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Band & Brown sets Twitter trend
Band & Brown scored a real coup on Twitter last week, turning comments made on a client website by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg about the controversial Digital Economy Act into a Twitter trending topic.
B&B client The Student Room (@studentroom), the country's largest student-only social network, is holding general election Q&A sessions between its members and the main party leaders. More than 400 questions were received, which B&B sieved for the most newsworthy to put to the leaders, before PR-ing the responses.
Nick Clegg, whose star was already riding high following Thursday night's ITV debate, called for parts of the controversial Digital Economy Act (#deact) to be repealed. B&B's release was picked up and tweeted by the likes of TechRadar, whose followers, and followers' followers, re-tweeted. From there, the campaign snowballed, with other online media picking up the story from Twitter, leading to yet more online coverage for The Student Room and retweets.
The story became the seventh biggest trending topic on Friday, with tweets including links to online news coverage - all of which then linked back to The Student Room, showing how socia media can be used to drive serious traffic.
Spreading the kindness offensive
Every day Londoners defy the moody and unhelpful stereotype. So we brought this to life for ‘feel good’ savings provider ING Direct by partnering with The Kindness Offensive to show the capital’s kind hearted side. Stooges posing as struggling pregnant women and lost tourists were placed around the city – with those deciding to help being rewarded with a surprise party of champagne, balloons and cheers of ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow!’ The stunts were captured on film and seeded across the web, and widely reported in London and national media.
Launching London's historic records
Over 400 years of London history are held online in Ancestry.co.uk’s records. We showcased the launch of the millions of records from the 1500s to the 1900s at London’s Guildhall. TV’s Tony Robinson was on hand to explain the importance of these unique historical documents and our media campaign focused on bringing back to life the Workhouse records so dramatically pictured by Dickens. The resulting coverage was extensive, spanning 7 national print titles, 3 national broadcasters and numerous regional print and broadcast targets. The launch generated a 50% increase in traffic to the family history site, in the days following the launch and won us a ‘highly commended’ award at the PR Week Awards for Best Use of Research.
Try life in another language
What do rock bands, gigs and reality TV have in to do with learning a second language? Everything.
As part of its campaign to encourage more 11-14 year olds to learn a foreign language at GCSE level, Department of Children Schools and Families funded 'Je Suis Un Rock Star' a reality TV documentary on Channel 4's T4.
The programme charted a group of 12 lucky youngsters competing to become the three “fixers” of Liverpudlian band The Wombats on a tour around Europe.
In order to generate maximum exposure for the show and build a teen audience, we seeded the programme on the band’s official fan site, on MySpace and Facebook groups and Digital Spy. We also used media relations to help to attract an average of 188,000 viewers per episode and 70,000 visitors to the campaign hub – which resulted in 15,000 downloading content such as adverts, episodes or behind the scenes footage.
www.channel4.com/rockstar
www.trylifeinanotherlanguage.com
Borough Market - Rebrand
Europe’s biggest outdoor food market needed a new identity and collateral. Thirst worked closely with the trustees to rebrand the historic site across signage, stationery, website and publications.
www.boroughmarket.org.uk
Upstaging the hotel business
The white tuxedoed pianist is normally what you think of when talking about hotel entertainment. But this is exactly the image Band & Brown was tasked with banishing when unveiling the world’s first arts club hotel.
To launch Guest Hotels, the new hotel collection transforming its five hotels into hotbeds for emerging talent from London’s creative arts scene, we hosted a cultural extravaganza for media featuring electro pop band Heartbreak and work from the internationally acclaimed installation artist Maria Marshall.
More than 80 journalists attended from a range of media including consumer glossies like Wallpaper and Vogue and high end travel broadcast such as CNN Business Traveller.
www.guesthotels.com
Launching the Networking Academy
500,000 European IT jobs needed to be filled and with technology responsible for a major share of productivity growth across Europe, that spelt bad news for businesses, governments and economies. We ran the CSR campaign, Networking Academy for Cisco, to address the problem. As part of the programme we commissioned a 31-country study revealing shortages in advanced security technologies skills highlighted the need for government and industry to act. The resulting media campaign around the research results generated 250 articles, a 38 per cent surge in enrolment to Cisco’s academy and grabbed the political agenda.
