Guinness Area 22

Despite how much I would love to talk about Cricket and the Ashes (260 all out? Actually, forget it!) I'm going to be talking about rugby, and more specifically the Guinness Area 22 PR campaign.

The campaign recently won PR agency Smarts the following awards at the 2010 Northern Ireland CIPR PRide awards:

Gold - Best use of digital PR
Silver - Consumer relations

As part of my third year university course I recently had to give a short poster session presentation about the merits of this campaign. The campaign ran shortly after the end of the 2008 / 2009 rugby season, where Ireland celebrated with a 'Grand Slam' after winning all of their RBS Six Nations games


(Copyright of PA Photos, taken from RBS Six Nations Website)



The aims and objectives of the campaign were to build consumer awareness of Guinness' sponsorship of the Irish rugby squad, and position the Guinness brand as 'the font of all rugby knowledge'.

This is quite an ambitious aim, yet Smarts were able to work with two other agencies to create a digital hub, which comprised a microsite full of rugby news, stats, video highlights and interviews, a Facebook fan page to link with the microsite, and an iPhone app which had video highlights, results, photos and even the words to the national anthems of all teams in the Six Nations!

I believe the campaign did so well because it took an already popular subject matter (rugby) and presented it in a way that enabled its target audience the opportunity to engage with the campaign, which was fronted by 'Team Area 22', formed of Irish rugby players Tommy Bowe, Jerry Flannery and Jamie Heaslip. A launch campaign used some novel approaches including a press event at a local rugby club, where members of the media could meet and have a 'casual chat' with the players, and talk about the forthcoming rugby internationals and Guinness' Area 22.

Over 11 million impressions were achieved across 10 different opportunities, which considering the population of Ireland is around 6.6million people is very impressive! The campaign recorded 35,000 downloads from the iTunes store, achieved an AVE of over £286,000, which led to a ROI figure of £16 for every £1 spent on PR.

All of the journalists and media organisations approached by Smarts responded in a positive manner, with many agreeing that Area 22 was a 'one stop shop' for everything you needed to know about Irish rugby. To prove that the campaign can be sustainable, the Area 22 website is still running, and will be joined by an improved Facebook page and iPhone app for the coming rugby internationals this autumn.

After the presentation, I had to conduct a small group session, so I decided to get 'on board' with the Guinness brand and let my coursemates sample some, whilst filling out a short questionnaire and discussing the campaign's merits and weaknesses. I was actually quite surprised with the number of people who had never tried Guinness before, and although it wasn't popular with everyone, I felt that they all engaged well with the discussion of the campaign.

So what I'll be asking for now is COMMENTS. Lots of them, about anything you wish to discuss or were wondering about the campaign. Also if people have seen / heard the campaign in the past, I'd be very interested to hear what you thought about it all, rugby fan or otherwise.

Paul

Reading / Leeds Festival & Vodafone

Next year’s Reading and Leeds festivals will go on general sale on December 3rd 2010. Now this is a whole lot earlier than the usual March / April dates for general sale. But the real twist is the way the tickets will be released, and the channels for purchasing them.

Customers of Vodafone will effectively have ‘first dibs’ on purchasing tickets, as they go on an exclusive pre-sale on December 1st 2010. Vodafone were one of the principle sponsors of the festivals this year, but have seemingly ramped-up their efforts to get involved in the cash-cow that Reading and Leeds have become.

Taken from the Virtual Festivals website (click here for full story):

"Festival Republic is set to offer customers exclusive ticket pre-sales through Vodafone for all of their 2011 events.

Vodafone VIP will enable its subscribers to buy Reading, Leeds, Latitude and The Big Chill tickets on Wednesday 1 December, 48 hours before they go on general sale on Friday 3 December."

Thankfully I already have my ticket (my decision to purchase during September’s pre-sale even when I didn’t have money for food has now been fully justified) but I feel a bit disappointed by Festival Republic’s decision to distribute tickets in this way. In my opinion it won’t help the issue of touting, but would rather help those touts who purchase as many tickets as humanely possible on credit cards and put on eBay for inflated prices.

It seems more and more that mobile phone companies are muscling in on the live music scene – Virgin Mobile sponsor the V Festival, and O2 now has exclusive branding rights on the AMG (Academy Music Group) venues in the UK, as well as the O2 Arena in London. O2’s ‘Priority’ service allows their customers 48 hours exclusivity on gig tickets for events within their venues, often at the same time as the ‘fan pre-sales’ set up on the email mailing lists of the artists playing the gigs.

Also worth considering is the issue of ticket websites such as See Tickets, Gigs and Tours, Ticketmaster, Ticketweb, and “re-sale” agency Viagogo. Many people have been left disappointed by having to repeatedly hammer F5 (refresh on browsers) and repeatedly dial on the days when tickets go on sale. Surely all the extra money that customers pay on top of the ‘face value’ of tickets (are extortionate booking fees really necessary?) should be better spent on providing websites that don’t buckle when put under even the slightest duress.

I don’t really want to hark on about Reading and Leeds “selling out” because that’s not really new to anybody who’s either been, or knows a little about the 'state of play' in the UK live music scene. But I worry that the festivals are only a few steps (and a decent chunk of sponsorship deal) from being re-branded as the Vodafone Festival: Reading and Leeds – which is something I remember the organisers being keen to step away from when the long-term sponsorship deal with Carling ended in 2007.

I suppose I should point out that anybody interested in getting a ticket from Vodafone on December 1st should head to the Vodafone VIP website.

