Year: 2016

So the big news from Facebook this week is Mark Zuckerberg has actually built Jarvis from the film Iron Man. OK not quite but he is getting there.  I love AI but I am a little wary of what it can become, I have been doing quite a bit with bots to see how effective the technology can be and it is still relatively expensive to build one that works well but it is getting cheaper. I think we need to be careful with technologies that can control things via the Internet. One only has to think of drones and ... Read more

This year (2016) has been an eventful year to say the least, and as it’s coming to a close I thought I’d take a closer look back at some of the best social campaigns of the year and list a few of my favourites. Here are ten of my favourite social media campaigns from 2016. The Salvation Army: #thedress Certainly one of the most brutally effective campaigns on the list, The Salvation Army used the viral ‘blue vs gold dress’ from earlier in the year to highlight domestic violence. Using the tagline ‘why is it so hard to see black ... Read more

So last week was rather busy, the team at Prohibition and I went out to the CIPR Pride Awards for Yorkshire & Lincolnshire and thankfully we scooped another award – this year it was “Best Consumer Relations Campaign” for a campaign we did for Interflora. However, before that I was discussing the digital landscape with a potential employee, and they expressed their thoughts to me that blogging was now dead. This struck me as a bold statement, they were younger than me and although I know blogging is not in its 2000s hey day – I still felt it was ... Read more

It has been a truly torrid couple of weeks for consumer giants Samsung. In an instant world, even minute issues can spiral into a PR disaster, so when a major clanger is dropped- damage can be cataclysmic. And this has very much been the case this past couple of weeks. The Galaxy Note 7 was the cornerstone of Samsung’s range—and a product bursting into flames is pretty much a worst case scenario already, before even adding a failed initial recall. But is such an incident fatal to a brand, or can Samsung survive it unscathed or perhaps even come out ... Read more

We all now understand that social media marketing without a clear strategy is dangerous and I am amazed at how many big well-known brands still don’t really have a clear strategy. Yes they do great content and some of it sticks but they don’t actually know why they do it other than their competitors are doing it so they better get organised. In the last twelve months I must have written twenty or so social media strategies and every single one starts the same, with an audit, to take a clear benchmark. To gauge the effectiveness of your social media ... Read more

I am calling on all Harrogate residents and animal lovers alike to save Peter our local celebrity peacock from #Pexit to Scotland. Peter has lived on my housing estate of Bilton for more than 10 years after breaking out of a private estate because he didn’t like it. He is his own man! He sleeps in trees and on local flat roofs to stay away from foxes and dogs and, although he has been single a while, he is still a great guy to have around the estate. He is a stunning peacock and is pretty friendly – he visits ... Read more

This week has been really rather busy, with the phones ringing off the hook. Following on from our integrated campaign late last year with Interflora in which we discovered the best and worst times of year to celebrate your birthday (Daily Mail), we used the trusty Birthday calculator app we created to help identify the very best date, which was found to be today! (July 28th) Tasked by the client with highlighting this special day in July, we commissioned some social media listening to identify insights and decided to deliver an experiential stunt to raise awareness and share the love. ... Read more

The thriving PR agency is a vibrant place with a fine assortment of characters and personality types. The merging of these personalities is what makes agency life so brilliantly unpredictable and lively. I thought about this and thought about the five types of people you might find in a PR agency. I have deliberately shied away from the hard drinker but here are my top five: The Creative The creative lives for the early stages of a campaign when he can release his stream of consciousness to the rest of the team, most of the time for as long as ... Read more

This article was originally written by good friend Dan Smith who posted it on his LinkedIn. Dan works in the marketing team at JCB World Headquarters here in the UK. I thought this was clever and rather interesting and would therefore make an interesting case study for this blog and he has kindly given me permission to repost it on here. I hope you like it. I saw an article about the launch of our groundbreaking new machine, JCB HYDRADIG. ‘Believe the Hype’ is the title. The hype that they are speaking of is the one created by our Marketing team ... Read more

If you like a guerrilla marketing campaign or two, this case study video walks you through the charity campaign that tried to combine the Whopper with the Big Mac to create the McWhopper. The campaign secured extensive media coverage and was backed by a fully integrated digital suite and although Mcdonalds didn’t want to play ball, the McWhopper became a meme that people across the globe made themselves and made a donation to World Peace Day. It raised awareness of peace which was its overall objective. It has been made into a Cannes Lions winning film which you can enjoy below. ... Read more