PR guru Barbara Clark joins the hot 100 - and gives Johnny Depp the perfect reason to Visit Scotland

Congratulations to media legend Barbara Clark, Head of Comms at VisitScotland.

She has just achieved official PR Guru status, according to the industry bible, PRWeek.

The magazine’s latest PowerBook  is a list of 100 people considered the most admirable movers and shakers in the UK PR and communications sector. Quite an accolade.

There aren’t too many Scots in the list, so Barbara can be extremely proud to have merited a place among such hallowed company. Though no doubt she’ll be shrugging it off in her usual modest fashion.

I most recently caught up with La Clark at the Scottish CIPR awards in Glasgow, where her VisitScotland team bagged armfuls of awards (including Scottish Public Sector Team of the Year).

There’s never a dull moment in her company and she was in particularly fine fettle that night. Despite having dozens of staff to see home safely - as well as enough silverware to fill several trophy cabinets - she still managed to find room on the bus for the bedraggled party from Holyrood PR.

Our bus back to Edinburgh never showed up and we were milling around in the centre of Glasgow in the wee small hours wondering how we were going to get along the M8 - when Babs appeared and ordered us onto her coach.

As bus journeys go it was no quiet, early morning roadtrip. Indeed, even at that time of the morning, with hangovers starting to kick in and everyone yearning for bed, Barbara is a social hurricane - as anyone who’s been lucky enough to bask in her bonhomie will testify.

Johnny Depp features a lot in Barbara’s full PowerBook entry, which you can read in full here (in pdf format), if you haven’t already seen it.

When I asked her how she felt about her PowerBook mention she told me: “I’m hoping it will make me more attractive and that Johnny will want to leave that thin little ‘Joe le Taxi’ bird.”

So there you go Mr Depp. Why don’t you walk away from Paradis now that you’ve got the perfect reason to VisitScotland?

Scottish media ensures a fair fight in the Cage Wars debate

 

When I was 19 one of my best pals was a pretty serious amateur boxer. He ate carefully, trained with a discipline that involved a level of self-sacrifice none of our peers would have entertained and was in near perfect physical conditon. His fitness was awesome. All of this I could see with my own eyes on a daily basis.

What took a bit more understanding was the amount of sheer craft involved in mastering the noble art.

My friend was a thinker and we watched endless videos of the fighters he admired, for their speed, skill and tactics - most notably Sugar Ray Leonard. So I knew that while it ultimately came down to who could bludgeon whom most effectively over 12 rounds, the sport in its purest form involved guile, finesse, speed of thought and a a real degree of  artistry.

This was brought home to me one afternoon in my friend’s back garden when he invited myself and another pal to  spend as long as we could pummelling him. Two on one and he promised he wouldn’t throw a punch in return. While we wore bag gloves (not much in the way of padding), he would wear sparring gloves (which were the most padded gloves it was possible to get). In other words, even if he forgot himself for a second threw a punch at one of us, it would be as painless as possible, while any punches we landed would be felt acutely.

The aim of this exercise, as we soon found out, was to demonstrate to us two non-boxers, just how much skill was involved. In the few frenzied minutes we threw everything we had at him neither of us managed to connect with a meaningful punch. Those which actually landed (and I was utterly amazed by the number which he successfully slipped) were caught harmlessly on gloves or elbows.

It’s safe to say I was dumbfounded. In a few minutes a sport I already respected attained an entirely new status. The casual ease with which he avoided, or parried blows from two of us was like a scene from the Matrix. We must have seemed like we were moving in slow motion to his fine-tuned boxer’s brain. Bear in mind that while my boxer pal was a big talent in the local amateur scene, the gulf between him and the top class professionals was akin to the gap between the footballers at Linlithgow Rose and those in a World Cup winning team.

Needless to say, I’ve never look at any boxing match the same way since. I always try to see beyond two blokes thumping each other to see the dedication, discipline, conditioning and undeniable level of skill involved.

Imagine learning all those skills for boxing and it’s easy to see why it requires endless hours of training, repeated day-after-day and year-after-year. Then imagine also having to learn all the equivalent skills in wrestling (the olympic version, not the theatrical joke that is WWF). And judo or ju-jitsu. And maybe a spot of Thai kick boxing as well.

