O’Conall Street

Belfast’s latest brand was launched yesterday and the local papers today are full of a pretty girl with pretty a ’B’ to illustrate the event.

I was involved in the reference group which was consulted on the development of the new brand and am happy with the results but like all brands the logo is simply the tip of the iceberg. What matters is the proposition on which it is build, whether it fits the product - in this case Belfast city, and whether it is capable of being understood and adopted by the target audiences. City Brands are difficult to get right because they have to appeal to visitors and residents alike. The biggest risk is local rejection fueled by cynicism and a popular view that it is all about a logo which cost too much.

As a reference group we worked hard and long to develop a brand based on core elements.  These have been formally expressed in the brand guidelines as follows:

Brand essence
This is Belfast’s moment.

Brand proposition
A unique history and a future full of promise have come together to create a city bursting with energy and optimism.

Brand identity
Through application of this new identity, the energy and optimism of the city is brought to life. The logo acts as the heart of Belfast – reflecting the warm and welcoming nature of the city. The capital ‘B’ of the logo puts Belfast on the map. It highlights that this is Belfast’s moment by using the ‘B’ as a call to action, as in ‘be here now’.

What this means to key audiences is what is called the brand experience and so we settled on the following:

For citizens…
The time is right for us to build a thriving, vibrant city. Bringing together our strong sense of identity, our resilience and enterprise, and our renowned warmth and wit, we are seizing this opportunity with both hands. Proud of our heritage, we embrace the future to build an even better Belfast, providing a warm welcome to visitors, an exciting environment for business and a great place to live.

For visitors…
Here, between the mountains and the sea, is a dynamic city with a big personality. Proud of its heritage Belfast is alive with possibilities and open to change – vibrant, energetic and exciting. The people of Belfast provide a welcome which is not just warm, but genuine and generous, inviting anyone and everyone to join in. Belfast provides a vivid and memorable experience with new things to discover every time you visit.

For investors…
Belfast is a vibrant city full of opportunity. A spirit of optimism and a real sense of purpose fills the air, inspiring enterprise, creativity and change. The people of Belfast – witty, lively, welcoming and determined – are proud of the city’s past, positive about its future, and ready and able to seize the opportunities on offer. Now is the time, and Belfast is the place, where anything is possible. 

As I said, today’s papers are full of pretty pictures. They get the message across that there is a new brand in town but do not in any way explain the proposition or bring the brand to life in a meaningful way. The City Council faces a significant challenge to ensure buy in from key stakeholders and the business community although in their defence the work on this is already underway. The bigger and more daunting task is to secure public acceptance and adoption. That will take a lot more then a photo and a short press release.

The opportunities to use digital and social media to bring the new brand to life are immense I will be watching with interest to see if City Hall adopt them.

The smoking ban is now well established across these islands yet there seems to be little drop in the numbers who remain addicted to the infamous weed.

 Josh Gilbert,a New York colleague and source of many a good blog picked up on an interesting New York Times story on this issue last week. 

The NYT covers a study to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine that finds there is a significant social factor at work in kicking the habit. It follows an earlier paper by the same authors that determined there was also a big social factor in weight loss.

According to Josh the research points to the enormous opportunity in healthcare communications to more and more create programs that defeat isolation, encourage participation, build community, and don’t just educate patients about treatment therapies but help improve health outcomes through facilitating advocacy.

The application of complex adaptive networks is becoming more popular amongst communications specialists and is driving our business proposition here at Weber Shandwick.

There is a big hole in the Republic’s public finances this morning. It’s €8billion big and that is just in the tax shortfall.

Meanwhile Dublin based Davy Stockbrokers are cutting their forecast for the Irish economy because conditions continue to get worse for consumers, as the labour market weakens it is harder to get credit, and because of a ‘negative wealth effect’.

Davy now expects GNP growth of 1% this year, and for 2009 of 2%, down from a previous forecast of 3.4%. On housing, Davy does not think 2008 will see building bottom out, but it has hugely reduced the number of house completions it expects to see next year - from 40,000 to 25,000.  It says house prices will fall by 10.7% over the next year, and by 7.2% in 2009.  It also forecasts that non-residential building will fall by 10% next year. The Dublin stockbroker says unemployment will have reached 7% by the end of next year from a current level of 5.5%.

