Welcome to the weekly wrap from How-Do.co.uk, the website for North West media and creative industries. If you enjoy this service please forward it to a friend.
Our guest editor this week is Paul Carroll of Zuma 011. Carroll established PR agency Communique in the 1980s. He sold it in 2001 to Burson-Marsteller for a seven figure sum.
No doubt about How-Do’s campaign of the week as smokers in England and Wales discover a new interest in weather forecasts and shares in dry cleaning companies plummet: step forward BJL for their ‘Friends Reignited’ website-centred campaign for Fisherman’s Friends (www.friendsreignited.co.uk ).
A truly original concept, the Friends Reignited site is wryly amusing - for committed non-smokers as well as smokers – and scores heavily in its copy and design excellence, interactivity and support mechanics including ads in the Metro series, banners on MSN and virals. Big cigar to BJL – as long as they smoke it outside.
How-Do’s story on Juicy Marketing’s printing of 50,000 environmentally friendly ‘Glastonbury Experience’ cards for the iconic festival sported a pic of closely grouped rain lashed tents. Is this the result of a limited photo library, the expense of reproducing ‘action’ shots of the Arctic Monkeys (or Shirley B) or an attempt at ironic humour by a rain sodden How-Do hack?
Tony Murray’s latest feature on How-Do takes an entertaining look at PR companies’ websites. Accurately describing agency websites as ‘the first call for window shopping marketing types and, seemingly, the last item on any PR bod’s “to-do” list’ Murray marvels at the general slackness of approach and lost opportunity that most PR websites exude. There is a notable exception when Tony gets to Communique’s website as he avers it’s the nearest of the sites on show to ‘a PR website from heaven ‘. It’s good to know that Tony can still, occasionally, lay claim to good taste, and a reminder that quality endures. How do I know? Well, I wrote the Communique website back in 2002, and hardly a word has been changed in the interim.
I bet there’s not been an agency presentation made this week that didn’t propose ‘doing a blog’ for client X, Y or Z. But are blogs really the future of ‘citizen journalism’ or just a load of egotistical, boring claptrap? Venturing onto How-Do’s blog section, there’s over 50 links to entice the visitor. Who has the time to read them? Who, in fact, has the time to write them? Worse of all are the so-called blogs that are thinly veiled corporate vehicles, whose attempts at being ‘street’ are as cool as the Concert for Diana. There are some good, amusing and thought provoking blogs out there (including some notable ones in the How-Do list), but these are the exception rather than the rule. My advice to most would-be bloggers? Shut it!
As rumours go, How-Do’s take on Prince Edward’s decision to go see Pete Postlethwaite in The Tempest at the Royal Exchange rather than attend a Manchester International Festival Reception is hardly in the same class as ‘Is Harry really Charles’ son?’ but I can at least put the record straight (on the former rather then the latter). Prince Edward – the Patron of the Royal Exchange – was scheduled for Tuesday night’s show for months, so who was promising him to Festival sponsors the same night (and then saying he’d got a better offer?). Come clean – you’ll feel better for it. What a shame too that the two best things in Manchester theatres for eons, The Tempest and the Festival’s Monkey finish this Saturday. If you didn’t get to see them, you missed out, and you should make more use of How-Do’s Events link in future.
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