Masters of Sand
Sandcastles are not just for kids. No. Not when you get an expert coming up with the perfect formula for building, a professional sculptor on Great Yarmouth beach and then hundreds of families vying for a Masters of Sand title. And with over 17 million opportunities to see or hear about the campaign, competition was hot. We put Teletext Holidays on the map for UK family breaks by creating the UK’s first ever Sandcastle Building Championship. Intensive media relations, a leafleting campaign and partnerships with Haven Holidays plus tourist boards all got Brits down on the beach.
Unisys Security Index
To heighten awareness of Unisys' role as a secure business solutions expert, we launched the bi-annual Unisys Security Index across 8 countries in Continental Europe to provide a barometer on consumer attitudes towards national, personal, financial and Internet security. The results serve as a call to action for businesses and governments to develop or tighten their security policies and practices. With news stories, feature articles, a podcast, a series of bylined articles and an ebook, the first two Indexes have resulted in 250 articles, with strong coverage in business and national dailies, including DeMorgen La Vanguardia, El Mundo, Reuters, L’Echo and Bloomberg News www.unisyssecurityindex.com/Germany
Sony Ericsson B-Boy Championships
Sony Ericsson wanted a long-term partner to reach out to Britain's urban youth. Over 3 years, Brando has strategically taken them from support act to lead sponsor of the UK B-Boy championships. Media partnerships, merchandise, careful branding and community website www.ubattle.com has made Sony Ericsson an accepted part of the B-Boy community.
www.bboychampionships.com
Changing the image of teaching
A giant puzzle isn’t something you’d normally associate with maths teaching. But that’s exactly what Band & Brown used to combat the misconception that maths is dull, drab and dry and recruit people into teaching it.
A 3D 3 metre tall Sudoku cube was taken on a national tour to publicise the need for more maths teachers, grabbing the front page of the Times on the way. Carol Vorderman fronted the campaign which challenged the public to solve the puzzle and if successful to consider a career as a maths teacher.
The unique recruitment events were supported by intensive media relations to drive attendance, achieving £1.2m worth of coverage, reaching an audience of 18,822,800 and generating an 83 per cent increase in the number of attendees for the TDA’s annual online maths teaching forum.
www.tda.gov.uk
Top bosses put UK jobseekers in the hot seat
It’s one thing to find a dream job that matches your skills and experiences, but quite another to be able to sell yourself in the interview hot seat. To drive candidates through to Jobsite, Band & Brown created BeMyInterviewer.co.uk – a video based website offering interview practice and advice from top bosses like Duncan Bannatyne, Jacqueline Gold and Ruth Badger. The unique site hit the headlines with highlights including BBC Breakfast, Sky News, the Daily Mail, the People and the Independent. 110K unique users visited the site within its first four months, streaming 1m video clips and directly driving 6K job searches, applications and new registrations to Jobsite. BeMyInterviewer.co.uk has evolved from a PR tool into a revenue-generating product.
Band & Brown's campaign was highly commended in the Digital Innovation category at the 2008 PR Week Awards
www.bemyinterviewer.co.uk
www.jobsite.co.uk
Above and beyond
Exodus needed a break from the old routine. So they asked us to get them out of the travel sections and into lifestyle pages. And we did. A cricket match between locals and tourists helped save Indian tigers – and made The Daily Telegraph. Winning a Mini Gap Year stole acres of coverage in The Times. Our clever mixture of media relations and promotional activity has given Exodus its first exposure outside travel media and reached a whole new audience of holidaymakers.
Getting hold of your money
Nobody likes to pay for withdrawing their own cash from an ATM and it’s particularly hard to swallow if you’re living on the breadline. We worked with RBS to launch its corporate social responsibility campaign, inviting the public to nominate the areas most in need of a free-to-use cash machine and then installed 300 in Britain’s poorest communities.
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