One good piece of news came out of this island last night though. A treaty banning cluster bombs was also signed in the fair city after the British government backed down to internal and external pressure and agreed to a total ban. It’s not often you get to demonstrate the value of local representation at Westminster yet for the past month a forceful campaign led by Mark Durkan MP of the SDLP has ensured this island’s opposition to these hideous weapons was heard loud and clear in every forum available to our public representatives. Advocacy in action me thinks.

According to the Press Association, Ireland’s Eurovision entry Dustin the Turkey hopes to score maximum points and be plucked for this weekend’s final.

The cult figure plans to ruffle some feathers with his performance of Irelande Douze Pointe - a parody of Eurovision - at the song contest semi-final in Belgrade.

Our feathered friend has been campaigning hard in cyberspace too. He has a plethora of Facebook and BeBosupport groups and turkey is off the menu at the thousands of  Eurovision BBQs across Ireland scheduled for Saturday night.

Denis Murray had a great interview with the king of foul this morning on the BBC. Dustin reminded our great island that Terry Wogan was born in Limerick in 1592 and sent to England in 1902 as revenge for the famine. Of course O’Conall Street to tally dissociates from such remarks but would like to point out that culchies are, well, different.

Can’t resist the opportunity to see the great bird in action.  
 

Three weeks ago a man was left for dead in Belfast city centre after being randomly attacked by a group of men who were reported to be wearing ‘Stone Island’ jackets. The hooligans were using the cover of an old firm derby and a Cliftonville - Linfield games to launch a spree of violence across the city centre. Press reports have linked them to Combat 18.

Last night there was trouble in Dublin when a tiny minority of Northern supporters got violent before the Setanta Cup fixture with St Pat’s in Inchicore. The front pages of all the local papers are plastered with the bloodied face of a man being arrested by Gardai. He is wearing a ‘Stone Island’ jacket.

This morning Linfield’s chairman did himself little favours on the radio when he came across confused and even contradictory. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone in that position, however this only underlines the need to consider carefully what you want to say and how you are going to say it before giving interviews, particularly live ones.

Another casualty of all this is the ‘Stone Island’ brand which is marketed as a premium brand on this island and available only in the best menswear shops. This small group is engaged by design or by accident in brand assassination. The likelihood of well to do men choosing a clothes brand which has become the uniform for a group of football hooligans reportedly associated with Combat 18 is zero.

This month’s Irish News article reflects back on the U2 - Ash concert which took place in the face of the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement and which I was lucky to be involved in organising with Tim Attwood and David Kerr. The BBC’s Stu Bailie has a lovely post on his blog about the concert and its impact on the volatile electorate of the time. It was a great event but also a professional achievement for three young men with a lifetime ahead of them. We picked the slogan for the backdrop because it summed up how we thought our generation felt about the agreement. It was time to “Make Your Own History”. Jonathan Powell omits to mention the concert in his recent book yet it created the image which is most reproduced of that time. The British and Irish governments played no part is the amazing coming together that night. That’s what made it special and I guess why he thinks it unimportant.

This is a slightly expanded version of what appears in today’s papers as space did not allow for everything to be included.

 THE DAY U2 CAME TO TOWN

Northern Ireland is not the place from which you expect an interesting case study in political communications to emerge, yet a decade ago during the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, PR took centre stage.

Generally speaking, political campaigning here is divided along community lines. Press coverage of electoral campaigns has tended to focus on the constitutional question and not bread and butter issues.

What’s all this got to do with Public Relations? Well during the campaign for the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement all this changed. I was the SDLP’s Director of Communications at the time. The party was the driving political force behind the talks and was ready to seize its opportunity on Good Friday. Sinn Fein was on the fence. The DUP had walked out and the UUP had suffered damaging walkouts. Of the big four parties representing over 90% of the electorate, only the SDLP was ready to start campaigning unambiguously for a Yes vote on the referendum on May 22nd.
A group of business and community leaders launched a non partisan Yes campaign at the end of April. Despite this and a very energetic campaign from the SDLP, the first month was dominated by negative stories and setbacks. On April 24th,  three UUP MPs joined Ian Paisley to say ‘no’. They were joined on May Day by the Orange Order. Trimble got the support of the Ulster Unionist Council during the last week of April but the coverage and regular opinion polls pointed to the possibility that a majority of the unionist community might reject the agreement.

