Under Strict Embargo

Today’s musings are inspired by this evening’s viewing on Channel 4.

First up was Property Ladder with the amazing Sarah Beeny. Apart from the obvious Property Porn, the real joy of the show is watching the invariably clueless and over confident DIYers set about ignoring the advice of a woman who has literally made millions from property developing, only to regret it later.

Brilliant TV and not dissimilar to the situation which can exist in the client agency relationship – but with two critical differences. Firstly our advice and expertise is not being offered for free. Secondly when Beeny’s warnings are ignored and the project goes tits-up as predicted, she’s not the one that gets all the blame anyway.

It’s the same story with the show that follows, Gordan Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Again the advice of a Michelin starred chef is ignored because the near-bankrupt proprietor thinks he knows better. However, crucially unlike Beeny, Ramsay almost always gets his own way eventually. He’s persistent, doesn’t give a toss about the other guy’s ego, doesn’t roll over at the first sign of trouble and above all remembers he is the Expert. And despite the initial rows and fisticuffs by the end of the show the owner usually worships him as a saviour. I think there is a clear professional lesson to be learned from the Ramsay approach, don’t you?

All of this reminded me of some fantastic rules developed by Ogilvy’s Rohit Bhargava on how to be a better client and therefore get better results from your PR agency. Please read his seven great tips below. I know seven rules may be nowhere near enough, but for me two key ones are definitely No. 4 - Take the advice you are paying and No. 5 Know what you don’t know.

As always would love to hear your suggestions on what should be added to the list! Tomorrow the lessons that PR professionals can learn from BBC1’s Spooks…

1. Provide clear direction - This was a clear No.1 priority for many agency creative workers in particular who have struggled to interpret vague instructions. Making something “more corporate” in look or language is not clear direction, though you may know what you mean by this. The best clients are the ones who are able to articulate what they are looking for.

2. Invite us to the table early - The earlier we learn about a campaign or new marketing initiative, the smarter recommendations we can bring to you. This may seem in contrast to the first point, as inviting your agency early might also mean you don’t yet have clear direction to offer … but at the early stage it matters less because as long as we have enough information, we can produce the best work. That comes from clear direction, or from early participation.

3. Be honest about success factors - The easy thing to say is that a campaign needs to get X number of views. Many times, the motivation for a campaign are more subtle. The smart agency guys (or gals) understand that part of your motivation is also to look smart in front of your colleagues. That’s nothing to be ashamed of - our job is to help you look smart. If we work together, we can all win.

4. Take the advice you are paying for - One of the toughest things to do as your advisors is to tell you when an idea doesn’t work. Too many agency people roll over and obey commands, but my experience with clients is that they respect you far more when you have a distinct point of view. The challenge is that once we share it, if you choose not to take the advice, we need to understand why. You don’t need to always follow what we say, but the thing we hate most of all is telling you something won’t work, being forced to do it anyway, and then getting blamed when it doesn’t work.

5. Know what you don’t know - We all have limitations in what we know and what we do. The clearest example of this comes when looking at design. If you don’t have a design background, you need to tread carefully with design feedback. Take the time to understand why a designer chose to do something a particular way rather than just sharing your personal dislike. A lot of thinking often goes into designs like this, and the most disheartening thing for a creative person is to just be told to arbitrarily change a colour or font or image that spent hours to select based on someone else’s personal choice.

6. Understand that changes affect timelines - This again is one of the common gripes from people in agencies, that clients change requirements or requests and still expect things to be done within the same amount of time. This isn’t reasonable, and the best clients know it. If you need to make a change, its ok - we get it. But work with us to get a real timeline for when we can make the change and get something back to you. We’ll respect you for realizing that.

7. Ask our advice - There is a book called The Trusted Advisor which has become the bible for many people who are in service businesses. As the title indicates, the book is about building a relationship of trust that gets to a level where you are considered an advisor even on things outside of your expertise. This remains the ultimate relationship between clients and agencies, and the one we all strive for.