Consider the combined training regime for all of those combat sports - and the feat of memory and the dedication required to master each highly-technical move, throw, grip , slip or avoidance technique. Wonder at how difficult it would be to learn how to read opponents across all those separate disciplines. Finally picture the culmination of that process - and stepping into an arena to face an opponent every bit as highly trained, motivated and hungry.

Welcome to the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Step into the controversial subject that is cage fighting - and to a fiercely contested debate on whether this is a genuine sport, or a form of bloodlust and barbarism with no place in a decent civilisation.

When Holyrood Partnership agreed to provide media support to Cage War Productions for its Max Xtreme Fighting event at Braehead Arena, it was with a degree of trepidation. I expected us to be firefighting constanlty while knee-jerk reactionaries would all too easily command the moral high ground. Previous experience told me reasoned argument in favour of cage fighting would be virtually ignored - steamrollered by a heady mixture of righteous indignation and misplaces anti-violence sentiments.

However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Firstly the coverage by STV (which has been slightly amended in the YouTube video a the top of this post) is pretty well balanced. Even more impressive is this article (click here) by Alasdair Reid in the latest Sunday Herald magazine. Inscisive, insightful and effortlessly written it is also gives a genuinely thoughtful - and thought provoking - view of the world of cage fighting for Britain’s aspiring competitors.

Each piece of coverage introduces a separate MMA fighter - and both are eloquent and persuasive advocates for their sport. At best MMA is misunderstood. At worst it is reviled. Add to that its status as little more than underground and minority sport in the UK, factor in the dedication and training required and the lack of financial rewards. All of these factors make it quite remarkable that Glasgow should boast two such impressive spokesmen as Anthony Thompson (the philosophy student featured in the video)and Paul McVeigh, who is quoted in the Sunday Herald article.

Pick of the quotes for me is Mcveigh’s snortingly comical dismissal of the local politician, who branded cage fighting a danger because of the strobe lighting and loud music. His riposte was this classic put down:

“Disney On Ice has strobe lighting, music and fighting and nobody talks about banning that.”

Now that is a quite brilliant piece of fighting talk.

A busy time for the Hibs and Hearts PR machines

 

There’s not been much for football fans in Edinburgh to sing about recently - both Hibs and Hearts are in freefall in the league and can’t string a decent performance together between them.

So the green half of the city will no doubt be breathing a sigh of relief today at the upbeat news that Mixu Paatelainen has been appointed as new Hibs manager. The Easter Road outfit have been rudderless since the end of John Collins’ short lived reign. Good luck to Finn Mixu, who was popular with the supporters during his time as a player at Hibs.

No doubt the latest developments have been keeping my old colleague, David Forsyth, extremely busy. David was the experienced hack who took me and fellow trainee  Barbie Dutter, under his wing, when we arrived, wide eyed and overawed at the Evening News in July 1988, to take up our jobs as trainee reporters. David is an all round good guy who now runs his own media companny, and most of his time is which sees him spend most of his time as the PR man for Hibs.

Meanwhile another football PR man with a challenging job is Paul Kiddie at Hearts, who has has the unenviable task of handlling the massive media interest in the Gorgie team, much of which is generated by the barking and twinkle-toed club owner, Vladimir Romanov.

I don’t know Mr Kiddie, who formerly worked as a sports reporter on the Edinburgh Evening News. But I enjoy seeing his regular press releases and media updates, which are resolutely cheerful and good humoured - like the series of funny monkey-related gags he squeezed into his press releases after bonkers Romanov labelled the Scottish sports media pack a bunch of chimpanzees.

There don’t seem to be many Jambos who are managing to remain quite so cheerful in the face of adversity. The pall of gloom over Tynecastle shows no signs of lifting.

However, the supporters can at least take a bit of pride in their team’s efforts to turn this weekend’s Scottish cup tie against Motherwell into a fitting tribute to the Lanarkshire team’s former skipper, Phil O’Donnell. His sudden death after collapsing on the pitch left the football world in mourning. He was clearly well-thought off, as the turn out of the great and the good at his recent funeral (view pictures here) clearly demonstrated.

