Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

We announced the Irish findings of the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer this morning. The deck is available to view below. Some interesting findings as usual this year, an overview of the key results can be found here.

It’s not uncommon to hear complaints from companies after a prerecorded television interview airs. A company representative might be interviewed for up to an hour, but ultimately a couple of minutes airs and the rest of the footage ends up on the cutting room floor. The ensuing accusation goes along the lines that footage that aired is not a fair reflection of the overall interview, with the producers picking and choosing segments to make the interviewee come out in the worst light.

This is a similar complaint that the Ultimate Fighting Championship made after an ESPN feature on fighter pay aired recently. The UFC took an interesting position when responding to the piece. They had also recorded the full interview and retaliated by posting it online. The move reflects the company’s overall slick PR machine and leverages the UFC’s huge online audience.

I’ve embedded the full video response below, but I’ve also included a clip immediately underneath which shows how well prepared UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta was for the interview. Fertitta flips the tables on the interviewer by pointing out how little some fighters on ESPN boxing bouts make, completely undermining their ‘expose’ on fighter pay.

Loreno Fertitta flips the tables on ESPN

Full UFC Response

From an issues management perspective, the incident follows a trend of organizations using the Internet as an unfiltered platform to respond to negative coverage, without the restriction of column inches or the length of the show.

Hats off to some slick PR by the UFC.

Couple of things that caught my attention over the Christmas break.

This ad by Mercedes for its new E Class range caught my attention primarily because I never expected something like it from a brand like Mercedes. With car advertising becoming so serious these days, it’s nice to see a brand highlight its safety features in a more light hearted fashion.

Lovely ad by Kodak for its Inkjet printers, which not only nicely illustrates why people should print more images, but it also communicates its value proposition well.

There was a lovely feature in the Sunday Times about an initiative to mark the Queen’s diamond Jubilee in the UK. Face Britain is a national project that invites all young people in the UK to submit a self-portrait. The artwork will be part of a world record attempt and turned into a mosaic which will then be projected onto Buckingham Palace.

There’s a new feature on Twitter which allows you to embed tweets on your blog. Here’s a guide how to do it.

I recently contributed to an article in the Irish Times about media and marketing predictions for 2012. Here are some of my other thoughts on what to look out for during the year ahead.

1. Social TV – Social TV is an interesting trend to watch in 2012. Apple is rumoured to be developing an interactive TV; Microsoft has already been leading the way in terms of redefining how we experience and interact with television by incorporating voice and motion controls, as well as incorporating a variety of content (disclosure: client); and new services like Zeebox have also sprung up, allowing users to interact with complimentary content for whatever show they are watching at the time. The immediate opportunity is the incorporation of social media to increase viewer engagement. A recent study by Nielsen has highlighted the simultaneous usage of devices while watching television. You only have to log onto Twitter and watch the commentary around live shows or sports broadcasts to highlight this. There’s a number of opportunities here. The likes of the WWE have begun to try to push hashtags as part of their regular TV show in order to get topics to trend and pull in viewers. Services like Zeebox show you what your friends are watching, gives you access to additional content about the show you’re watching and also lets you download relevant content. Despite the multitude of content available, seeds will be sown in 2012 that will look to push the crowd to specific content and get them more engaged with it.

2. Erosion of the Middle Ground – With consumer spending tightening, the trend of brands getting caught in the middle between luxury and value will continue as shoppers either trade down or hold out for status purchases. From a grocery perspective, the huge growth in Own Brand is evidence on the value side of the spectrum. Retailers have invested heavily in Own Brand ranges and consumers are well over the stigma of buying these items, not only due to the savings but also because they find the taste is the same if not better. On the other side of the fence, you only have to look at the likes of Apple’s continued success at charging a premium for their products and consumers are only happy to fork out their hard earned cash. The challenge for brands that find themselves caught in the middle is to try and establish a point of difference fast.

3. Communicating Value – Building on the previous trend, there has been a noticeable shift in the second half of the year as to how companies are communicating value, essentially redrawing the battlelines on their own ground. Rounded price points appeal to consumers as they are able to calculate their spend easily whilst shopping. Good positioning in store combined with rounded pricing is an excellent way to drive impulse purchases. Some companies have taken this a step further and are reshaping their offer based on a price point which will appeal to consumers. Coke’s recent introduction of a new bottle variant at a rounded price point is a good example of this. Instead of discounting, they’ve effectively reshaped their offer for what consumers are willing to pay.

4. Targeting emerging markets – While Irish consumers might be tight with cash at the moment, there’s a number of markets who aren’t like the Chinese. According to research, Chinese tourists spend as much as 8% of their discretionary income on foreign visits. Ironically despite the reputation for being able to pickup knock-off luxury goods in the likes of Bejing’s Silk Market, they place a huge emphasis on picking up real luxury goods whilst on foreign visits. Brown Thomas in Dublin recently revealed that the Chinese represent 1% of their annual sales and have adapted to ensure that they have Mandarin speakers in store and can also accept Chinese credit cards. Yet it is ironic that a recent survey showed that four out of five hotels in Ireland do not cater for non English speaking tourists on their websites. From an Irish tourism perspective, we have to reengineer our offer to specific segments.

