says simply "I am very upset". The anthem of middle class discontent. The NYT headline is "Countless grievances, One thread; We're Angry". Rainbow coalitions are not new, certainly not to us Brits. This is different though. A mash up of pissed off people with different issues, spreading from city to city (as the UK riots did this summer) across the globe like a spontaneous virus in tents. Sure people are pissed off at what they see as unfettered and irresponsible capitalism, and governments who seem to have no power to control it. They are pissed off about losing their jobs and their homes and want someone to take the rap, be it business or banks or governments or just 'the system', 'the man'. But there is also a deep undercurrent of the young, educated and unemployed. Kids who are the first generation since the war to face worse lives than their parents. Or getting a job and having to pay for the long life pensions of those older generations. This is a totally different youth unemployment than that which blunted Britain in the 1970's and 1980's, the wasted youth of the dole queue rock movement. They are educated, social engagers with trashed expectations. They may not be looting trainers in JD Sports but their deep seated anger and distrust is an issue for businesses, decision makers and governments. When I joined one of The Prince's Trusts 20 years ago, I was told the story of how Business in the Community was founded before Prince Charles got involved. It was a response from mainly Conservative supporting British business leaders and then trade secretary Michael Heseltine to the youth riots in English inner cities. Basically Hezza put them on a bus, toured burnt out neighbourhoods and said, we have to fix this, or it will be your business next. Two decades later capitalism faces the same challenge globally, to demonstrate it's responsibility and enormous value add to society. Many individual businesses do this daily, across a variety of issues, from education to public health. They have great stories to tell. More have to do the same. The challenge for all of us in the corporate reputation and societal change business is to figure out if the Occupy movement, connected by social media, is a short term bubbling up of local grievances or something more seismic, generational and long term.

Politics and the Media

Posted Colin Byrne on October 4th, 2011 | Filed under Uncategorised | Comment now »

One of the Labour blogs jumped with glee on evidence of ‘strong arm Tory media tactics’ this week, posting BBC footage of Steve Hilton steering off-message senior Tory MP Andrew Tyrie into a side room for a bit of a, erm, pre interview pep talk on the Chancellor’s speech. Shock horror. Of course Labour would never stoop so low! Yeah right. That Alistair Campbell was such a pussycat. I once got into a near fist fight trying to prevent an off-message member of theShadow Cabinet holding a press conference. Would I have done it on camera? Of course not, but these pesky things get everywhere. All the BBC film shows is what a pain in the bum rebelious backbenchers are to HM Government PLC , whoever is running it. I did hear an interesting programme on BBC Radio Four driving home last night though, ‘In Defence of Politics’ presented by Prof Matthew Flinders. His thesis was that our media is overwhelmingly interested in the froth and rows of politics, to the damaging detrement of the body politic in the eyes of the voters. Tony Blair, he of the ‘feral beasts’ speech, popped up telling a story about trying to explain the good work the last Government did - and this one continues to do – on aid to Africa, and the lives saved, but how he was met with blank looks because the media rarely covered such a ‘good news’, positive story. Alastair Campbell quoted research showing that 30 years ago the positive-to-negative story ratio in the British media was 3-1. Now it is nearer 1-18. Of course the media did not invent the expenses scandal. Politicians created it and The Daily Telegraph to its great credit exposed it. That exposure has critcially weakened people’s trust and engagement with politics. Now every politician, whatever their motives and however honourable their goals, is automatically treated with suspicion. That is not the media’s fault. But as The Guardian’s Micheal White observed, there has to be a balance. I wrote a chapter on the media and politics a few year’s back for a book overseen by EI’s Julia Hobsbawn, ‘Where the truth lies”. In it I told the story of when I interviewed for Head of Press for Labour in the late 1980’s. My pitch was ‘it’s war’ between the press and Labour. I got the job. It was also true. More recently trench warfare and hand to hand brutality have been replaced by soft power and smiling diplomacy. Witness the well documented and entirely politically understandable sucking up to The Sun etc by successive governments and oppositions. Post the hacking enquiry, the balance of power between politics and the media may change, but will this nudge the positive-to-negative story ratio back towards the positive? Not necessarily. It may just mean that (Labour) leaders are looking over their shoulder a bit less when they make policy. It has been a weird couple of weeks in politics – I haven’t been at the conferences so have largely consumed them through the media, much of it social. Stories of rival political positions and name calling have given way to politicians saying pretty much the same thing, springing from reading the same market research, and claiming that the other guy nicked their lines and ideas. Given the changing nature of media platforms, the growing cynicism of the public towards politics, the ability to interact with grassroots members and supporters without having to expensively herd them to Manchester or Liverpool or Birmingham to talk at them, you do wonder if leaders are continuing to hold annual conferences because, well, they always have. After all, if you want to make a keynote address to the nation, or launch a new policy, there are more risk free and less costly ways of doing it than at an annual conference (where as Ed M discovered, even a technical hitch can mess with your message) watched by dwindling TV audiences. In terms of re-engaging with the voter, party conferences are more political masturbation than passionate sex.

