Binge Drinking: can PR end the hangover?

October 28, 2009

alcohol is bad

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.

club1830

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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From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.

Not so right said Fred

February 2, 2012
fred hat

So Farewell, then, Sir Fred Goodwin.

Now you are just Fred.

Not Right Said Fred, but plain Fred.

The Forfeiture Committee did for you.

No one had heard of it before,

But Dave said it had to act, and it did.

Trouble is that no one knows what to think.

Is it ‘Alas, poor Fred‘,

Or ‘Hurray! Sir Fred is dead!’?

We don’t know.

Do you?

By A. Mob, aged 1,378 and a half.