5. Online data analysis – Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt. There is a huge amount of publicly available information being published by consumers in real time, which will prove to be a goldmine of information. Google claims that can predict flu outbreaks based on the rate of searches for specific terms. This is being exploited by firms like Recorded Future, which uses information to predict future events. According to a recent feature in Wired UK, if you used their stock market predictions since 2009 you would have made an annual return of 56.69%. It highlights that online monitoring isn’t simply a service to identify potential issues, but can also be used to spot market opportunities and predict future behaviour.

6. Communicating Complex Information Simply – We’re living in an era of information overload where consumers are scanning headlines in newspapers or browsing through their Twitterstream. In order to grab their attention, organisations are having to rethink how they present information in an engaging fashion. The rise of infographics over the past year is a good example of this, whereby complex information is presented in a simple fashion visually. From a media perspective, it helps draw the reader’s attention to the page and will hopefully entice them to read other information around the infographic.

7. Waste – The shift to reduce the amount of packaging will continue, driven simultaneously from a CSR perspective as well as an effort to drive down costs. The likes of Aldo have accomplished this very nicely, where the shoebox also doubles as your carrier bag as the simple addition of a piece of string to the box, cutting out the need for a carrier bag.

8. Proof of Concept – There has been a trend in the Internet industry to develop a product off the back of a landing page, essentially establishing proof of concept before actually offering anything. Lots of companies are essentially just setting up landing pages which give an idea of what the service may be, registering interest on the pretense that you will be the first to get access to the service and then deciding whether to develop the product or not, even getting VC cash off the back of how many signups they have received. It’s certainly a trend other sectors will have to have noticed and will look to exploit in order to make investment decisions more cost effectively.

A lovely review of 2011 as a series of Twitter updates during the course of the year by Jeremiah Warren.

Gamification is one of the big buzzwords out there at the moment. It is essentially the discipline of using video game mechanics to incentivise your audience and encourage them to follow specific behaviour. From the outset, I’ll flag my support for the concept and I am currently putting it into practice through the Fitocracy beta.

Here’s a great video of Gabe Zichermann giving a talk at Google about Gamification, which I highly recommend viewing. Some highlights include:

For more, check out the Gamification blog. Here’s a nice starting point – ‘The Six Rules of Gamification‘

2011 has, as the Guardian puts it, been the year of media overload. With so many major news stories breaking within a short space of each other, it has been difficult at times to comprehend. Here’s a great video which tries to show how it felt to live through 2011. Although one wonders whether it has been released too early.

Adidas had a brilliant launch for the new Scotland football shirt in early November. The sportswear manufacturer made use of a giant television screen and augmented reality in the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre in Glasgow. By standing in front of the screen, shoppers would see and could interact with members of the team on the big screen. The reactions of the crowd in the video below says it all.

A lot of promotional activity for a product tries to make it appeal to consumers by associating it with a celebrity, trying to illustrate how it can fulfill a desire or need or by associating it with cultural values which will appeal to the target demographic.

There is nothing better than stripping back all the layers and using the product itself to tell a compelling story to consumers. Like any aha moment, people will just get it.

For example, this video of Eric Yeo recreating an iconic image using only one line speaks volumes about the Faber Castell Artist Pen he uses.

Faber Castell from eric yeo on Vimeo.

What about this giant Christmas tree made of Lego at a train station in the United Kingdom? (via Nick Burcher) It is the centerpiece of attention and illustrates the endless possibilities of the building block perfectly.

Sure enough it seems simple and straight forward, but this sort of creativity is hard to nail. By putting the product at the centre of the story, however, the sales pitch is crystal clear.

There is an interesting feature in last weekend’s New York Times about Dr Dre’s Beats by Dre headphone range. The headphone market is particularly fascinating when you look at how quickly the market has grown. In the UK alone, it has doubled in size over the past five years and is worth £150 million. What is really eye catching about the Beats by Dre phenomenon is the audiophiles don’t really rate the headphones in terms of sound quality. What is really telling is that they are seen as a fashion statement, with reports of people wearing them at clubs akin to ‘wearing sunglasses at night.’

Despite the fact that we are effectively in a global recession, people are still happy to shell out £300 on a pair of headphones. One trend which is evident in most markets is the squeeze of the middle. You can either be a luxury or bargain brand, but everything else in between is in no man’s land. Beats by Dre falls into this trend.

It reminds me of growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, where having a pair of Levi 501s or Nike trainers was seen as something special. We were only delighted to get our hands on specific labels, but as we became more affluent in the late 90s and at the start of the millennium, we shifted away from mass consumption of specific brands and tried to be unique as consumers with purchases reflecting our personality, rather than status.

It strikes me that we are seeing a shift back to similar behaviour as that in the 80s, where consumers will seek out specific brands that they feel make a statement about their status. Another rapper with his own line of headphones, Curtis Jackson aka 50 Cent, sums it up neatly – “Because of the price, it says something about the guy who has it around his neck.”