We don’t cope very well in the heat in this country. As with heavy snow, we are just not used to it. For a country that’s obsessed with the weather we are actually only at home with moderate variations thereof. Predictably unpredictable yet fundamentally bland weather is our national speciality.

And in this extreme heat you must consider the plight of those at risk: pets, the elderly, young children, the organisers of Wimbledon…

Because surely it’s not just bad weather that has a knock-on effect on such events, but any weather that is deemed ‘out of the ordinary’. Rain – ok, obvious. It stops play. High winds would bugger up the movement of the balls across the court. And heat? It will affect the players and the spectators alike.

The players just can’t be playing to their usual standards… I’m sorry, but they just can’t! God alone knows what it’s like to have to play in 30+degrees. Eugh. Doesn’t seemed to have stopped Murray though (well played lad). But it clearly didn’t do Serena any favours. But not being a Brit, I am sure she won’t even think on blaming the weather.

And moreover I’d wager that a lot of today’s visitors have actually left early because the highly concentrated heat in those courts has just been too much to bear.

It would be interesting to learn the financial implications of extremely hot weather on such occasion, and indeed the economy as a whole, as much as one would be informed following a spell of snow or flooding. But instead we’ll just be shown pictures of children frolicking and ‘stunning’ girls in their bikinis on British beaches.

(Oh jesus. I just noticed the PR story at the bottom of that last link: 9 out of ten Brits will lose sleep this week because of the humid nights. No Sh*t Sherlock.  Fair play to Travelodge though for getting the story out. I’m just jealous, clearly)

P.S. Some like it hot? I don’t. I like it temperate. With occasional rain. Sorry – I’m a gardener.

In PR our job is defined by relationships – with clients, journalists, bloggers, the public – and as a parent meeting another parent, you can create an almost instant bond with people you might have taken a few meetings to bond with otherwise. Nice!

But like anything significant that happens to you, once you notice it the subject pops up everywhere. The additional layers of reference you acquire as a parent mean you have more and more information to process (as if we didn’t have enough to deal with already!).

Take a simple thing like reading the many newsletters which appear in my work inbox every morning. If I have time I scan the headlines and maybe click on one or two links if I spot anything relevant to work or social(ha!)life. Very much a passing glance. Takes up very little of my day.

But no more. Oh no! Now I have Parental Radar things are getting complicated. Today’s Events Magazine newsletter, for example, contained reference to Lollibop: a festival for children under 10.  Not only did I click on it (would I have even noticed it two years ago, unless I had a relevant client?) but I then experienced the following thought process: “That’s interesting, a festival for children – nice concept. Ooh, it’s at Clissold Park, that’s close to me! Oh, no its not, it’s moved to Regents Park. Hmm, that’s a bit harder for us to get to. Good for them though, they must be doing really well – I wonder who does their PR? Not really right for my two this year but it could be good to go to next year. I’ll save the link.  It looks pretty Yummy Mummy to me – I’ll have to investigate their marketing...”

You see what I am dealing with here? A cacophony of thoughts fighting for my attention. I never had this problem before. I had Work Head. I had Home Head. Simple. Parent Head sadly knows no such distinction and gate-crashes ones every waking moment. Sure it’s very useful at times but its kinda taking over. But I am new to this stuff. I am sure – and feel free not to tell me if this isn’t the case – it evens itself out again in time and it will just become a useful frame of reference. Like owning a car. Or having a garden.

And by the way, in case you’re interested, I’ve checked the line-up at Lollibop and Rastamouse is headlining! Parent or no parent, unless you’ve been sitting in a cave for the last few months surely you’ve heard of Rastamouse….

Irie.

What?

‘SpeedLIVE is a service that creates, plans and delivers compelling brand events with high impact, turning real time experiences into content which helps widen the net of influence. Focusing on integrated events, SpeedLIVE events deliver influence way beyond the day itself’

That’s what is says on our services page

What it means in practice is that we offer a defined events service – delivering the whole project from concept and planning, though to management and content distribution – with a dedicated Head of Practice. For our clients this means a fresh pair of eyes joining the core team to help create a fully integrated event with depth and a link to the wider PR plan. We also believe that events should be created as more than the sum of their parts, offering output that takes the experience to the widest possible audience, via compelling content for online media and social networks.

Why?

Events are established tools of the PR armoury. They offer brands an opportunity to make direct contact with their audiences and helps make marketing more real for the attendees.

However, events are often treated as separate parts of the plan to the core PR activity, or fall outside PR all together, being identified as Brand Activation or Experiential Marketing. In fact, events cross over many disciplines, but when they are conceived, planned and managed by a PR team there should be a wider PR benefits. Events create emotional connections between brand and public, but they should also generate content to take the experience, and that emotional connection, to a wider audience – those who could not attend the event in person, but still have enough interest to engage remotely.

Finally, we think that events should also bring new insights to the brand itself. Having spent all that money on one day, or event just a few hours, if there is nothing more left at the end of an event day than props and staging to take down, then where is the long-term value?

How?

SpeedLIVE approaches events in a different way. We work to the Speed mantra of Success, Sooner and we develop events as brand accelerants: they deliver impact fast, and create content which engages the wider audience more quickly.