Things took a distinct turn for the worse at the Sinn Fein Ard Feis on May 10th when the party’s decision to call for a yes vote was drowned out by the parading of the notorious Balcombe Street Gang on stage with Gerry Adams. This was the penalty kick the No campaign had been waiting for, and the mood particularly amongst middle class unionists, began to shift. This being Northern Ireland, you can’t have one stupid action without another, and four days later Michael Stone and comrades were paraded in front of a jubilant crowd at the Ulster Hall. In less then a week the symbolic image of agreement had become one of convicted paramilitaries being paraded as heroes.  With friends like these who needed enemies.

A positive image was needed to knock these of the front pages and give people something positive to vote for. It also needed to have serious news value: a picture of Hume and Trimble plus celebrity of choice would not be enough. 
On the 13th of May the SDLP invited senior figures from the arts world to publicly support the Agreement. After the event Tim Attwood and I were discussing our dilemma with the film director, Jim Sheridan. Tim mentioned that we had a commitment from Bono to come up and campaign and I pointed out that a simple walk down Royal Avenue would not do. We needed to create an image capable of capturing everyone’s imagination and which symbolised the new beginning. A coffee later and Jim was on the phone to Bono telling him he needed to talk to the rest of the band and come to play a gig. That evening, Tim got a call back from Bono to say they would come and could do the 19th.

When we told David Kerr, the UUP Press Officer of our plan that night he thought we were pulling his leg. The next day David Trimble agreed to be part of the concert alongside Hume. We also invited Ash, a band from Downpatrick, to bring some local flavour and provide balance to the bill.

We decided to leak the story of the gig out gradually to maximise impact. First we would confirm Bono was coming to campaign, next day that other members of the band would be joining him, that Trimble and Hume would campaign together for the first time, that the Waterfront Hall had been booked and finally on the eve of the concert that U2 supported by Ash were going to give an impromptu concert calling for a Yes vote. This guaranteed us four days of front page news before the event and began to shift the agenda away from the RDS and Ulster Hall images.

None of us knew anything about organising a gig much less for the biggest rock and roll band in the world. Cue Eamon McCann, an old college friend of Tim and his brother Alex and a local promoter in Belfast. To this day I am not sure how Eamon did it but in five short days he booked the Waterfront Hall and made it ready for the most historic gig it would ever host.

Next problem was filling the hall. We were worried about it being hijacked if we simply threw open the doors and there was no time to run competitions. Hume always said the agreement was about the future generations so we took our lead from the great man himself and decided to offer tickets to sixth formers across the North. Teams in the SDLP and UUP Head Quarters worked flat out for three days. Gerry Cosgrove, Catherine Matthews, Ronan McCay, Eilis Haughey, Orla Cosgrove and the UUP team played a huge part in making the gig happen by ensuring we had an audience. In the end we were not just turning away fans looking for tickets but a major band also. Late on the the eve of the concert word reached us that the Corrs would like to come and play. Tim and I agreed this could back fire politically and unbalance the bill which was just right with U2 and Ash. That was what our heads said. Every other part of our bodies wanted the best looking and pretty good sounding band in Europe to walk into our lives, even if only for a few hours. Even David, a committed unionist, was equally unhappy at the prospect of letting them down. 

All that remained was to choreograph the image everyone needed. Time was against us and we could not be sure of the quality of the pictures inside the Waterfront Hall so we arranged a ‘door step’ press conference on plaza on the way in. Hume, Trimble, U2 and Ash lined up in front of eighty nine TV cameras and gave a straight up comment. The pictures were good but we had to do better. Bono wanted to bring the men on stage and he eventually talked them in to it; one coming on from each side. He never told them he was going to grab their arms and raise them in a sign of unity. That was as spontaneous as it looked and we had our image. I was standing behind one of the big loud speakers stage right. Hume left my side and strolled out in front of the 2000 crowd. A wall of sound hit him. This was a very special moment and even John, who had addressed presidents and parliaments the world over as well as countless rallies was momentarily stunned by the reception.