In praise of Penelope Keith

Posted Colin Byrne on September 21st, 2011 | Filed under Celebrities | Comment now »

Travelling in on my train from west Sussex, nose deep in email and twitter, I hear an unmistakable voice from my past, crystal sharp in the sleepy commuter carriage. Weird to suddenly come face to face with someone who in a left field kinda way influenced my choices, possibly life and outcomes. Not a politician, a mentor, a fond remembered teacher or tutor. It's none other than actress Penelope Keith, whose magnificent Margot of seventies prized sitcom The Good Life is etched on the face of British comedy. As an early teenager, I always fancied Margot more than the fresh faced Felicity Kendall, even with mud on her wellies. Working class boys always aspire to posh women. Get over it. When I was looking at colleges with mixed arts degrees, I had the choice of one up North or Kingston. Leaving aside the Angie Bowie connection, the fact that Kingston bordered Surbiton, where my halls of residence would be, clinched it. If it was full of sexy Penelope's and Felicity's, let alone houses with big gardens and kindly folk growing vegetables, instead of scalliies, it was Surbiton here I come. Do you ever play the 'what if'' game? What would have happened to your career etc had you done that instead of this? Course you do. I can't say for certain that I wouldn't have edited the student newspaper, got into politics, dated that social sec, gone to that gig, met that tortured singer, written that review, got that first job in PR, got that next job and the next and the next, worked with folk like Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, Phillip Gould etc, met this person and that person, developed those interests, had I stuck the pin in the map at some other college, some other part of Britain. Who the hell knows. But I suspect my travelling companion this morning was part of one of those little switches that then flick other switches and set your life on a track. Thanks Penelope. And by the way, you still look and sound fab.

This ain’t rock and roll, this is creativity

Posted Colin Byrne on August 18th, 2011 | Filed under Celebrities, The Media | Comment now »

I actually wrote this post months ago and you know how it is, work, family, more work, social media, financial crises, riots, I forgot all about it. Forgive me if you think I should have continued to forget all about it, but I was trying to examine a case study in creativity, not recreate my teenage pop scribbler days. Anyway... Whilst much of Britain pored over Royal Wedding supplements recently, I spent part of our extended quadruple Bank Holiday break (a mystery to my American friends) reading Paul Trynka's fabulous biography of David Bowie, "Starman". A story of creativity, creativity lost and creativity regained (and then, hey ho, pretty much lost again completely.) This is the third excellent memoire on the late 60's and 70's rock scene in the past year - along with Nick Kent's "Apathy for the devil" and Keith Richard's "Life" - and a wealth of detail on the most fascinating, unique and creative contemporary British recording artist. It is important to recognise and celebrate creativity, and understand what shapes and drives it. As well as taking us through Bowie's social, cultural and musical roots, and taking me through the Ziggy to Young Americans to Low period which charted my own journey from early teens to university (ie musical, stylistic, social and sexual liberation), the first 200 pages showcase the most intensely creative period of Bowie's career - a creative red thread linking some of the rough diamonds of his quirky debut album (more a musical CV than an album, released ironically at the same time as Sgt Pepper, the great creative musical milestone of the time. Check out 'Let me sleep beside you') through "Space Oddity", "The man who sold the world", "Hunky Dory", Ziggy Stardust" and tailing off on the highlights of "Alladin Sane". A brilliant mash up of everything from Dylan to The Stooges and Velvet Underground, Lennon to English music hall - Bowie as the self proclaimed 'stylish thief'. A period of joyfull English creativity, before he met America, cocaine and near psychosis. Plus, what better teen anthems for the early 70's could you get than "All the young dudes", "Changes" and "Oh! You pretty things", as we discovered there really was more to life than greyness, miners' strikes, Led Zeppelin and boys and girls with greasy hair. Don't get me wrong. The futurism and gothic funk of "Diamond Dogs" was great entertainment, and "Sweet Thing/Candidate" one of his most powerful vocals. "Young Americans" turned Ziggy wannabees like me into Soul Boys, making me explore black music for the first time. "Aladdin Sane", a series of postcards from the edge of America took this early teen Catholic northerner closer to drug fuelled LA and NYC sex fests than anything else at the time, and in numbers like "Drive in Saturday" again some great songwriting. The creativity returned in his self imposed exile in bleak Berlin, collaborating with Eno and others. Particularly "Low" and "Heroes" show a return to creative output drawing heavily on situation, state of mind and feeding off the creative inputs of collaborators. But in those early albums, the birth and death of Ziggy Stardust and many of Bowie's brain cells, there is a creativity and rewriting of the song writing rules that Trynka's book made me go back and listen to again with new ears. " Space Oddity", his big breakthrough single, is less a song than a mini musical dramatic epic. " Changes"," Life on Mars" and many other songs from those early albums show an innovation in songwriting that often gets lost with the focus on costumes and image. The constant changes of look, from curly haired post hippy to stylish droog, to the Hunger City predator to white soul rebel, are just the surface sheen on the hair pin bends of musical styles and influences. How many musical artists have produced great working ranging so dramatically from Hunky Dory to Ziggy to Diamond Dogs to Young Americans to Low in a mere handful of years, and managed to slip in a starring role in a major art house movie ("The man who fell to earth"), revitalise the careers of Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople in his spare time and inspire whole generations of new musicians and music. Not to mention live it a bit large on the sex and drugs front. For me, Bowie ranks with Lennon-McCartney as the great British contemporary songwriters, and is the stand out creative force in modern music. The big bang that coalesces into creative force, what saps away that energy, and what can restore it is fascinating, and Bowie's story, so well told by Trynka, is a great narrative on creativity as well as fame and personal branding.

