Year: 2018

I thought this would do nicely for an end of year post, back in April, J.D. Wetherspoon’s announced that it would be closing down its social accounts with immediate effect. But looking back nine months on, was this really the right business decision? I take a look and perfom some social listening to find out. Wetherspoon’s 44,000 Twitter followers and 100,000 Facebook fans were relatively small for a large and relatively successful FTSE250 company. With around 900 social media accounts for its pubs, it would certainly be a mammoth task to even try to manage all of those – no ... Read more

This post was originally posted on the Prohibition blog but I felt it would be useful to share this on my own blog too. So a couple of weeks ago all of the chatter online (apart from Brexit) was all about the latest John Lewis advert and a little boy called Reg buying a new piano. I don’t think they sell Pianos but I liked it, all the same, despite it being a very different approach for them this year. So this week we are delighted to reveal our own video-led Christmas campaign for our client and leading high-street jeweller ... Read more

Google+ first landed on the internet back in 2011, eager for a slice of the social networking pie. Launched to directly compete with Facebook, some did say at the time it was fighting a losing battle (me included) and it does now appear they may have been right. Last month, Google announced it would be closing down Google+ to consumers in August 2019 and concentrating purely on business users. But what do these changes mean for us in PR and marketing? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? The new social networking site attracted early interest with more ... Read more

So a couple of weeks ago I was contacted online and asked if I would be interested in receiving a free copy of the new book: The Art and Craft of PR by Sandra Stahl. For those of you that haven’t heard of her, Sandra is a co-founder of the PR agency, Jacobstahl, Adjunct Professor in the Branding and Integrated Communications master’s degree program at The City College of New York, and now a published author. She has more than 30 years of experience in communications. This book is apparently aimed at focusing on the truth about public relations. In Sandra’s ... Read more

The last twelve months at Prohibition have been particularly busy, with the team delivering some truly stunning work, much of which we will be sharing this Christmas but we felt we weren’t really sharing a lot of the content we were producing. So we wanted to create a short sharp piece of blatant self-promotion that would bring our busy year to life. This short clip hopefully does that – well-done team, there are some great campaigns in here and you should all be very proud.

It’s been a busy week and this has made me smile this morning. This video is part of a wider campaign from one of our clients uBer – the video takes a humorous angle on why marketers sometimes think it’s far safer to go with a London agency. I know I have talked about this a lot but although there are lots of brilliant companies in London there are also plenty of great quality PR, marketing, content and creative agencies outside of the M25 and this video shows you that in a far more entertaining way than I can write. I love ... Read more

In my opinion interns and work experience students should and must be paid. I started out as student on the PR degree in Leeds many years ago and I got work experience from year one with several agencies. The first couple of internships I wasn’t paid anything but on my third placement the agency in question decided to offer me a small fee for getting off my backside and turning up to work each week, which if I am honest really helped as I was pretty skint. There is a huge worry in the PR industry at the moment that ... Read more

I have been pretty busy during these last few months speaking at various social media conferences and events discussing a lot of different topics but the big one has been the latest social trends. Now although I am OLD (don’t laugh) I don’t proclaim to be an oracle and know everything that is going to happen in business and technology but I do feel I have a fairly solid understanding of social media marketing as it is today in 2018. My agency Prohibition has had its biggest year of growth in the last twelve months and a lot of our ... Read more

Who doesn’t love a good old tasting surprise PR stunt? And here is the most recent example with our friendly baker Greggs fooling a load of foodies at a food festival. They all think they are trying some local artisan delights when really the food being tasted is available in your local Greggs. A great little stunt and the video is well put together so a big hat tip to the PR team at Greggs for this one. Here’s the campaign bumf: “Who is Gregory and Gregory?” Greggs went undercover to showcase our new summer lunch menu to foodies… but ... Read more

There has been some big news in the last few days in the world of social and I am not talking about Privacy. No I am talking about Flickr, the forgotten social network for images, that was created more than 14 years ago, which was quickly sold to the juggernaut Yahoo – remember them? After that the platform did rather well and was always mentioned as the social photography platform of choice until about six years ago when others started to join the party and to overtake it. It has been bought by a competitor SmugMug – the two platforms ... Read more