pr-media-blog.co.uk

The nation’s sweetheart, Cheryl Cole, has landed a global advertising deal with L’Oreal Paris making her the first British woman to be signed by the company since Kate Moss in 1998.

The Girls Aloud singer and X Factor judge will appear in a major TV campaign this month following the launch of a new range, Elvive Full Restore 5, in the UK.

It’s reported that L’Oreal tested a number of UK celebrities and unsurprisingly, Cheryl was the clear favourite, held in great affection by the British public.

But what is it that makes this Geordie lass a national treasure? From humble beginnings on a Newcastle council estate to gracing the cover of UK Vogue, Cheryl Cole has well and truly been through the public mill (remember the incident with the toilet attendant?). But since winning public sympathy when husband Ashley Cole allegedly cheated on her, and replacing Sharon Osbourne as a judge on X Factor, she has been the crush of many girls, boys, men and women.

In fact, over the last couple of years there appears to be a distinct lack of criticism for Cheryl generally. The press love her, girls want to be her and we know what boys want to do…

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, she talks candidly about her life in the media glare, often referencing her Geordie roots and admitting that she “doesn’t trust anyone except her mother and her dogs”.

The interview also reports how, on set of the L’Oreal TV ad, she humbly admits that she can’t quite believe she’s been given the opportunity to say those iconic words “because you’re worth it” and, in other recent press interviews, when asked how she feels about being involved in the campaign, she’s a PR dream: “I have always loved the brand, to be given this opportunity is amazing.”

Cheryl Cole has cleverly managed to position herself as a fashionista, a songstress and a TV favourite whilst retaining an air of openness, accessibility and honesty unseen in the likes of Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss.

Love or loath her (unlikely the latter) with a deal rumoured to be worth half a million pounds, L’Oreal clearly think she’s worth it….

Need media coverage - then hire your own reporter. That is what is happening in the US where newspapers are increasingly in the position where they can no longer to afford to send reporters to cover professional sports.

The New York Times this week highlighted the growing trend in baseball and hockey for teams to hire journalists who have previously covered their teams.

Newspapers have increasingly been using copy from news agencies, which tends to focus only on the winning team. It doesn’t necessarily tell the full story of the game and misses details that a newspaper’s dedicated reporter can bring to the story - particularly if his team has lost.  However, it is not just the match day coverage that has disappeared but the profile provided by non-match day stories and interviews.

To combat this, the hockey team the Los Angeles Kings have hired journalist Rich Hammond, who used to cover the team for the Los Angeles Daily News. He will travel to all the games and provide copy for the team’s local newspapers.

It immediately throws up issues of impartiality and potential conflict with the Kings’ PR team. Hammond has been quick to dispel concerns on his blog. He says that that his output will not need approval or interviews supervision and that his role is not PR.

He will be working as an independent reporter but can he? It is hard to believe that that the PR team will be totally comfortable with this as, in theory, he can write stories about the conflict within the club or how the manager may be about to lose his job. Compromise will happen somewhere along the line.

Could something like this happen with professional sport in the UK? Unlikely at national newspaper level but with the cuts being made in the regional media and the number of journalists that have been made redundant it is not beyond the realms of possibility. A media owner could jump at the idea to have a flow of stories about a football club without the cost of employing the journalist. But the nagging question would be how much input has the PR team really had?

Strictly Come Dancing versus X Factor. Brucie versus Simon. Celebrity versus wannabe. All part of the fight for the largest viewing audience on Saturday night.

This weekend sees the return of what has become the traditional autumn battle for the crown of most watched TV programme of the weekend.

X Factor, currently showing the auditions, is already an established part of Saturday viewing more than a month into its latest series. Last weekend more than 12 million viewers tuned in. It seems not only to be pleasing viewers but must make the ITV bosses happy acting as a spur to advertising revenues in these difficult market times.

The BBC’s announcement last week that it was to pit its Saturday flagship caused a flurry in the media with claims that the BBC was being ‘aggressive’ taking on ITV head-to-head. Over the last couple of seasons, when the shows have been complementary, each has reached around 10 million viewers.

It is unlikely that the viewers will be split down the middle as Britain’s households will probably choose to record one while watching the other. Potentially it could be X Factor relegated to the recorder as it has already been announced that its results will now appear on Sunday rather than on Saturday night, with the BBC dropping its Sunday night results show.

The danger for ITV is that with X Factor recorded, viewers are tempted to skip the ad breaks. This must be a concern for advertisers and for ITV.  

There is only one group that will decide this and it is the British public. Next  week I am sure we will have more debate as this has a lot further to run - well until Christmas.