So who or what has been dominating the media agenda in 2007? Well Canadian news broker Influence Communications has just released an analysis of 632 million print and broadcast news items across 120 countries and Paris Hilton, not for the first time, is on top. Well almost, Ms Hilton is this year’s most talked about global personality (excluding politicians) and her brief spell behind bars is the 13^th most popular story of the year so far. Thankfully celebrity culture doesn’t completely dominate with ‘proper news’ like the the Iraq War and the 2008 US Presidential race the most covered stories to date. See the Top 15 below and Press Gazette’s piece:

1. War in Iraq
2. US 2008 presidential elections
3. Iran nuclear threat
4. War on Taliban
5. Blair’s exit from office
6. Virginia Tech shootings
7. Harry Potter, the final book
8. French general elections
9. G8 summit
10. Execution of Saddam Hussein
11. iPhone launch
12. Madeleine McCann’s disappearance
13. Paris Hilton in jail
14. Mattel recalls toys
15. Madonna’s adoption problems

It’s perhaps not surprising that one of the most hyped consumer product launches of the year, Apple’s iPhone is only just outside the top ten. As the guys at 10 Zen Monkeys point out, this summer saw a “pop culture battle between two empires – one high-tech, one high-rise”, especially in the US media. The following from their site is I think the best selection of the many comparisons between the Sidekick/BlackBerry/Motorola weilding star and the must have gadget of 2007…

iPhone: Simple to use.
Paris Hilton: Simple.

iPhone: Well-protected against viruses.
Paris Hilton: Has herpes.

iPhone: Responds to touch from multiple fingers at once.
Paris Hilton: Responds to touch from multiple fingers at once.

iPhone: Face consists of hard, transparent plastic shell
Paris: Face consists of hard, transparent plastic shell

iPhone: Has at least 4 gigs of memory
Paris Hilton: Doesn’t

iPhone: Appeared in multi-million dollar ad campaign.
Paris Hilton: Appeared in “House of Wax.”

iPhone: Sometimes sucks.
Paris Hilton: Always…

Martin Sorrell’s WPP Group disappointed the City on Friday with 3rd quarter growth of just 5%, but PR was one of the strongest performing divisions with an 11% increase in revenues to £157m. WPP’s vast portfolio of agencies includes the likes of H&K, Bell Pottinger, BM and Cohn & Wolfe. The Guardian reports that Sorrell is attributing the high growth to social networking. Not PR 2.0 as such, but rather that the attention being paid to social media has apparently highlighted to clients the power of independent editorial, which in turn has boosted PR spend overall.

Sorrell claims that,“Social networking is really recommendation between people about the things that they are interested in and they like… this has stimulated people’s attention in terms of the importance of PR. The people who are going on these sites didn’t want to be monetised, they didn’t want to be advertised to, so again editorial communication is so powerful, they would rather be communities that can exchange views that are untarnished.”

It’s an interesting analysis, but while being in agreement, I think the social networking story is just a small piece in the far wider and more fundamental battle raging between PR and advertising spend. I do love the bit about ‘untarnished’ editorial though, perhaps he was being deliberately ironic?

Fascinating signs of possible further PR industry consolidation today. It is being reported that Photon, an Australian group that owns over 31 different agencies globally, has not only acquired consumer shop Frank PR for £18m but tech agency Hotwire as well.

The Hotwire acquisition speculation has yet to be formally confirmed by Photon via a statement to the Australian stock exchange, but PR Week seems confident in its reporting as is TWL. The lack of a formal denial by either party possibly indicates that negotiations on price may still be ongoing. Hotwire was ranked as the third largest technology agency in the UK in PR Week’s most recent league table with reported fee income of £4.5m in 2006.

Such a move would follow the recent acquisitions of Rainier and Mantra and the possible sale of Brands2Life.

So Bite has won it! Not content with landing LinkedIn they have beaten off a host of competitors to win the UK Facebook account, according to PR Week. Surprisingly Facebook sees no potential conflict with LinkedIn, with Bite claiming they ‘operate in a different space’. Slightly unfair I thought of PR Week to call Google’s PR agency Octopus (which made the final three along with Chameleon) a ‘relative unknown’….

A couple of examples of firms harnessing the power of B2B social networks have caught my eye today. Pfizer has announced a partnership with Sermo, the fast-growing US networking site for doctors. Sermo which launched in September 2006 currently has 30,000 US physicians with the site adding 2,000 new members each week. The network allows doctors to discuss medical cases or problems and post personal profiles. It is expected to launch outside the US next year.

Pfizer’s engagement will initially focus on providing medics with online information on its products but the company will also be looking to work with Sermo to formulate rules governing the wider exchange of medical information. This will include engaging with the US Food & Drugs Administration to define guidelines for the use of social media in communications with healthcare professionals. Pfizer is the first of the ‘Big Pharma’ firms to engage with social networking in such a concerted way.

The second example comes from global IT reseller Ingram Micro which has created The Zone. The social networking initiative will allow Ingram’s various VAR communities covering SMB, government procurement etc to create their own Zone sites. Both VAR executives and Ingram employees will be encouraged to create profiles and blogs and network to share information and best practice.