We also focus on the 3D (please excuse my wanton band-wagon jumping) by looking outward to the wider audience and beyond to ensure value after the fact.

Who?

Get in touch with me if you would like to talk to us more about SpeedLIVE. You’ll find my contact details are on the People section of the Speed website.

Although there are no long-standing, official definitions of the concept of ‘Olympic Spirit’ it is generally accepted to be something to do with participation, endeavour, effort and drive. Nothing then, to do with gold, glory or beating the competition.

So, after attending a recent CIPR talk given Mark Blayney Stuart, Head of Research at the CIM, on Ambush Marketing – and specifically how it is defined by the IOC and the legislation in place to quash it during London 2012 – it is unsurprising that I came away feeling rather bitter.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the rules, let me enlighten you:

- no brand, company or commercial company (nor in fact the non-commercial ones who have not sought permission) not having paid to be an official sponsor may suggest or infer in any way that they have any connection to the games

- In practice this means that we cannot use any combination of the following words Games, 2012, Twenty-Twelve, Two Thousand and Twelve or use any of them in combination with anything in this second list of words: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, Medals, Summer, Sponsor/s

- these rules apply to all forms of marketing and all forms of media: meaning that (subject to hefty fines) not only cannot one issue a press release which includes  any connection, event inferred, to the Olympics but this also applies to Facebook posts, blogs post and tweets.  i.e. as PRs we cannot send a tweet which in any way promotes a client which makes reference to any of the above. Nor can your clients post anything that makes any reference, or inference to the aforementioned insanely restrictive list of words

So, some illustrative examples:

A tourist company cannot run an ad saying ‘Come to London in 2012’, nor can a landlord display a hand-written blackboard outside his pub saying ’come in and watch the London games on our big screen’.

Ridiculous? Of course it is.

The thing that REALLY annoyed me, as apposed to annoy me quite a lot (which most of it did, as you may have noticed), was the defense that the Olympic Games are ‘non-commercial’. What tripe! There are sponsors so they are, by definition, commercial. If the games were non-commercial then they would be entirely funded by the public purse, would they not, rather than seek 10% of the costs from brands such as McDonalds and Coca-Cola.

But yes, ok, it’s a modern world we live in and sporting events have sponsors. And yes, we all know and accept that the official sponsors should have their rights protected. But surely the nature of Olympic Spirit is the taking part and small, independent companies who are only trying to enter into the spirit of things (there’s that word again) should be allowed to do so without the fear of police intervention to remove the offending articles – yes, really, that’s in there too – or a £20,000 fine.

What ever happened to a bit of healthy competition?

Bah. Am feeling very grumpy about this.

And by the way, if you are worried about my apparent wanton disregard of the rules by writing all of this out here… ‘editorial’ is not covered by the rules and so blogging – as long as am careful to avoid any reference to a brand or paying client – is allowed. Oh, thanks for that.

Chose a career in PR and you are destined to be all things to all men, covering off in one role the arts of client counsel, planner, strategist, sales-person, (arguably) charmer and of course, creative genius.

It is not always an easy task. And creativity can become something one does in a scheduled slot, rather than part and parcel of every task.

Here’s the plan for Friday.

Part 1: Inspiration
Dick Powell, SeymourPowell – Rules for creativity… what is creativity and how can you nourish it? How to give yourself the best chance of coming up with that idea

Richard Williams, Williams Murray Hamm – The creative process: how to differentiate, how to approach a brief, how to present ideas

Anthony Lucas, Epoch – What clients are looking for and how to take your client on a journey through an idea

Part 2: Action – hosted by Alice Hunter, Branded
Live brainstorm session (subject and content to be revealed), both as a team and a group. Present back from group brainstorming and lunch

Follow #creativeapprentice on Twitter and Wadds’ blog (guest host, yours truly!) throughout the morning for some insights from our speakers and updates from us on the content of the live brainstorming session.

The report explains that, “The three-day expo will give visitors the chance to see preview screenings of summer blockbuster movies, personal appearances by filmmakers and cast members, and an exhibition of memorabilia. The event will take place from 12 – 14 August at the O2′s Indigo2. Films that could be featured at the show include Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Transformers 3D and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.”

It’s essentially a bigger, better version of their Movie-Con events which have developed quite the cult following. But by super-sizing the venue and upping the ante with the publicity, Empire will be massively increasing awareness of their off-page/web activity credentials.

Live events is seemingly very much where it’s at for Bauer – there are also rumours of music festivals – which has newly created an events-specific role for the previous MD of music and film, Stuart Williams.

Interestingly, this is exactly where PR is headed according to Loewy’s new chairman, Will Whitehorn, who visited the Speed offices recently to talk about his view of the future. And it’s the way we have been thinking already at Speed, as in both traditional media terms and when tackling social media, content is now king. Events create engaging content and a natural ripple effect of interest in people who could not attend.  They also have the potential to communicate brand essence in its purest form. Essentially, events make marketing real for people in a way, and to a degree, that no other discipline can achieve. They are now integral to everything we do in the world of modern PR where successful customer engagement is at the heart of every brief.