Smart Marketing: Mobilising Your Brand

Posted Colin Byrne on June 10th, 2011 | Filed under Consumer, Personal, Public Relations, Technology, Weber Shandwick | Comment now »

My eldest child turns 16 this year. For her generation the lifestyle value of mobile phones equals the value of laptops 8 years ago. I will not be surprised if soon we witness a generation who will not assume they need a laptop in the light of falling prices and massively increased capabilities of Smartphones. This is the generation of the future, the generation living in the “Me Economy”. A generation of consumers who are used to have the world spinning around their needs, their demands, their experiences, their content…and who wouldn’t expect anything less. Five years ago, mobile phones were simply handsets for establishing contact between two people. But driven by technologically literate, demanding and empowered consumers we have swiftly arrived in the “Era of SMART”. With rocketing growth in sales of 85 per cent in the first quarter of 2011, Smartphones have now become key to mainstream consumer life, increasingly the first and only point of interaction with the brands and businesses that matter most to "smart" consumers. This week my firm launched a Weber Shandiwck pan-European research report, “Smart Marketing: Mobilising Your Brand.”, a survey of 2,000 Smartphone users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. It found that mobile devices are becoming the primary channel for interaction with organisations and brands, and that many companies are failing to invest in and focus on mobile as a more personal and engaging audience communications channel. Facts: 45 per cent of those polled said they prefer to do business with companies that make it easy to interact with them via mobile. One in four prefer to use a Smartphone instead of a PC to access e-mail and information even at home. 30% of users pass on stories about a company via mobile devices. One in three say their purchasing decision is affected by the mobile channel. And at the #smartmarketing launch event at WS London, which gathered together senior marketing and communications practitioners, the EMEA Head of Mobile Ad Sales at Microsoft, Paul Lyonette, brought an interesting fact to our attention. 70% of PC searches terminate with a purchase within a month. Yet the same percentage of mobile searches lead to a sale in only an hour. One hour! Ultimately, mobile is today’s digital frontier and the next stage in computing and web-surfing as a medium reshaping consumer experiences and demand. And this “mobilisation” of everyday life has profound implications for all of us involved in the business of relationship management. Whether as a complementary activity to watching TV, a platform for social media, researching products and services, or purchasing them, Smartphones are no longer for saving time. We now actively choose to spend time on them. The research also shows that quality of mobile interaction plays a key role in brand preference. A brand website which is not optimised for mobile use with slow uploading, difficult navigation, SPAM text message adverts, etc. can only “intoxicate” reputation. Mobile surfing is embedded into our daily routine. It is impossible to ignore this phenomenon especially with younger consumers who have never experienced life without mobiles. But in spite of this mobile revolution our research suggests that many companies, organisations and brands are yet to catch up. Why are businesses and brands so fearfully observing Mobile as an approaching wave when it has already flooded the consumer space and smart consumers are happily surfing and fishing in it? Smart marketeers are already integrating mobile into their communication strategies and tactics. Because PC is increasingly moving to IC – from the Personal Computers to the Intimate Computers that mobile phones are today. We don't claim that mobile is the silver bullet or a single solution to all communication and marketing challenges a business or brand may have. But it is now a facilitating platform for the implementation of an INLINE strategy across all available channels. A cross-medium for businesses to deliver total brand involvement from awareness through engagement to transaction. For full details of the Weber Shandwick’s Smart Marketing Report, click here.

Evolve or die in the “Idea Economy”

Posted Colin Byrne on May 13th, 2011 | Filed under Consumer, Personal, Politics, Public Relations, Technology, The Media | Comment now »