Hearts have produced a special commemorative programme for the occasion, with all proceeds raised going to benefit O’Donnell’s grieving widow and their children. Lets hope plenty of the fans dig deep to buy up copies for a player, who by all accounts as a gentleman and a superb ambassador for the sport.

Why PR Works: Number 5 (With a wee bit of help from Peter MacMahon)

If you’ve got a kid at nursery or with a childminder, or an older relative in a care home, then be very, very glad the Care Commission exists.

We’ve just had the news this national care regulator wants to extend its PR contract with us at Holyrood Partnership for another year. Great news for our agency.

I hope we made that decision easy for the senior figures within the Care Commission thanks to the tremendous success of a recent proactive campaign.

Since it operates in such an emotive sector (basically the bulk of its work is to prevent abuse of vulnerable children and old people) we spend a huge amount of time dealing with inquiries from the media, which makes the whole account a bit reactive.

So we had to go well above and beyond the basic terms of the contract to deliver a three month proactive push in local media. The aim was to highlight the availability of inspection reports which tell people how care services are performing. These reports are available on the Care Commission website and should be the first port of call for anyone checking out a nursery, care home or other care service.

We agreed five key messages with the Care Commission – and in the 50 (and counting) articles generated around a third carried all five of those KMs. Such a staggering result, it even amazed us. It also means we got the message out to a million local newspaper buyers.

From the Care Commission viewpoint they have seen traffic to the website soar as a result. Which is the ideal way to start preparing the Scottish public for an even simpler and more useful system of grading care services, which is coming in next year.

Last week I presented the results of our proactive push to a quarterly meeting of Care Commission Board members I felt sure they’d be blown away by the overwhelmingly positive tone of those 50+ articles. In fairness, they did seem quite pleased.

But I couldn’t help get the feeling that they were even more impressed by asingle article (unfortunately I cannot find it on the Scotsman website to link to) by The Scotsman’s political expert and former Government spin doctor,  Peter MacMahon.

Peter’s piece might not reach anywhere near the million local newpaper readers of our three month campaign – but he is influential and widely respected in the corridors of power and you can be sure his comments would have been widely read in Holyrood, St Andrew’s House and the offices of the SNP, Scottish Labour and the other main political parties.

This has to be viewed against the backdrop that the public generally – and the media specifically – are a wee bit suspicious about regulators. It makes them think of characters like the over-zealous and crazily bureaucratic Bottom Inspectors from the irreverent comic, Viz.

Likewise, Peter MacMahon and The Scotsman are not normally noted for their sympathetic stance when it comes to public bodies. So to have Peter give a broad welcome to the Care Commission’s introduction of a new grading service was gold dust – a real recognition of the painstaking three years of careful consideration and hard graft everybody at the Care Commission has put into developing the new grading system.

Of course, my chance for glory in front of Care Commission bosses and board members was somewhat eclipsed by Mr MacMahon’s article. But the combination of reaching a million ordinary punters and a handful of Scotland’s most important movers and shakers is a potent one.

For us at Holyrood PR, the whole thing couldn’t have come together better, or at more ideal time – and though I don’t know Peter MacMahon personally, I feel I owe him a pint!

    

The 100 most influential PR Blogs.

You can find a list of the world’s 100 most influential PR Blogs here

Something for BAWARAA to aim for next year, then.

(The biggest bummer about this is that now I’m going to have to spend the Christmas holidays checking out each and every one of them. How much are my family going to love me?)

Why PR Works: Number 4

You may or may not know that I started this occasional series to remind myself of the good things PR does.

When you have a bunch of journalist referring to you as the “dark side”and potential clients announcing they “don’t believe in PR”, it pays to celebrate the wee successes on a regular basis.

Every year Scotland on Sunday publishes its list or Scotland’s 100 Most Eligible, described as: “Funny, sexy, successful and intelligent: these are the men and women who have everything - except someone special in their life.”

This year the list of most eligible men had a top three of:

1 - David Tennant, Dr Who actor.

2 - Jamie Murray, tennis star and older brother of Andy

3 - John Smeaton, bane of Islamic terrorists and incomprehensible have-a-go hero.

