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Saturday, May 14, 2005

PR Week - What's The Big Idea?

I'm hoping some of you visiting www.consulttheguru.com over the next few days will be doing so after reading about us in the article on page 25 of this week's edition of PR Week magazine (UK).

With hindsight, I think there's a danger that if you work in the same profession, you might look our domain name and think "Who the bloody hell is he to call himself a guru?" In fact, the inspiration for the domain name came from my time working at a subsidiary of Hill and Knowlton. When anyone in the team came up with a good idea for a client, the others would all shout: "Damn, you're a guru" in unison, in a slightly take-the-piss kind of way. That's really all there is to it, except that we also thought consulttheguru is kind of catchy, contains a 'call to action' and would inspire more confidence than, say, consultthehalfwit.com

Anyway, if you are visiting from a PR agency, we'd like to know what you think of the idea for this website. If you don't have a dedicated creative department in-house, can you see yourself using our service as an integral part of the pitch process? Is it priced correctly for you to do that?

Any comments would be much appreciated.



Thursday, May 12, 2005

Good bit of self-promotion by a marketing company

With the exception of blatant self-publicists like The Big Borkowski and Max Clifford (a man who graces the pages of the UK tabloids so often that his company has no need of a website) it's not often you see PR or marketing companies working on their own account. In fact, it's positively frowned upon in some quarters.

I've never quite understood why. After all, it's a PR's job to champion their clients, and as Messrs Clifford and Borkowski have shown, becoming famous in one's own right can be a very effective platform. Granted, it's a risky strategy (ask Mandelson or Campbell), but the same could be said of many of the most effective tactics used to get the media's attention.

Anyway, good to see Jo Parker, head of Teamspirit, shamelessly promoting her agency with the story in the Daily Mail that Britons are now suffering PIN blindness. Not to be confused with the condition which causes millions to stab themselves in the thumb as they fasten their child's nappy. Rather, a result of the modern age, when we all have so many credit and debit cards, and so many website usernames and passwords, that we have to write them all down, creating a security risk. A quarter of us have 4 PIN numbers and 16 usernames and passwords; some have a staggering 45 passwords.

No word from Miss Parker as to a cure for PIN blindness. Secretly though, I hope they don't find one. My wife suffers a particularly advanced form of the condition in which she forgets the PIN numbers and then where she hid the piece of paper she wrote them on. If I'm going to keep up with the mortgage payments, I've got to hope she's not cured any time in the next twenty five years.

Link

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Good bit of DIY public relations

The 'Big Excuse' in the public relations profession is probably the same the world over: "Well, we did everything we could, but your press release didn't make it in to the newspaper because of the terrorist bomb / crashing airliner / politician caught in bed with someone of a different sex (or species) than their wife / footballer caught dogging in the layby on the A412 outside Slough".

So Wickes must be feeling quite pleased with its story in the Daily Express yesterday, when over 18 pages of the newspaper were devoted to election reporting, results and commentary.

The DIY chain carried out a survey which showed that 88% of people now use their bedrooms for anything but the first two things that come to mind. Primarily: eating (a meal, rather than ice cream from their partner's midriff), watching the plasma TV, reading and working. Apparently: "for nearly 9 out of 10 people, sex is the last thing on their minds once they are in the bedroom."

But then again, given that the poll was conducted exclusively amongst customers of the store, I wonder whether it doesn't say more about the sort of person that shops at Wickes than anything else.



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