This post is based on a speech on the future of the PR industry I gave at the excellent Think 11 event at The British Library yesterday. Great event which we should have more of, with key insights from host of top PR and media thinkers. As well as being the 10th anniversary of my firm, Weber Shandwick, which I have had the privilege to lead in the UK and now Europe for most of a decade, I realised the other day that this is my 30th year in PR. People look at the youthful Byrne good looks and don’t believe it, think I started with my badge for spinning in the Boy Scouts or something, but it is true. Half that time has been in house, in the private, not for profit, politics and the public sector. Half with Shandwick, now Weber Shandwick. During that time I have seen the move from the broadcast model of PR to the engagement model, powered by digital & social media, changes in media consumption, and frankly changes – often driven by demographics (as the recent Arab Spring has been) – in public attitudes and trust. The rules by which the world now operates have been rewritten – through economic austerity, through competition and commoditisation, through technological revolution and changing cultural mindset. The cycle of change in marketing and communications is spinning faster. The offers and services that once defined our business will no longer guarantee future success for the PR industry, whether agency or in-house teams. We must understand those changes and the opportunity we have, to guide ourselves and our clients through this changing landscape. But we must also recognise the imminent threat we face – diminished influence through complacency and inaction. The changing communications world has made it clear to us that the thing our clients and end audiences value most from us are the ideas generated by our people on a daily basis. Ideas change the world, people and communications facilitate that process. People with transformational ideas - ideas that don’t just engage but move to action and have a tangible desired outcome - are the most valuable of all. The emergence of these people – the creative strategic thinking class – has enabled the communications world to finally move away from its disciplinary silos and toward the need to be a creatively and socially agnostic service industry. Structurally that’s tough, we all have businesses to run and people to manage. But to borrow a slogan from my old mentor Peter Mandelson, you have to meet the challenge and make the change. We work in an Ideas Economy, a world where those with the best idea shall triumph and those without shall watch. This is nothing new. Ideas have always driven change and revolution. But linked to recent dramatic technological change we find ourselves at a tipping point that forces us to ask ourselves a very fundamental question – do we embrace change and evolve? Or do we go on as we are and wither? I think our industry is changing, but is it fast enough to seize the day? Indulge me in a personal story which explains where I am coming from. Last June I was sitting in an over-air-conditioned conference room in Cannes, having been fortunate enough to be invited as one of the judges of the Cannes Lions PR Awards. I knew the form as Weber Shandwick was one of the lucky recipients of an award in its inaugural year in 2009. So in 2010 I was delighted to be asked to join my peers in judging some great PR work. It was a truly fascinating and enriching experience. As we sat judging the entries I encountered a collective PR-industry-come-to-Jesus moment. Picture the scene. A dozen international PR agency leaders watching smart videos, sifting, debating and discarding. A thorough and deliberative process. After much discussion we agree on the shortlist of winners. As always, we were judging the campaign submissions without the agency details. One campaign in particular has blown the judges away, united us in praise and collective agreement for the Titanium Lion accolade. A campaign that had a big, emotionally engaging and compelling idea at its heart that created a momentum to carry it across all media channels. Imagine the euphoria we felt as a group reviewing such groundbreaking work from one of our – as yet unnamed – industry cousins. But then imagine the surprise and self questioning when we discovered that this PR industry campaign of campaigns – came from an ad agency. I found it interesting and slightly alarming. For me it underlined that the marketing world had irreversibly changed but and that the PR industry as a whole hadn’t fully acknowledged the change. A favourite pastime of any PR industry gathering in recent years is speculating on – and in some cases, but not mine, prematurely celebrating - the decline of advertising. Sure the old advertising model is under pressure through changing media consumption, new technologies, declining trust and changing values. In a single decade we have gone from a boom in online display banner ads to a situation where for every 1000 pop-up display ads, less than 2 are clicked on. But advertising is the great survivor and entrepreneur. In that same decade, search advertising has grown from 1% of US online advertising spend to almost half, and as we read in last week’s Economist the innovation of real time bidding is allowing marketers to buy access to known and interested audiences. Imagine a year in which the Campaign of the Year award at the PR Week, Sabre or PRCA Awards was won by an advertising agency. We would be beside ourselves. We would call foul. But privately we would acknowledge that which to date we have not collectively accepted – the historic creative superiority of our advertising cousins, the mantle we have for so long been desperate to take. As I saw in Cannes that is what is happening. The inaugural Cannes PR titanium Lion was won by CUMMINSNITRO for the “Best Job in the World” campaign. And in 2010 it was TBWA/CHIAT/DAY for their “REPLAY” campaign. Both phenomenal campaigns. Both highly deserved. Both ad agencies. My goal here is not about dissecting what we all know – whether or not our future looks different from our past. That, for all but the most Luddite, is a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. It’s about how we secure our place at the big table of marketing communications today and tomorrow. We have just witnessed an amazing example of the new bottom up communications and empowered audiences in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. Political revolutions are one of the oldest forms of public expression. What made the recent activities remarkable was their pace, their domino effect and their ability to achieve major change. Whilst revolt has been commonplace in the political world for centuries, it’s a new beast for brands and organisations to contend with. Reputations have always mattered but in an audience-empowered world, driven by social collectivism and technology, they have become much harder to manage and much easier to destroy. Think of it this way. Facebook has 500m users. If it were a country it would be the 4th largest in the world. It also emerged this week as one of the top three drivers of traffic to so called traditional media sources. So imagine that instead of the old ruling Egyptian elite it was your organisation or client. Imagine the impact of tens of thousands of your customers hitting the “dislike” button and imagine how long it would take you to rebuild that trust. We live in a world now defined by digital revolution and social empowerment. Of advocates and badvocates, powered by technology. Collectively, we have worked hard to build PR away from being a narrow niche sector – once described to me by a captain of industry as being the marketing discipline at the tradesman’s entrance – into being the critical part of the marketing mix that it is today. But past success is no longer good enough to succeed in the new world. Accelerating social technology, commoditisation, inter-disciplinary competition – all of them are asking fundamental questions of the sustainability of the PR agency and much of the industry in its traditional form. Our heritage of advocacy, influence, conversation and trust is more vital today than ever. But others are encroaching. PR is the lover that all within marketing desire and it is the specialism all believe they can, and should, now do. And it’s not just our sector which is feeling the pressure. It is professional marketing as a whole with the rising confidence of the consumer, empowered by access to information and new platforms, and the influencers who were once authoritative being no longer as convincing. The rise and credibility of the non-“media” advocate - the employee, the mummy-blogger, the Googling patient, the Facebook revolutionary – is part of our evolutionary challenge. This change is not going away, just as the television revolution of the 60s and 70s in politics didn’t go away. Depending on where you sit ideologically on this spectrum you will see that as a glorious opportunity or a threat. Personally I see it as the former. We talk a lot about the explosion of information we have been witnessing for some time but unless you really step back and think about just how colossal this is, you can’t appreciate what the future will hold and just why it is so important we evolve. Google recently announced that today and tomorrow, or any two days you care to think of, we as a world will produce more information than we did from the dawn of time through to 2003. Imagine that for a second. To put that into context, a recent IDC study estimated that in 2010 the world produced 1.2 zettabytes of digital information. For those that had never heard of a Zettabyte, me being one of them, 1 zettabyte equals 1 trillion gigabytes. To put that into context that’s equivalent to the 6 billion people on Earth “tweeting” continuously for 100 years. What’s more, they predicted, at this rate it will be another 35 times larger in just 9 years. This is rampant revolution people and it’s here to stay. Our mandate to evolve becomes more pressing every day. Against this challenge of massive competitive noise, badvocates who are many time more likely to act than