And coming in at a very creditable number 11 in the top 50 blokes is Thomas Ashdown, entrepreneur, sport sponsor and all round good guy. Oh - and I should also mention that his Citylets business is a client of yours truly at Holyrood Partnership.

I can’t tell you how delighted I am for Thomas. His natural instinct is to shirk the limelight. I know he sees PR as a necessary business evil, because he certainly has not a shred of ego, vanity or desire for self-promotion.

So he really did take a bit of persuading to be nominated for this year’s list and right up until the last minute was getting cold feet. He was genuinely surprised (and I think quite pleased) to come in so high, but I knew he’d totally charmed the judges.

So ladies, the good news is that I have Thomas’ mobile phone number … who’d like to start the bidding for first introduction?

Why PR works: Number 3

I feel like a trainspotter. Which is odd, because I rarely travel on trains, have no interest in rolling stock and am indifferent about railway stations.

However, a week or so ago I posted on the £800m cost of the refurbishment, which has taken place at St Pancras station in London as the new home of the Eurostar service. A phenomenal amount of money to spend on a train station, which left me bristling indignantly.

Indeed, so offended was I that when I found myself in London at the weekend I had to to have a look and see exactly where all that wedge was spent. Most of the interior still under wraps. But the huge, curved steel roof canopy and the massive clock certainly look a bit special . That said, I was still astonished that sprucing up a railway station should cost so much.

When I first posted about this subject, what most amazed me was that until this got a mention on Radio Five Live I hadn’t heard so much as a peep about it, despite the enormous amounts of money involved.

A short time later, though, my better half announced that she’d just watched a rather impressive telly documentaray all about this very subject and was able to tell me all about the historical and engineering importance of the station. Muttering dismissively about London-centric TV programme-makers I buried mysef in a copy of (London-centric) industry bible, PR Week. Only to find a two page interview with - yes you’ve guessed it - the man who is responsible for the PR push at the refurbished station.

Simon Montauge, the head of comms at Eurostar sounds like a very nice bloke. What didn’t escape my attention though was that he has a 14-strong communications team as well as two big name PR agencies who have been working tirelessly for a long time on getting the message out.At first I considered their efforts a failure, since I’ve only heard of this project in the past fortnight and my indignation at the amount of money spent could hardly be considered a postiive reaction. That, however, is particularly harsh.

To recap, I’ve heard an extensive (and largely positve) report on BBC radio, read about it in my industry magazine PR Week (again very positive). Meanwhile, my missus caught a TV documentary (hugely positive) about the station and I made the time during my (once a decade) visit to London to have a look at the station. All of this in little over a week.

When I look at it like that it is clear the PR team are clearly doing something right. Yet, Nagging doubts are well named. They are doubts. That nag. And mine were still telling me that my perception of this station was, well, negative. However, even I had to admit defeat when the email below dropped into my mailbox from buildingtalk.com (all right, maybe I am an anorak):

Howard Chapman, Editor, writes: The Queen has opened a transformed St Pancras International Station, the new rail terminal for Eurostar that cost £800m. The front of the station, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s neo-Gothic masterpiece, will open as a five-star hotel in 2009. St Pancras is today celebrated as one of the finest examples of Victorian architecture and engineering, but it could easily have been demolished in the 1960’s but for protests from the likes of poet laureate John Betjeman, co-founder of the Victorian Society. Developers have called it the jewel in the crown of a £5.8bn project to bring high-speed rail to the UK. When the Eurostar leaves for Paris on Wednesday it will also mark the completion a truly remarkable feat of engineering. There were 45 contractors involved in the project, building 109km of high speed track, 22km of twin bore tunnel, 3 major viaducts, 150 new bridges, 3,000 other structures designed and built. All this achieved in a little over 5 years, arriving bang on time and on budget!

D’oh. Suddenly I felt like the kind of narrow minded, anti-change, curmudgeonly kneejerk reactionist I’ve always disliked. How is it possible to keep hating this project in the face of all the positive PR messages I’ve been bombarded with? How was it possible to see only an old station getting a makeover, when the project is actaully 3000 projects - all delivered on time and on budget?