Both examples are a reminder that Facebook and LinkedIn will not be the be-all and end-all of professional social networking. There is a huge potential for well designed vertical sites to really take off in the next year. Also with the growing capability to buy inexpensive off-the-shelf software to create social networking sites, I can see many organisations with large potential online communities following Ingram’s lead and simply creating their own.

To say that the Chancellor Alistair Darling transformed the UK PR landscape yesterday would be an obvious exaggeration but neither should the potential implications of his tax changes be underestimated. Beyond all the ya-boo politics surrounding Inheritance Tax, Darling in his Pre-Budget Report announced a new flat rate of 18% for Capital Gains Tax. In essence CGT is a tax paid whenever you sell an asset for profit, be it shares, property a second home or your PR agency.

Now the new 18% flat rate is in effect a near doubling of the 10% discounted rate which most people currently pay if they hold on to their assets for over two years before selling them. With the new 18% rate coming into effect in April 2008, a number of commentators are predicting that many small business owners will be clamoring to put their firms up for sale under the currently more favourable tax regime.

Not wishing to imply that PR agency owners are in any way greedy, but I think few who were seriously considering selling up in the next 18-months will want to wait and hand the Treasury an even bigger slice of the businesses they have devoted their lives to building. The past year has hardly been quiet on the M&A front and a number of agencies have quite openly put up the ‘For Sale’ sign in recent weeks. So what will be fascinating to watch over the coming months will be whether Darling’s changes have the predicted effect and in any way catalyse the consolidation of the tech agency space.

Fascinating afternoon with the breaking news that Gordon Brown will not be calling a general election. Political blogs like Iain Dale and ConservativeHome have been quick off the mark as has the BBC, with the news leaked first to BBC Political Editor’s Nick Robinson’s blog.

With the news breaking at just after 3pm today, what’s slightly puzzling is that with this decision widely expected this weekend, that the online sites of most of the major papers as of 5pm have still not got the news up, unlike England’s Rugby victory. Then again they may simply be reflecting the British public’s real priorities this weekend…

David Cameron is a Hottie - not my view of course but the name of a Facebook Group which David Cameron cited in his make-or-break conference speech this afternoon. Facebook and MySpace were both name checked in a section of the speech discussing change and growing personal freedom, you can see the specific clip here.

Apparently the Hottie group had 74 members when Cameron came across it, but this has increased to 170 and growing so far this afternoon. In his defence he does also mention one of the many anti-Cameron Facebook groups which seem to be far more popular…

So after widespread speculation in recent weeks that Microsoft was set to buy a stake in Facebook, it appears that there is some back tracking going on. Last week Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was at Microsoft’s HQ, where he was reported to be negotiating the sale of a 5% stake for $500m, valuing his site at a colossal $10 billion.

The negotiations perhaps didn’t go quite to plan judging from Rhys Blakely’s great interview with Microsoft Chief Exec Steve Ballmer in today’s Times Online. Ballmer claims, “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.”

In case we haven’t got the message he goes on to say, “There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure.”

Hmm, sour grapes anyone?

Given the massive growth in online advertising, the policy by a few remaining papers to charge a subscription to access online content has become a growing anomaly. The news today that FT.com will be allowing users free access to any 30 stories on its website per month, all but sounds the death knell for the subscription model.

In many ways the FT has been bounced into this decision following the news last week that the New York Times would be making its site free. In addition there have also been well publicised hints from Rupert Murdoch that he is considering ending online subscription charges for the FT’s arch rival the Wall Street Journal. It’s clear the FT didn’t want to be the last mainstream paper still charging readers through the nose.

With a surprising 100,000 subscribers paying £99 a year, the likely erosion of almost £10m in revenues will not be pain-free for the FT, especially considering its tiny £11m profit in 2006. The gamble is that relaxing the restrictions to access will lead to a significant enough boost in visitors to power a stronger ad-funded and search-funded revenue model. FT.com claims that in the last year monthly unique users have already grown by more than 70 per cent to 6.5 million, so the signs are positive.

The official spin on the announcement is that the ‘30 stories limit’ represents an innovative ‘third way’ model between free and paid access. The obvious reality is that this is a stop-gap measure on the welcome road to completely free access. What is also encouraging is the recognition that an open access model will increase the number of blogs linking to FT.com stories and will thus help drive those all important visitors from the blogosphere – a key battleground as the FT prepares for war with a more aggressive WSJ.