Let battle commence.

It seems the power of the PR ‘stunt’ to gain coverage is still well and truly with us - as the story of Winston the pigeon is anything to go by.

Winston was challenged to get a  4gb data stick from the offices of Unlimited IT in the town of Howick to Durban quicker - one hour and eight minutes -  than a transfer by an internet connection from the country’s biggest ISP Telkom.

Unsurprisingly, Winston’s pigeon post won delivering the data stick whilst just 4% of the data had arrived electronically.

The object of the exercise was to demonstrate just how slow broadband connections are in South Africa and give some profile to the IT company.

However perhaps this ‘stunt’, which gained global coverage, was timely as qualification games were taking place across the world and people were thinking about South Africa.

Today’s tournaments are so heavily reliant on the internet that the’ stunt’ offers a wake up call to the authorities and tournament organisers that its communication  network needs to be able to cope with the demands of the modern World Cup.

The last thing you want is a meltdown while the world’s media is in your back yard. Now where is that crisis management plan……

Around the middle of the morning the words Sir, Bobby, Robson and RIP started to trend on twitter.  It seemed that once again the social web had broken the news of the sad demise of a celebrity.  There have been several instances where this happened, a phenomenon first identified by this blog in October of last year, with the most notable occurrence being with the recent departure of Michael Jackson.

An analysis seemed to confirm that twitter was first to the news if only by a few minutes. At 10.18am (BST) @RobertMNHarvey was the first to tweet ‘RIP Bobby Robson’.  The Yorkshire Evening Press website was hot on his heels with an article timed at 10.22am, the first of the so-called conventional media to publish the story.  Four minutes later the news was on Bobby Robson’s Wikipedia entry but there was still nothing on Google News.    

I contacted the author of the twitter scoop.  Was he a hospital worker, a friend of the family, a football agent with inside knowledge perhaps? No, he had seen the story on the TV, Sky Sports News to be exact.  The crowd are are on the twits and they think it’s all over.  If you think it is time to blow the whistle on conventional news media, think again.

Most people who read a newspaper will have picked up on the story of Mathew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report into teenage consumption of the media which broke surface a little over a week ago. At first glance this smacked of a well executed PR stunt after the story made a huge splash in the nationals and had significant penetration online.

However, upon reading the report in its entirety – rather than reading what other people have said about the report, which is where most conversations have derived from – it is actually surprisingly simplistic, logical, and to someone who was not a teenager all that long ago, far less than groundbreaking than you might imagine. Everything contained in the report, well, it just seemed rather self-evident.

For instance, one of the key points that the media picked up on is that teenagers don’t Twitter. Of course they don’t. You actually have to invest some time in Twitter to get anything out of it. It takes months, if not years, to actually build up enough followers for one to feel their tweets are actually reaching an audience which could be, in any way, defined as significant. And even once you do, there is little content other than the oh so boring medium of text.

Compare this to the Facebook experience where you can jump into a ready made group, lured by a diversity of visually stimulating and engaging content, such as pictures, applications and games. It’s all rather Scrabulous.

Many of the other observations are fairly straightforward, claiming, for example that most teenagers don’t read newspapers or watch the news…is this news? Were you interested in global geo-politics or the lack of transparency within the political system when you were 14? No, thought not. Funnily enough, kids aren’t now either.

Most kids have mobiles on pay-as-you-go because they can’t afford contracts…hold the front bleedin’ page…the FT did.

So ok, this isn’t a PR stunt, but it does demonstrate a few things. Firstly, that if you want a report into the habits of media consumption – or anything for that matter – to have penetration, keep it simply and write it in language that is not impenetrable to the man in the street. Secondly, if you want to know how teenagers consume the media or anything else, just ask them. Thirdly, a story really does not have to be groundbreaking to get blanket coverage; it just has to be insightful, informative and PR’d within an inch of its life.

The report in its entirety can be viewed here.

A few months ago I wrote about discovering via twitter that the French actor Guillaume Depardieu had died.  Six months ago it seemed an oddity that ordinary individuals would break news ahead of the major media sources.  It appears now that this is an established phenomenon.  The sad news of Natasha Richardson’s fatal skiing accident was spread via twitter, blogs and social networks long before the strictures of the established media allowed them to confirm the details.

At around 4pm UTC today (19th May) twitter started trending with the news that actor Patrick Swayze had died of pancreatic cancer.  But within half an hour or so the story had flipped to a denial.  The actor it appears is alive if unwell and continuing his battle against cancer.