Tim Wheeler and Ash did County Down proud that night. After the gig we adjourned to the ‘green room’ for a few jars with the two bands. I got lost in conversation with the Edge whose mother had taught me in primary school. The ladies swarmed Bono like bees to honey and Bono swarmed Hume like a little boy with his hero. We all watched the ten o’clock news. Hume and Trimble knew they had done a good days work and the lads headed back to Dublin with their place in the peace process secure. Before they left I asked Bono if he would he sign my tie. I had read about a tie Teddy Kennedy has on his wall which was signed by the brothers the night Jack was elected president. He wrote BONO and in the middle of the first O made the time on the clock. Under he wrote ‘this is the time’ 19-5-1998,  Larry, the Edge and Adam signed above. It’s framed now and on my wall. A little bit of history for my kids.

The referendum was passed on the 22nd of April 1998. Academics reckon that concert was good for 5%. All I know is we had a new picture for the front pages. In the end we got one for the history books.

Sure she was asking for it….

The shocking news today is that one in four people in Ireland think women who are raped are somehow responsible for it. The Red Sea Poll in today’s Irish Examiner finds:

* More than 30% think a victim is some way responsible if she flirts with a man or fails to say no clearly.

* 10% of people think the victim is entirely at fault if she has had a number of sexual partners.

* 37% think a woman who flirts extensively is at least complicit, if not completely in the wrong, if she is the victim of a sex crime.

* One in three think a woman is either partly or fully to blame if she wears revealing clothes.

* 38% believe a woman must share some of the blame if she walks through a deserted area.

The results also show that defence barristers, looking to swing the deciding three members in every 12-person jury, can exploit misgivings in certain demographics about the perceived responsibility of female victims.

Dramatic differences in empathy towards victims based on age and social class are revealed. Gender, however, had little impact.

In every category, widowed, divorced and separated people took the harshest view on the role of the female victim, compared with married or cohabiting couples.

The results of the poll support the results of the ground-breaking Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report in 2002, which found 15% of the population believed a raped woman was not an innocent victim.

The SAVI report, which was published in partnership with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, also found 6% of women were raped at some point as adults.

I have no doubt attitudes in the North of Ireland are the same. In a day when the Irish News reports that women in NI can expect to earn £9k less then their male colleagues it is clear there is still a mountain to climb in terms of gender equality.

As the great saying goes: “I’ll be a post feminist in post patriarchy.”

It’s a big bonus when you get to work with creative clients who have embraced advocacy and are exploring new ways of using social and digital media to communicate their message. Tourism Ireland has provided us with a great story to communicate on their behalf. I am sure it will capture press attention here in Ireland and abroad.Tourism Ireland will host the world’s first virtual St Patrick’s Day parade on Sunday 16th March, in the internet-based, virtual world of Second Life. The virtual parade will include 20 Irish and Celtic themed floats and will be the highlight of a three-day Discover Ireland Festival in Second Life, sponsored by Tourism Ireland.Second Life is one of the largest virtual worlds in existence, with over 12 million registered users, 3 million of whom are considered regular users. Sixty per cent of Second Life’s users come from Ireland’s four biggest tourist markets: Great Britain, US, Germany and France. Half of those users are aged over 30 – a key demographic for tourism to the island of Ireland. These “residents” can explore, socialise, and participate in activities and services using Second Life’s currency, the Linden Dollar.

As well as the first virtual St Patrick’s Day parade, Tourism Ireland will organise a range of events and activities during the St Patrick’s festivities in Second Life’s replica city of Dublin. Events will include a live broadcast of the largest ever contemporary Irish music expo – “Snakes and Ladders” – from the World Financial Center in New York; a treasure hunt which will involve visitors exploring Dublin to find clues that will enable them to collect points and win prizes (clues are located on www.discoverireland.com; as well as live bands and DJs.

The virtual cruise ship the “SS Galaxy” will visit Dublin during the festivities and will host an onboard digital exhibition of Irish artists’ work. Guided helicopter and bus tours of Dublin in Second Life will take place throughout the weekend, giving visitors historical information on the many famous Dublin landmarks that are recreated in Second Life.

Tourism Ireland’s objective is to encourage those who visit this virtual world to come and visit the real Ireland during 2008. “Dublin” in Second Life is a well-established destination – frequently making the Top Ten list of the most popular places to visit there. Tourism Ireland launched the first ever tourism marketing campaign in Second Life last October, with a Discover Ireland music festival.

