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Planning Applications and the Survival of the Press

October 29, 2009

Who’d have thought that the humble notice of a planning application plays a key role in the survival of local newspapers? That is does is the view of Doug Melloy, the editor of the Rotherham Advertiser, who cautions that switching the ads to online media will serve as yet another nail in the local papers’ coffin. We think he’s got a point. See this story from the Press Gazette for more.

A Stock Market Sense of Occasion

October 29, 2009

How best to kickstart the City out of recession? As the Telegraph reports here, one suggestion at the London Stock Exchange is that a new way to start the day’s trading is devised. At present, proceedings begin and end with the activation of floating balls in The Source - a sculpture in the lobby of its headquarters. But John Wallace, an LSE spokesman, says that ways to “spruce up” the day’s work are being sought. Which is fair enough, save that we hope that the stock market’ s search for a sense of occasion is not blighted by a phalanx of consultants proferring ideas at vast expense.

Binge Drinking: can PR end the hangover?

October 28, 2009

Can PR help rid Britain of binge drinking? We ask the question following the news that Radiator PR has been appointed by Club 18-30 to update its image.

Radiator is a youth lifestyle agency with a significant presence in the surf industry, with clients such as Billabong, Relentless, Etnies and Fat Face.  Such brands must be a joy to promote, for surfing, synonymous with sun, sea, health and vitality, comes with a PR upside that is hard to match. However, Club 18-30 presents a tougher challenge. The Thomas Cook-owned holiday company has become a byword for alcohol-fuelled, anything goes excess, an image encouraged by ads such as the Saatchi & Saatchi-designed ‘Beaver Espana’ and another whose tagline, if we remember correctly, was It’s not all sex, sex, sex – there’s a bit of sun and sea as well. Indeed, we recall that disquiet just a year ago about the company’s reputation led to a marketing revamp. Evidently the revamp needs a revamp – hence Radiator’s arrival on the scene.

According to PR Week, Radiator will undertake a 12-month integrated comms campaign to promote the brand for the 2010 holiday season, diverting attention from its disreputable past by promoting Club 18-30’s upcoming music festivals: The Big Reunion and The Big Snow Festival. A nice idea, if not the most fiendish of marketing schemes, but how likely is it to be successful?

The problem is that many people sign up for holidays with Club 18-30 precisely because of its reputation for Dionysian revelry. Well, they might not put it quite like that when paying their deposits, but you get the idea: they’re on board because they want to get drunk, a lot, and hopefully enjoy a series of brief but disinhibited encounters as a consequence. Club 18-30 has always known this, hence its perennially edgy ads, but does Radiator’s brief mirror a societal sea-change? Could it be that we’re sick of binge drinking, that the hangover has become too hideous?

We hope so. British towns are blighted by binge drinkers young and old on Friday and Saturday nights, a legacy of our inability to drink conservatively and strange collective obsession with ‘getting wrecked’. We seem unable to emulate the mature relationship with alcohol found on the continent, especially in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and instead insist on exporting our louche, degenerate ways to Meditteranean idylls, to the despair of locals. If PR can help reconfigure our warped relationship with booze, the world will be a better place. We wish Radiator all the best – though we suspect that some of Club 18-30’s executives won’t want them to revamp the brand too much.

Pictured courtesy of Artrim: ‘Alcohol is bad’.

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