advocates, across infinite channels, the task is to engage the right people at the right time with the right stories. Those who do will lead. Two key words there. Engagement – and I have talked about the move from broadcast to engagement – and stories. Such a nicer word than spin, and a very different proposition. Spin, overt efforts to control the dialogue and messages, alienate people. Stories engage them. The best communicators are storytellers. But this is not unique to us. Ad agencies and other marketing disciplines can do it to. Even management consultants want to get in on the act. So another evolutionary hurdle is justifying our value proposition – creative and engaging content, cost effective connections to communities we want to engage with, added value intelligence and analysis, not just insight but foresight. My view has always been that much innovative modern communications draws on political campaigning. Politics is about ideas to influence an outcome. Just as the Saatchi & Saatchi ads for the 1979 Thatcher election victory – recently voted one of the best British ads every along with a Wonderbra and a WW1 recruitment poster – helped change social marketing, The Obama election campaign changed modern community engagement. It wasn’t just about the technology behind social media, it was about a change in cultural mindset. Indeed social media is really just a higher octane fuel for your emotionally engaging story, what one communications academic recently called ‘exceptional authentic content’. So, our challenge in my view is changing the way we think, work and recruit. From broadcast to engagement. Seeking less to control the dialogue and more to influence and engage in the conversation. From information to innovation. From communications people to content people. As one global PR industry guru told me in recently, we in PR need to move from being seen as the comms people – waiting for someone to create news for us to communicate – to being seen as the ideas people, otherwise we will lose our seat at the table. All too often we come up with media ideas or publicity ideas when CEOs and CMOs are looking for big transformational brand ideas, and don’t care where they come from. What we can’t do - and many in PR and advertising try to do this – is retrofit ideas and campaigns to the new communications landscape. Ideas can’t simply be adapted for the new multi-platform, multi-influencer, engagement-driven world. They have to be built for it. I don’t claim a monopoly on wisdom, but here is my platform for evolution. 1. CREATIVELY DIGITALISING WHAT WE OFFER In today’s environment the adequate positioning of a brand is no longer a matter of message formulation only. It is increasingly about the provision of rich media content across a variety of channels that sparks conversation, multiplies and drives influence and advocacy. Media is no longer purely about the provision of information. Media is about the formation and expression of opinion. Digital and social media are tools which helps us to deliver our core activity – telling genuine and involving stories in order to own the relationship between an entity and its “public”. But those who think that online can do the whole job would be missing the big picture. 43% of consumers still constantly cross-reference between channels and rely on traditional media such as print, radio and TV to cross-check the credibility of facts published online. Stories that engage in our multi-channel, multi-influencer world are not offline or online, they are INLINE. The key to successful communications lies in telling a truly engaging, compelling and consistent brand story across both ‘old’ and ‘new’ channels. 2. CREATIVELY INNOVATING, BOTH COMMERCIALLY AND ENTREPRENEURIALLY One of my recent hires in Europe was our first Chief Innovation Officer. My firm is not known for chucking money at crazy hunches. Innovation to us means commercial innovation, not doing the shiny new thing for the sake of it but finding new, sustainable ways to build ourselves and our clients an agency of tomorrow. The innovation age in which we live requires us to be as nimble and cunning as the organisations currently defining it, be they Facebook, Google, Groupon or other social commerce. Our innovation unit seeks to be constructively disruptive, finding the inefficiencies in our model, creating new services and offers to provide a more complete and creatively-driven solution for our clients, and constructing major creative ideas where often we own the IP and benefit jointly with our clients from taking them to market. The commercial model agencies have been built on – giving the big creative idea away and making money through billing time online and writing press releases – has to ultimately change. 3. CREATIVELY EVOLVE TO BE BETTER AT SELLING AND MAXIMISING “THE BIG IDEA” IN THE NEW WORLD The success of every great campaign – from the Obama election to the great work we rightly celebrate with PR awards – is rooted in the power of the idea at its heart and the intellectual capital and skill applied to making it fly. In the “Ideas Economy” it is the creation and full implementation of transformational ideas that is the future success of our discipline. It is no longer enough for PR people to just deal in media ideas, important though that remains. But more often than not we are still viewed as just message-disseminators. We have to prove to CMOs that is not true and we have more to offer. We have to evolve from being communications people to ideas people. The new environment is re-defining the role of PR, setting PR more at the front of and central to the communications process. We are no longer solely in the media and communications business. We are increasingly in the content creation and ideas business. Game-changing and compelling campaigns, like the example of Replay discussed earlier, are those campaigns which are less about the communication of a message alone, but are increasingly about the creation of conversation, participation and empowerment and engagement. And within the structure of our businesses, this means re-thinking the creative process. Instead of pretending a creative director, or a plaster cow in reception, is the key to creativity, we should create platforms to unleash creativity - what we call the turbulent mix – and bring wider, more diverse thinking and experience into the ideas generation process (including young entrants often given the crap jobs and the phone rounds). In this way would we stimulate creative thinking fitting for the Ideas Economy and our goal to be the ideas people. 4. Creative DIVERSITY in our employees, recruitment, opinions and output That brings me on to a pet subject of mine. Diversity. In the USA this is now a legal issue, and my firm rightly has a Diversity Officer working to ensure the firm employs diversity best practice in recruitment and promotion. Here it isn’t, but it should be a matter of concern. When I wrote an article for “PR Week” a few years ago I did a straw poll of photographs across a number of issues. There were only two non white faces and one of those was a footballer in a sports sponsorship story. It is not just our industry this is an issue for but those brands and organisations we work with or for. The need for brands to understand and communicate with socially, culturally and racially diverse groups in the UK for example has never been greater. A recent insight study by our Multi-Cultural Communications practice found that over 50% of people in the UK, including many within the white population, believed that ethic groups are often ignored or an after-thought for brands and organisations, and that this was often reflected in their marketing. Our industry still fails to reflect the wider society we live in and claim to be able to understand and converse with. The fact remains that at the heart of our specialism, we are storytellers. And good storytellers are able to speak with, empathize and understand a variety of audiences, whether they be customers, clients, the media or employees and whatever ethnic, social, economic, political or cultural background they come from. I believe that diversity is what brings real insight, credibility and dynamism to the creative "turbulent mix". Diversity in our employees creates diversity in our ideas and our output that allows our clients and organisations to engage with rather than talk at increasingly diverse communities. We need to mix people with differing passions and skills, with diverse backgrounds and experiences, to bring the insights, critical thinking, broader perspective and cutting-edge ideas we need. Some of what I’ve talked about is based on the views and insights of my firm, some are personal from thirty years experience in PR, but I’ve just tried to give you some specific examples of the bets I’m making from where I sit as to what our collective future holds and how I believe we need to get there. The reality is, as with all forms of evolution, no-one really knows where or how this change will net out. But each of us in PR, or aspiring to a career in this great business, needs to decide how we take our industry forward. It’s a great business, a truly interesting and influential business and one which is increasingly at the centre of business and public life. We’ve had dramas and hit comedies about us, we have practitioners who are household names and are behind almost every major news story and water-cooler conversation. We even have a former senior PR as PM. The one thing I can tell you is this. Ignoring change, throughout our entire evolutionary journey, has never ended well for those who do so. We have the opportunity and it is in our best interest to embrace the new challenge facing us. The challenge of accepting and acting upon the new definition of PR in today’s “Idea economy”. We must move from the broadcast model to the engagement model. From an unrepresentative industry to a diverse industry. We must evolve. And if we do this, given the democratised and technologically empowered society we live in, I dare to say that no other marketing discipline faces such a potentially powerful, profitable and fascinating future as ours.