Some experts predict that the web will be three-dimensional in a decade’s time and virtual worlds such as Second Life give us some idea of what the web may look like in the future. Second Life is one of the biggest virtual worlds in existence and many major brands, including Coca-Cola, Vodafone, IBM, Toyota, Sony and Adidas already have a presence there.

Anyone can join in the St Patrick’s Festivities by getting a free Second Life account through www.secondlife.com or at the virtual Dublin website: http://www.dublinsl.com
For those of you wishing to party online here’s the programme (all times GMT):

Saturday 15th March
17:00 Grand Opening
17:01 Treasure Hunt begins and will run for the next three days with instruction and clues at 30 locations
17:15 Saturday Swing
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (2 hours)
20:00 Carraig
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (2 hours)
23:00 Highland Marching Band parade and concert
- fully kitted marching band with kilt and pipes (2 hours)

Sunday 16th March
15:00 Sunday Riot
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (2 hours)
15:00 Bus and Helicopter Tours of Dublin start (4 hours)
17:15 Celtic Muse
- Irish/Celtic sports music by live DJ (2 hours)
19:00 St Patrick’s Day Parade
- 20 Irish and Celtic themed floats (2 hours)

21:00 Sunday Slam
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (2 hours)
21:00 Live Music Showcase
- Keltish live music band (1 hour)
23:00 Snakes & Ladders: New Irish Music Festival live simulcast from New York
- the largest expo of new Irish music in the world, ever! (2½ hours)
- Featuring: Green Time Ensemble, Somadrome, Amoebadoid, Deep Burial, General Practise, Toirse, Richard G Evans, Educution, Daniel Figgis
01:30 Carraigh
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (1½ hours)
Monday 17th March
16:30 Snakes & Ladders: New Irish Music Festival live simulcast from New York
- Featuring: Brian O’Huiginn, Roger Doyle, Daniel Figgis
19:30 Live Ireland traditional Irish music festival live simulcast from the real world Dublin to virtual Dublin (3 hours)
20:00 Fibber Magees Grand Opening live music simulcast from the real world Fibber Magees to virtual Dublin featuring the band “World of Good” (2½ hours)
22:00 Carraig at New Fibber Magees
- Irish/Celtic rock by live DJ (2 hours)

 A couple of Irish boys entered the PR pantheon of the greats for a campaign which was described by the Guardian Media Awards  judges as showing “bold disregard for conventional marketing techniques”

The creative PR brains behind Kentucky Fried Chicken’s ‘Face From Space’ are Nick Woods and James Kelly, both colleagues of mine at Weber Shandwick. James is half Ballymena and Nick hails from Holywood, Co Down. Weber Shadwick shunned the competition with a stunt designed to capture a global audience. “It enabled the brand to gain worldwide attention without the complication of language” the judges said.

The giant 87,500 square foot KFC logo was assembled in the Nevada desert last year and claimed to be the first brand logo visible from space.

The Weber Shandwick team faced huge operational difficulties which started with trying to find a supplier who could build the thing and getting right materials in the right colours. The original build site flooded two weeks before launch and the whole thing had to be shifted from Utah to Nevada. The team hired a commercial satellite to take images from space and worked very hard to keep a lid on the idea until they were ready to launch one story around the world at one moment in time.

They worked up two stories, worlds biggest logo and first logo visible from space. The trick was they could both only be told by showing the image. The story being the image meant cultural and language barriers were instantly overcome.

The story was launched out of New York via the international wires, in London via UK/Euro wires and out of Shanghai for Asia and got picked up everywhere. And I mean everywhere - every country you can think of, TV, print, radio, online, media sites, social network sites and consumer blogs. Google the image and its still there. Go onto Youtube and you can watch it being built as the clip above demonstrates.

The end result was huge opportunities to see (literally billions globally), an enormous return on investment, a number of awards in Europe the US and a very happy client.

You hear me go on a lot about the shift from traditional public relations to advocacy. We have been tracking this global shift in Weber Shandwick for a couple of year and last week we launched some European research on the topic.

Richard Moss a fellow Weber Shandwck Director in Europe and the man responsible for the research gave an interview to PR Week TV which you may find interesting. More as always on this blog and from Weber Shandwick.