Whilst trending topics on the web add a new dimension to breaking news inaccurate rumours can take hold.  The established media brands adhere to a largely common set of journalistic conventions that moderate the motivation to break news fast with the imperative of accuracy.  That’s why they are trusted.    

There is something very fishy about about the news that Sainsbury’s is to rebrand the pollack as ‘colin’ (that’s with a heavily accented French pronunciation by the way).  Apparently their shoppers are fighting shy of asking for a “pair of fresh pollacks” at the fish counter.  

The story has made quite a splash today but much of it doesn’t hold water.  Firstly the French for pollack is lieu jaune and ‘colin’ is a hake.  Secondly we are very close to April Fool’s day (that’s Poisson D’Avril in French).  Is this an April Fool idea that Sainsbury’s thought would grow legs and get more coverage?  If so they weren’t wrong.    

There is also new ‘Colin’ packaging designed by Wayne Hemingway and based on the work of Jackson Pollock (please note not ‘Jackson Colin’).  Furthermore this initiative is also only being taken in 10 stores - so what of the blushes of the myriad of bashful fish fanciers in the other 750+ Sainsbury’s outlets?   Is this an old fashioned bit of PR puffery?  Will we see that after a trial period the ten stores get their pollacks back? 

Has the media fallen for this hook, line and sinker? (OK that’s enough puns….Ed.)

I’ve been stupidly busy the last few days so my only real info on the G20 summit has been from the radio and occasional glances at news websites and Twitter feeds, until a rather sleepy view of the BBC 10 o’clock news last night. So I took time this morning for breakfast and a proper read of the paper.  (Guardian, but the other broadsheets gave a similar spread of coverage and comment.)  It was a joy. 

The reporting was clear, the breakdown of the communiqué a good mix of fact and analysis, the comment pieces pertinent (these with a clear Guardian standpoint of course, but with Simon Jenkins to leaven the mix). There was a nod to the fashionistas with the provenance of Michelle Obama’s outfits, and a suitably laconic piece on the politics of the official picture. I enjoyed it so much I’m going to find time to read it all again in one of the other broadsheets tonight. So what does this say for the future of newspapers? 

Well, it confirms that in my house at least (which is a very average establishment, I like to thing) Monday to Friday papers have the same status as the weekend ones - best enjoyed at leisure with a cup of tea.  The actual reading of them is the point.  I found time because I wanted to see a real spread of coverage of a story which I had skimmed but needed a longer shot. 

A full fat latte version, if you will, rather than the expresso. There is a crucial difference, though, between that and traditional feature fare - this was current, grounded in real news, hard working and focused. I really felt the passion of the journalists who had been involved.  

Can they replicate this on a daily basis?  Perhaps not, but it will keep me paying the newsagents bill for a bit longer. Will it be enough to sustain their future?  I’d like to think it will.  I think people are rediscovering the joy of a good read, and I think they are likely to be prepared to pay a premium for it. And where does PR fit in all this?  Well someone has been writing all those media information packs…

Exciting news from the Guardian where they’ve announced they will make their content available on an Open Platform. Great, but what does this mean??!

Essentially the Guardian are saying they see the future for news brands as content providers, making themselves useful to readers on the web by allowing other content providers eg online niche news sites, bloggers, forums to repackage Guardian content by making their code widely available.

But wouldn’t the Guardian lose out by losing control? I don’t think so. The best place to come for Guardian content in one place will be the Guardian’s site and its articles will still rank very highly in search - much more than most other sites. But where users have a close relationship with a particular blog or forum then it makes sense for Guardian content to appear there, with the potential for online publishers to innovate with that content to produce something even more tailored. 

The Guardian are ensuring they have a place in audience’s networks in a way that keeps pace with their viewing preferences. 

UPDATE - Jeremiah has a great post on what innovation may result from the Guardian extending control beyond the walls of their site.

All details are here and a summary of what is planned is below: 

The Open Platform is the suite of services that make it possible for our partners to build applications with the Guardian. We’ve opened up our platform so that everyone can benefit from our journalism, our brand, and the technologies that power guardian.co.uk.

The Open Platform currently includes two products, the Content API and the Data Store:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

The Content API is a free service. We have some limits and restrictions detailed in our terms and conditions, but we hope that you will use our service for whatever needs you have, including commercial applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Data Store has a range of different uses for different types of partners. We will include relevant terms and conditions along with each service.

Our aim is to make the Guardian Open Platform a useful environment for anyone who creates for the internet. We will offer more services in the future such as an ad network and an application platform.

This initial release is a beta trial that will help us identify the ways our partners want to work with us. Access will be granted on a limited basis.

If you want to use the Content API, read the Getting started guide and apply for a key.