The triumph of imagination

Posted Colin Byrne on February 28th, 2011 | Filed under Uncategorised | 1 Comment »

Forgive me for being in nostalgia mode right now (yet another birthday over the w/e, spent time downloading and printing 3 year’s worth of mobile phone pics of the kids thanks to nifty little portable printer with Bluetooth my wife bought me, watched first ever episode of Stingray with my submarine obsessed four year old, etc) but heard a story this morning that made me think. I am old enough to have been born in the space age (as opposed to the spaced age) and that technology excited me as much in my youth as Facebook and Call of Duty excite my teenaged kids. In fact - giving the game away here! – I was born in the year three significant space age things happened. The Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth orbiting satellite. The Russians put the first living creature into space (a dog, Laika). And the BBC started its astronomy programme, The Sky at Night, presented by Patrick Moore. This year TSAN hits 700 episodes. Asked in an interview this morning what the secret of its success had been, Moore replied tartly that it was cheap to make. Indeed in the early years, before space photography and imaging became more advanced, a lot of it was Moore with charts and diagrams on bits of paper stuck on clip boards. But what it did have was magic. Wonder. It stirred the imagination. When I sit through discussions about where PR is going and digital, and through many many pre-pitch run throughs, I look for the big idea, and then I look at how imaginatively it is going to be tactically executed. Whatever the medium, whatever the marketing budget, however clever the tactical execution folks are, it is imagination-stirring magic and creativity and passion that will make an idea fly.