Anyway, I hope that this had made you (the reader) more aware of what’s going on, and any comments would be very gratefully received – my university dissertation is about the culture and culture change of music festivals in the UK – and any opinions you have would be really useful primary research to discuss as audience perceptions. So to conclude, some questions:

Will you try and get tickets to Reading / Leeds next month? How will today’s news affect you?
Should ticket sellers (Ticketmaster etc) spend more money on their website’s reliability?
Is the trend of mobile phone providers within live music a good thing?

Let me know,

Paul

Esprit Big Bang

This weekend I was in London, as I had tickets to see Paramore at the (rather expensive - £4.50 a pint!!!) O2 Arena.

During the day my friend James and I went shopping on Oxford Street and the surrounding area, to kill off some time till the gig, and so I could spend my student loan on updating my wardrobe. During our visit we passed the Esprit shop on Regent Street, which had a massive crowd of people outside.

Now a massive crowd outside a shop in this area isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but this was different. Passers-by were being handed pairs of drumsticks and being encouraged to go inside and join in with a live percussion session inside the shop. Walking round, drumming on rails of clothes is actually quite fun, and it’s for a good cause as well!

Esprit’s Big Bang campaign (more details on the website) aims to raise 500,000 Euros for the SOS Children’s Village in Alibaug, near Mumbai in India. Staff and the live band were joined by Marina Diamantis (Lead singer of Marina and the Diamonds) which generated local and national news coverage.

As far as PR stunts go, this is a nice campaign for a worthy cause, and I was lucky enough to be in the Oxford Street area on Saturday and now have a pair of red Esprit drumsticks as a ‘souvenir’ of the day. (Please excuse my messy room)


What are your favourite PR ‘stunts’?
Did you take part in the ‘Big Bang’ at the Esprit on Regent Street? What did you think?

Paul

30 Millbank

As I type this blog entry I'm watching the BBC News footage of the NUS protests at Millbank Tower in Whitehall (where the Conservatives are based)

And I'm a little bit horrified watching it. I believe that in the right situation, a protest or strike can have the desired effect, but this shameful protest is something I'm glad not to be a part of, and is almost making me feel ashamed to be a student.

My opinion on the matter of raising the tuition fees is unsurprisingly similar to the rest of the UK student population - in that we (as students) already pay too much for tuition at universities, so any increases would obviously not be welcome.

What I've been watching - students breaking into the tower, causing broken windows, reaching the roof of the tower and throwing missiles and fighting with police - isn't the right way to make the points that need to be made.

Obviously it could be argued (and this is the 'line' that many of the NUS leaders are using) that people who are not students have got involved in these protests, and used the opportunity to cause damage to the building as an act of 'defiance' towards the recently elected coalition government.

The reputation of students in this country is already pretty poor - the popular perception from the rest of the UK population is that students are lazy, drink too much, and are generally a nuisance to society, and this view has been created through the media coverage. Only last month a student urinating on the Cenotaph in Southampton during the Carnage night generated widespread condemnation of students and Southampton Solent University after it received coverage in most of the UK newspapers.

I'm not actually sure if there's anything that can be done to improve the reputation of students in this country, but as a PR student I know that becoming involved in violent protests like the ones shown in the news coverage certainly isn't the right way to get the message across.

Are students seen as 'second class' citizens in the UK? Is this fair?
Can the reputation of students ever be improved?
Is protesting (in a violent manner) the right way to get results?

Let me know what you think

Paul

Katie Waissel

So, there's been a lot of Twitter and Facebook hatrid unleashed last night...

And its mostly been directed at Katie Waissel and Cheryl Cole. Once again everyone's fallen into the trap of getting fixated on having the people that they dont like on X Factor hounded to the edge of the earth. Or worse.

The show has a very negative relationship with social media (outside of the official accounts) as people flock to Facebook and Twitter on Saturday & Sunday nights to post their opinions about who should have stayed, or went, or how the show is a 'fix'.

The same thing happened last year with Jedward, where they stayed in over other contestants who the majority of social network users argued was a 'better performer'. Cue a million (equally boring) Facebook groups about how Jedward shouldn't be on the show any more.

And then the Joe McElderry winning single was stopped from reaching the Christmas number 1 chart position by a Facebook campaign to get Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name Of' to number 1 to "Show Simon Cowell that he doesn’t control the UK music industry".

Or something like that. Too many people missed the point last year, and thought that a song with the line "F*** you, I won't do what you tell me" suddenly made them above the 'mainstream' X Factor single. Except that Rage were on a major label so any anti-establishment feelings should have been quelled by the realisation that money for both singles would likely have ended up in (pretty much) the same place.

Katie Waissel was never going to leave the show last night, especially not against TreyC Cohen. But yet people have been saying that they'd never watch the show again, how they hated Cheryl for not making a decision about which 'act' to send home, and how other contestants (Wagner was a unpopular survivor of the public vote again) should have gone as well.

But will anybody actually switch off? Of course they won't.

Like with the earlier 'Gamu-gate' (which seems so long ago now) people will tune in each week to see what new controversies occur, then post about it to their friends on Facebook and Twitter.

I quite enjoy it on a Saturday night when everyone posts their opinions about the performances, as it makes the show much more 'interactive' than anything else on prime-time television in the UK. People obviously have different opinions, but its the discussion and spouting of views that makes the X Factor so enjoyable for me.

Should Katie have left the X Factor?
Should Cheryl have voted?
Who do you want to win the show?

Also - If you don't want to add a comment, please feel free to click on the 'Good' or 'Bad' reaction buttons below - It’s nice to see what people think of this blog.

Paul