And frankly if they’re not part of your comms plan, they should be.

They have produced a series of children’s books – the most recent one a Christmas special, The Magic of Christmas, – using ‘augmented reality’ to make the books virtually 3-dimensional, using your computer’s webcam. The book comes with software and features encoded sections, which the webcam scans and uses to create a live animation effect on the screen, as if the action were coming straight out of the pages of the book.

Nifty.

The range was launched to rave reviews in June with two titles, Dinosaurs Alive and Fairyland Magic, and comes complete with its own and a TV ad.

Carlton is selling these books of course, so this is not just a PR exercise, but it does speak volumes about the company’s level of innovation and creativity and will inevitably effect how kids interact with the brand in future.

Owning the url www.bookscomealive.co.uk also means that Carlton has the ideal platform not only for further book launches, but also for some great integrated campaigns encouraging kids to interact and great and share their own books.  Whether they make the most of it or not, is only for time to tell.

And it seems that augmented reality is all the rage this Yuletide, with this dude from Germany doing the rounds earlier in the month.

None of this bodes well for my childish side…  I still get excited by old fashioned pop up books. This kind of stuff is enough to have me quite giddy with joy!  Weird to think that my children aren’t going to bat an eyelid of this stuff in five years time…

Page 3 of the Metro made me smile this morning. And feel a pang of nostalgia. The odd thing is that it was nostalgia for something that was the daily norm only a couple of years ago. And I hadn’t noticed it had gone.

I shall explain…

This morning’s paper featured a story of the old order – a news creation piece, themed around Christmas and based on the results of an Index. In this case, the wonderfully simple, and undeniably genius, cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Issued by an American company, PNC Wealth Management, and described by the paper as ‘whimsical’, the index has been calculated for the last 27 years and tracks the cost of living via the gifts listed in the iconic Christmas song.

Reading it made me feel nostalgic because here we had a straight piece of news creation (thinking about it, who uses that term any more??), which delivered what it aimed to do – brand checks in the paper and communicate the more human side of a financial organisation. It had everything; universal appeal, seasonal relevance, personality and topicality. All that you could hope for and more. And five years ago, maybe less, it would have been enough – this was the bread and butter of consumer PR. But the media landscape, and PR’s response to it, is so complex now that this is no longer enough. And so this story stood out for me because of its gloriously one-dimensional simplicity.

So imagine my disappointment (teamed with conflicting utter delight) when I discovered that in fact this was not the throw-back story I thought it was but actually accompanied by a beautifully crafted and highly engaging microsite. With the inevitable links to follow PNC on Facebook and twitter.

Sigh.

Of course. Of course it would be multi-platform campaign with a social media element. How could it not be? Nothing wrong with that. It is the way of things now – PR has evolved and continues to do so week by week – so why do I feel cheated?

Why? Because I when I read it this morning I was briefly transported back to simpler times and that made me smile. And simple is, frankly, what I want sometimes when sat on the tube at 8am. Sadly I think the days of simple might be over and I am just going to have to go with multi-platform as the norm for my morning commute.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to engage with that microsite again, because it’s just so bloody clever!

The faces of famous people appearing in inanimate objects.

I am quite obsessed.

Really. Ask me’colleagues – old and new – and they will tell you how I brief them to hunt examples down for my ever-growing collection of what I consider to be coverage nirvana.  This week, to give you a recent example, an old colleague of mine tweeted me about the appearance of Jesus in a naan bread in Monday’s Express. I was actually off sick that day but made damn sure I hunted the paper out in our office the following day. And low, it was well worth the effort:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/150952/Jesus-of-Naan-zareth/

Just genius.

Why such stories delight me so much I am unsure, but suffice to say that I would retire on the spot if ever a client were to let me produce one for PR purposes.  I have had a couple of very near misses. In my first job I was privy to a colleague suggesting ‘Jesus in my pint’ to the Guinness client and later I very nearly swung ‘David Beckham in my ready meal’… but both were a case of close, but no cigar.

Gutted.

Over the years I have collected all manner of examples: Osama Bin Laden in my cloud, The Madonna and Child in my water stain, Mother Teresa in my bath bun, God in my cat fur… I could go on.  And do you know what – if ever a subject was guaranteed to appear in the paper, this is it. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it is universally appealing… and fun. Maybe we could learn from this in terms of story development, particularly for the tabloids – keep it simple and make people smile. Not a bad rule to follow if you ask me.

As for my collection, I am planning to use it to create a montage for my downstairs loo… in case you were wondering.

Take the hilarious story about a health club in Bristol which took it upon themselves to point out in an ad that
“When the aliens come, they will eat the fatties first”

Needless to say, the locals were far from impressed.

And earlier in the week, a story so bad that I am in two minds as to whether it was born from mind-blowing stupidity or mind-blowing genius:  dating site BeautifulPeople.com – which only allows new members to join if existing members deem them to be good looking enough – has axed 5,000 members for having posted photos of themselves showing weight gain.

And the official company quote?

“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said site founder Robert Hintze. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Yes, you did read that right. “Letting fatties roam free”.  Somebody approved that.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or impressed, I really don’t.