Feeling the earth move, or is it the groundswell

Posted Colin Byrne on February 14th, 2011 | Filed under Uncategorised | Comment now »

The earth moving may be a suitably romantic theme for St Valentine's Day, but this is about the groundswell. I am currently reading the book of the same title by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research (Harvard Business Press). It may have been published in 2008 - a fleeting second ago in the history of business book publishing but an age in the short but tempestuous history of social media - but its key themes grow in validity week by week. They boil down to the threats and opportunities to organisations poised by social media and the shift in power from those organisations to connected customers and citizens. Take just two examples in recent weeks; the historic upheaval in Egypt - the first social media generated revolution, and the new anti-corporate protest group UK Uncut. The former is well documented, and while the ramifications will be massive for the Middle East, Arab-Israeli relations, Western policy towards the ME etc etc, buried in there is a powerful story of how previously disparate and disconnected folk can come together via social media into an unstoppable and previously unforseeable force. The latter is an anti-corporate protest group, largely twenty-something activists born out of the environmental movement, using corporate tax (avoidance) as their platform. They got together in a local pub a few months ago to plan a one off demo, and now through social media a pulling together a series of high media profile demos against businesses. Months ago they were not on each others' radar screen, let alone visibily organising. A few years ago one of our slogans within the PR world was 'control the dialogue'. It accepted that, unlike with classical advertsing. PR was about two way communication but that we in PR were seeking to control to our advantage. How times change. Now it's less about controlling the dialogue than seeking to positively influence the conversation. A less snappy but more realistic goal for communicators. My other thought this morning was how would Don Corleone of 'The Godfather' ("Never tell anyone outside of The Family what you are thinking") have coped with the arrival of Twitter?

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Posted Colin Byrne on May 13th, 2010 | Filed under Current Affairs, Politics | Comment now »

Buy Valium No Prescription, For those loyal readers (hi Mum, hope the goldfish got better, hi son, still can't find your mislaid iPod) who think I was either too bone idle to blog or dead, I was actually blogging away for GQ (ww.gq.com) with my good friend Tara Hamilton-Miller during the election. As of today ByrneBabyByrne.com is being dusted off, online buying Valium, Purchase Valium online no prescription, the dead spiders swept up and the pile of junk mail being recycled.

The past few days have been unbelievable, Valium from canadian pharmacy, Buy Valium no prescription, and I am still trying to work out if the marriage of convenience celebrated in that sunny if slightly chilly garden yesterday is quite believable. Jack Straw, where can i buy Valium online, Buy cheapest Valium, a wise and experienced head I once had the privilege of working closely with, summed it when asked this morning if the coalition would last the course, buy no prescription Valium online. Buy Valium online cod, "I don't know" he said, with very New Politics candor, buy Valium in canada.

Glad to see David Miliband make the first move in the Labour leadership, Buy Valium No Prescription. Order Valium from mexican pharmacy, Rightly or wrongly I believed a year and a half ago that if David had replaced Gordon Labour might have done the difficult thing, renewed itself while in power, where can i find Valium online, Order Valium, and given New Labour a better chance to reconnect with the voters. To paraphrase Jack, australia, uk, us, usa, canada, mexico, india, craiglist, ebay, paypal, Rx free Valium, who knows. But David is already gathering momentum and a Dave (David?) C/Nick C/David M contest of smart young talent will be a fascinating thing to watch, order Valium no prescription. Valium samples, I just hope Labour gets on with it and doesn't do the usual drawn out dither. Buy Valium No Prescription, I hope Ed Balls does stand. The public need to see the party make a clear choice between Old and New Labour, Valium for sale. Buy Valium online no prescription, Last time they did, they liked it, buy Valium without a prescription. Buy cheap Valium no rx, Glad also to see my friend and former colleague Priti Patel as one of the new Tory faces elected, bringing another talented Asian woman to frontline politics, buy generic Valium. Where can i buy cheapest Valium online, I predict a big future for the very able Priti.

Watching that first press conference - and whatever your politics you can't help being enthralled at the sight of NewPol in action, just as whatever your politics you can't help being deeply moved by Martin Argles' amazing photo essay on Brown's last hours in No10 in today's Guardian - I was struck by two things, Buy Valium No Prescription. You have to wish these guys well on all our behalf given the financial and international challenges our country faces and you feel yourself unwittingly rooting for them to be able to cope, online buy Valium without a prescription. Order Valium online c.o.d, Secondly, That Joke, buy Valium from mexico. Valium over the counter, It punctured the tension and was a genuine moment of fun in the middle of drama and high seriousness. Any student of Shakespeare will know the power of that moment, where can i order Valium without prescription. Buy Valium No Prescription, Those of us old enough to recall Spitting Image's puppet-based satirical commentary on politics in the 80's will remember the way comedy shaped our vision of political leaders. Valium pharmacy, Thatcher in a man's pinstripe suit. Hattersley as a dribbling tubster, purchase Valium online. Valium price, Owen and Steel with a squeaking wee David in big David's pocket. They are at it already, with cartoonists like Steve Bell branding the relationship as Clegg's butler to Cameron's lord of the manor. Time will tell if satire will once again influence our view of politics more than slavish newspaper editorial.

