Robbing Banksy

Just watching a Channel4 report about a cafe owner and a builder from East London who dug up a Banksy wall and now want to flog it on the open market.

Two small problems:

1- Banksy wont authenticate any outdoor work believing these are public art pieces and not for sale, and;

2- No auction house will sell a piece that isn’t authenticated by the elusive spray paint genius himself.

Great excuse to put up my favourite piece!

Free Pints all round!

Its free pints this Christmas from Tennents. The well known brewery is giving away 40,000 pints to customer over the holidays. That’s about 6.8 million calories or 60,000 units of alcohol.

Its a headline catcher alright but here is the question.

Will this promotion fall foul of the increasingly vocal lobby who are trying to change the relationship we all have with drink in this part of the world?

Woooo Hoooo!

This is a bit of trumpet blowing but it is great to work for a company at the top of its game.

Last night the UK Public Relations Consultants Association named Weber Shandwick International Agency of the Year and Weber Shandwick Technology as Specialist Consultancy of the Year. Weber Shandwick Financial won the PRCA’s Best Financial PR Campaign award.  

Just a fortnight ago PR Week named us International Agency of the Year – a double whammy that is a first for us or any other agency in our business.

More than online or offline – the future is INLINE

Describing communications that draw no distinction between the media used, be it online, offline or experiential, INLINE is a methodology developed by Weber Shandwick to maximise the effectiveness of PR spend and ensure a 360° conversation with audiences. We launched it in Europe last week.

This new thinking is based on a major analysis of communications trends and behaviours. The research was commissioned in August 2009 from almost 5,000 European consumers and focused on which communications channels carry the most influence on consumer purchasing decisions. The data returned turns traditional PR thinking and planning on its head.

When it comes to influencing purchase decisions, online advocacy carries the most influence of all communications channels.

• Young European consumers are more influenced by the traditional media than their older counterparts.
• Over half of European consumers under the age of 35 expressed a desire to interact with brands via social networks.
• Newspapers and magazines are more influential to French and UK&IRL consumers than those in other European markets.
• Advertising is cited as having the least influence on Europeans’ purchase decisions.
• Many European consumers do not wholly accept what they read online until they have checked the facts in mainstream, traditional media.
• INLINE Profiles are consistent across all European markets.

Spend less – live longer

The good life may well be our only hope if we are survive to humanity’s assault on our planet according to the  Sustainable Development Commission’s Prof Tim Jackson who’s report ‘Prosperity without Growth?’is taking him to the UN next month and had him in Belfast last night to debate a local panel including myself.

His message is a simple one. We are living beyond our means and our planet’s resources are running out. We are on a self destruction path and the only way out of this quagmire is by radically changing the way we run our economies and manage our resources.  The economy is geared, above all, to economic growth. Economic policy in the current recession is all about returning to growth – but an economic crisis can be an opportunity for some basic rethinking and restructuring.

Professor Jackson argues that two objectives other than growth – sustainability and well being – have moved up the political and policy-making agenda in recent years, challenging the overriding priority traditionally given to economic growth.

His solution is much more complex.  Too complex to cover in 400 words and to be honest beyond my powers of summary. But the challenge is clear – macro economics needs to cease its pursuit of growth and that means all of us have to change our behaviour as consumers.

Prosperity without growth? analyses the relationship between growth and the growing environmental crisis and ’social recession’. In the last quarter of a century, while the global economy has doubled, the increased in resource consumption has degraded an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems. The benefits of growth have been distributed very unequally, with a fifth of the world’s population sharing just 2% of global income. Even in developed countries, huge gaps remain in wealth and well-being between rich and poor.

While modernising production and reducing the impact of certain goods and services have led to greater resource efficiency in recent decades, Professor Jackson’s report finds that current aspirations for ‘decoupling’ environmental impacts from economic growth are unrealistic. The report finds no evidence as yet of decoupling taking place on anything like the scale or speed which would be required to avoid increasing environmental devastation.

He argues that this is a global problem which requires global solutions, but is there anything that can be done locally?

Joanne Stuart from the IoD, Eleanor Gill and myself responded. I asked why we import every last drop of gas we need to generate electricity in this region, why our executive is showing no interest in putting sustainability at the heart of its economic strategies even though they have the power to do this.

Green is the new black

Eco fashion is in and brands are out according to trenders.

Intimate communications

So do you get it now?

Malachi on the media

Malachi O’Doherty is always worth reading and I am a big fan of his radio work. He gave an interesting talk on the media in Northern Ireland at a seminar organised by Agenda NI this week.  It’s well worth a listen.

Mixing with the Media «

By the way Malachi is only one half of the best blogging marriage in Ireland. Check our Maureen’s blog here. Don’t tell him but she’s even better with words!

Weber Shandwick tops global agency rankings

Weber Shandwick has won gold in the first PRWeek Global Agency Report Card 2009.

The report tracks performance over the last 12 months for 24 global agency networks against four key criteria: business development, people, network initiatives and cohesion, and external recognition. Weber Shandwick was recognized in particular for its strong 12-month performance, impressive new business record across multiple markets, and its innovative and award-winning work for clients.

Does the media sometimes miss the real debate?

Sometimes loudest voices drown out the debate

There is an interesting article in this week’s New Republic, by E. J. Dionne about the way in which the media has reported on the town hall meetings which have been taking place across the US to discuss heath-care reform this summer.

Health care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

Some well known members of Congress and the Senate have also been sharing their experiences of these encounters on Twitter. Claire McCaskill is a case in point. “Looking forward to seeing everyone, all opinions at our public forums. Just hoping everyone has Missouri good manners. Rude is not persuasive.” was a recent tweet of hers.

As the forum for victims gets off the ground it will be interesting to see if only the loudest voices are heard or whether the stories of all those involved get reported.