The answer - it isn’t possible. But I only realised this when I started seriously considering booking a trip to Paris on the Eurostar. A city I’ve never much fancied on mode of transport I don’t very much like. One of the stated aims of the new St Pancras station is to lure a further 40,000 Scots per year to use the Eurostar service - so they’ve only got 39,999 to go.

In some ways I feel a bit embarrassed by all of this. How could I fail to spot what was happening to me and yet still profess to be a PR and communciations specialist?

Easy. In fact, this entire episode has actually proved very refreshing, because it has reminded me that no matter how hardened, inured and cynical I become, I can still be surprised by the positive power of PR.

Simon Montague and team - notch that one up as a considerable success.

Why PR Works: Number 2

In answer to those who “don’t believe” in PR, I created an occasional series to remind myselt that I do get out of bed for a purpose:

An earlier post concerned a wee bit of crisis management we did for Fife-based FFDR when it was reported they were subject of a £10m takover bid, leaving staff unsettle and fearing for their jobs. For the six hours work we put in at short notice, we achieve the following:

• Three daily newspaper articles - in all target titles.
• One article in a national, weekly business publication.
• One sizable article in the most relevant weekly newspaper.
• Major coverage on the first two pages thrown up by Google by searching the company name.
• A basic AVE of £4000 (no multiplying the figure either!)
• All three, pre-agreed key messages delivered across the coverage.

That’s cheered me right up. But I’m not half as pleased as the client is.

Why PR works: Number 1

Today I got the good news that we at Holyrood PR are to be invited back to give a second pitch to a potential client.

Like all the best leads, it came through word of mouth. It’s not an earth-shatteringly big or glamorous client - but we can see plenty of reasons why we’d like to work with them.

Now the only hurdle we have to get over is that one of the directors - who we’ve not yet met - doesn’t really “believe” in PR.

I don’t know why I should be so surprised. We fully understand some businesses have tried PR and its not for them. The particular flavour of PR we specialise in is media relations and I know there are some businesses who see no advatage to be gained from positive media coverage. I can disagree with them until I’m blue in the face, but at least they will give rational arguments for what they say.

But I’m stumped by the people who say they don’t believe in PR. What? We’re like the tooth fairy or Father Christmas? Or maybe a grown up version: some fantastical concept that stretches credulity, like Roswell, Area 51 or the moon landings?

I find this kind of thing draining and demoralising in the same way as I did when we had a client who, for his paltry two grand, got around 30 separate cuttings in all his target media and multiple positive key messages - then refused to pay up because it was the “wrong kind of coverage”.

Even worse is the fact that, as PR professionals, we are constantly reminded of the importance of measurement, while also being told that there is no effective (certainly no cost effective) way to actually go about that measuring process.

To add insult to injury, our own professional body, the CIPR, has told us that the only relatively simply measurement tool, the long tried and trusted AVE (advertising value equivalent) is now totally discredited. That is despite my own experience that most small clients (those paying less than £2000 a month) actually like AVE.

With these three negatives ringing in my ears I am now going to apply a bit of positive spin. I’m going to start a series of posts to bring joy and happiness into the world of smaler PR agencies. From now on, every time we get a proven bit of PR success I’m going to post it here. I am going to show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that PR does work. So there.

To start the series, I’d like to report a small success for Orchard & Shipman. The company offers a private sector solution to the council housing shortage, particularly to those famillies with the most acute and pressing need. They do this by persuading private landlords to offer their properties through the scheme. It has been a welcome lifeline to hundreds of families who, for a multitude of reasons, find themselves without a secure home.

Orchard and Shipman negotiated a favourble buy-to-let mortgage deal through the Dunfermline Building Society for those landlords prepared to back the scheme. We helped generate coverage on that, which in itself was pleasing, though measuring how many take up the deal as a direct result is more difficult to do.

However, one categoric result of the coverage - and a big pat on the back for us - was this: another major financial institution, having seen the media publicity generated, has now approached Orchard & Shipman and asked if they too can offer a favourable mortgage terms to landlords getting involved.

Whether anything comes of that approach is neither here nor there - but it shows without doubt, the power of PR. I thank you.