On media influence on the election, last Autumn my firm Weber Shandwick did a unique INLINE profile of what channels voters thought would influence their choice most. Next week we publish a follow up study to see just how influential digital, print, advertising, broadcast and WOM actually were in this groundbreaking election. More on that here soon.

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Posted Colin Byrne on March 3rd, 2010 | Filed under Uncategorised | Comment now »

Buy Retin A No Prescription, BBC DG Mark Thompson is right to frame the question as "what is the BBC for" as opposed to (the defensive) "is the BBC too big", but are his cuts the right answer to that question. Buy cheap Retin A no rx, As Lily Allen (swoon) points out in her Guardian op ed, without 6 Music we would be forced back on the blandness of much of the Radio 1 playlist, order Retin A. Order Retin A from mexican pharmacy, As for cutting an Asian news network in modern multi-cultural Britain?. I am told this was missing its audience in practice but surely that requires a rethink not just chopping it to satisfy anti-BBC, buy generic Retin A, Retin A from canadian pharmacy, anti-multicultural jihadists. As a multi-cultural comms expert on my team says "If BBC is to invest in good quality radio for ethnic groups, Retin A for sale, Buy Retin A without a prescription, they need to go back to the drawing board and think about what these listeners want, instead of presuming it's all about bollywood and bhajis."

The one that makes very little sense to me is cutting back on the BBC website, where can i order Retin A without prescription. At a time when other media are expanding their digital channels, Murdoch and Brooks at NI are chewing over paid for access to digital content, and more of us are consuming news and entertainment online, this smacks of turning back the clock rather than reining in the spending, Buy Retin A No Prescription. Australia, uk, us, usa, canada, mexico, india, craiglist, ebay, paypal, I love it when the Beeb discusses itself on air. Always a diplomatic affair with BBC inner politics simmering away below the surface, order Retin A no prescription. Retin A price, On Today this morning they trotted out a bunch of highfalutin' commentators including cultural elitist Charles Moore (who refused to pay his licence fee until Jonathan Ross was sacked - a bit like Lord Ashcroft saying he will only register to pay tax if a Tory Government is elected. For the record, order Retin A online c.o.d, Retin A pharmacy, Ross' Radio 2 show was one of the most entertaining shows ever, for an organisation whose stated role is to entertain as well as educate and inform, buy cheapest Retin A, Purchase Retin A online no prescription, even if his pay was ridiculously high.) who droned on about dumbing down, Strictly and chasing ratings (what a dreadful thing for folk in the entertaining and informing business to do), online buying Retin A. Buy Retin A No Prescription, A better move by Thompson would have been to share consumers' credit crunch pain last year and go for a lower licence fee increase, rather than take the money, endure the media flack (Ross' salary, taxi expenses etc) and then start cutting services that are bang on with a modern interpretation of its charter. Retin A samples, Let's face it, this is the usual defensive posture organisations like the BBC feel compelled to take in the face of the ritual Murdoch-driven, buy Retin A from mexico, Online buy Retin A without a prescription, Tory attack on it. Yes the BBC should be well managed, Retin A over the counter, Purchase Retin A online, prudent and popular, but it should also stand up for itself and have us as brand ambassadors, buy no prescription Retin A online. Buy Retin A online no prescription, At the moment poor Thompson faces the worst of all worlds. Cutting services is not going to buy off the Murdoch-Cameron unholy alliance, rx free Retin A. Meantime badvocates are lining up rather than advocates, Buy Retin A No Prescription. Where can i find Retin A online, Meanwhile the other tax story rumbles on, while political anoraks like me try to work out what the negative fall out from the Lord Ashcroft story means for votes in the marginal seats that will decide the outcome of the forthcoming election and which Ashcroft is literally trying to buy for the Tories, buy Retin A online cod. Buy Retin A no prescription, The media are right to point out that the Tories are not the only party that take money from nom doms, an act of breathtaking hypocrisy for any political party seeking to run a democracy based on citizens who neither seek to or have the means to withhold tax from the wider national benefit, where can i buy cheapest Retin A online. Buy Retin A in canada, The difference here is Ashcroft is a senior official of the Conservative Party who is unashamedly funding a key seats operation to decide the election outcome with scalpel-like efficiency. I will pay my taxes - and a stack more from next month - under a forthcoming Tory government, where can i buy Retin A online. Why should he have the right to decide he will only pay taxes if the party he supports is in Government.

The Blair Government I enthusiastically supported in the past took money from people I really don't like (though I assume Richard Desmond does pay his taxes) and one of the less appealing aspects of modern politics is the need to hold your nose occasionally around some of your rich friends. Obama showed there was another way.

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