Danny Bradbury was robbed,
Month: October 2007
..for best triumph in face of adversity.
Hugh McCleod strangely not around to collect the award – but Phil Devery from Microsoft was.
Collecting the gong, he said: "It had fuck all to do with me."
Nice.
Knock a glass of champagne over him. Congrats to the PR who did that a few moments ago – barely 8pm and already people falling over – marvelous!
And ex-colleague Nicky Alvey asked me to mention the porn tree – apparently it will mean something to people who worked at Brodeur in the late 90s.
Anyway – we are all waiting breathlessly for the awards to begin.
Drink count: +2 glasses of wine.
Early doors @ fhacks
Flackenhacks – let battle commence
So here we are at the inaugural Flackenhack awards in the ultra chic Audi showroom in Piccadilly. Peter Kirwan is nervous and TWL is off down the pub – sounds about right. 200 tickets sold, so this really is the only PR show in town tonight. The excitement is, well, palpable. And the Pretenders are playing on PA system – perfect.
More news as guests arrive.
BTW – the keyboards on the PCs are very cool,shiny and metallic – and difficult to type on. Get my excuse in early.
Drink count: one glass of champagne.
Making sure I can upload pix from my mobile in preparation for capturing incriminating evidence at tonight’s Flackenhack Awards. See you there!
—- Sent using a Sony Ericsson mobile phone
Keeping My Hand In
From time to time, I’m still asked to do the occasional piece of freelance journalism. My most recent effort was for a new arts and culture title launched in Edinbugh called One Magazine.
My piece on social music networks (and LastFM in particular) can viewed here.
All comments – both here and at the One Magazine site – gratefully received.
PR Week reports today that Text100 is centralising its back-office account servicing to a new office based in India.
‘Global Resource Optimization’ service will apparently provide account
administration, content and secondary research to support client
campaigns and pitches.
The story doesn’t give any detail on exactly what content and secondary research will be done overseas (press release writing? features tracking?) – but as I discussed here last November, If 70pc of legal work can be offshored, who says 70pc of PR work can’t be? Looks like Text 100 are first out of the gate among the bigger agencies – will be interesting to see how they get on. And what impact it has on profitability.
Peter Kirwan at FullRun picked up on earlier post of mine regarding the relevance of IT trade mags to senior IT decision makers.
He cites a couple of surveys that appear to contradict my argument:
1. A study of 600 senior executives worldwide from the FT and US ad agency Doremus asked respondents to comment on the suggestion that "print media are becoming obsolete". Fully 73% disagreed. Meanwhile, two-thirds said that they paid more attention to print ads than the online equivalents.
2. Back in June, Hill & Knowlton produced another example of the genre. Surprisingly, perhaps, the agency’s survey of IT purchasing decision-makers found a strong bias toward print titles among respondents.
On point one, it may be true that they pay more attention to print ads than online – what isn’t mentioned is how much general attention they are paying to the mags themselves – if they are only having the odd glance, it still doesn’t bode well for print advertising.
On point two, one thing I didn’t mention last time was that although the senior IT decision makers I talked to didn’t read the mags themselves, a number of them said they passed on these titles to other junior colleages – occasionally, they will have a particular piece highlighted to them.
In which case, it would remain perfectly valid for IT decision makers to say that they still regard IT trade mags as important – just not in the way you might expect ie by actually reading them.
It makes for an interesting PR challenge – how do you craft stories that persuade lower level decision makers that they have something that might be of interest to their boss?
As Peter says, in the absence of compelling reader research among IT decision-makers, you pays your money; and you takes your choice.
Not a headline I expected to be writing today – but apparently, Strumpete Editor Amanda Chapel has had enough.
Say what you will about Ms Chapel (and many have), there can be no doubt she brought a much needed level of focus and debate to the PR industry generally. We’ll certainly miss her at Object Towers.