The peeps at Finn have been celebrating this week, both regionally and nationally! We’re very much in awards season, and we’ve had some great recognition for some of the campaigns we ran in 2012.

CIPR Awards

At last night’s CIPR Awards, we picked up three Gold awards – one in the Public Sector category for the Merseyside Winter Health Campaign as well as best use of social media & best digital campaign for lovetubs.

We also picked up two silver awards, one in the social media category for Morphy Richards Innovators and one in the digital campaign category for Fox’s Christmas Puddings. A particularly fruitful night for Finn Digital!

PRCA awards

Finn achieved a “highly commended” award in the category of small consultancy of the year at the prestigious national PRCA awards, held this week at London’s Park Lane Hilton. Hosted by the professional body that represents PR professionals, the award is particularly poignant for Finn, as the only agency outside of London to be recognised on the night.

The Grocer’s Marketing, Advertising and PR (MAP) Awards

Finn was also a finalist at the Grocer’s MAP awards, which recognises teams representing some of the nation’s most prominent food and drink businesses. Finn was nominated in the category of social media for its work for Fab Ice Lollies, creating a Facebook ‘Pass the Parcel’ application to celebrate the brand’s 45^th anniversary.

Thank you to all our clients and everyone who was involved. Roll on 2013!

Posted by Julia on November 16th, 2012

Each month we host 3,2,1 Share, a chance for the agency to get together and share knowledge. Back at the beginning of the year, I blogged about the ever growing trend of collaborative consumption; a shift from ownership and mass consumption to sharing, bartering and lending.

Last night I clocked an advert from Argos, pushing its Toy Exchange campaign. This caught my eye, as it was a surprisingly different, and very modern approach for the retailer. In short, you donate unwanted toys in exchange for a £5 off voucher, the toy is then given to Barnado’s for them to sell and raise money for the charity.

For a retailer which is in a pickle with its finances, this appears to be a bold move, clearly focussing on brand. However, as consumers demand more and more social responsibility from the companies they buy from, this will be an interesting one to keep watch of, to see whether the Toy Exchange will help play a role in improving the fortunes of this ailing retail business.

Posted by James on October 30th, 2012

Hitting the headlines

• Kent is set to get its own Disneyland paradise, as work begins on a £2bn, world-class theme park in Swanscombe (across the board)
• Retail sales are set to warm up, as a nippy start to the colder months explains a 1.5% rise in high street profits (across the board)
• Homeowners are being promised greater rights when defending their home against burglars, as Justice Secretary Chris Grayling assures taxpayers that he will strengthen the law in this area (across the board)
• Despite being told at school that his hopes of having a career in science were ‘quite ridiculous’, John Gurdon has gone on to win the Nobel Prize for his research into cell development (across the board)
• RBS has announced £1.5million of funding in an effort to help young entrepreneurs (Daily Mirror)

Picture perfect

• Britain’s Got Talent star Amanda Holden is pictured with her hands full, holding eight children as a part of a Picture A Better Future Campaign launch with Pampers and Unicef (Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun)
• The artist Shauna Richardson is pulling the wool over no one’s eyes as she poses with her woollen, wildlife creations – knitted animals otherwise known as ‘crochetdermy’! (Metro)
• Though 100 Devon residents have declared the statue by Damien Hirst as ‘obscene and disgusting’, the 70ft tall statue of a naked, pregnant woman holding aloft a sword will be installed this week in Ilfracombe (Independent, i, Daily Mail)

PR at work

• Why is a meal not complete without a glass of wine? Or a breakfast without a cup of tea? Research by food scientist Paul Breslin found that tastes at opposite ends of the spectrum please our mouths most (Daily Express, Daily Mail)
• A survey promoting the launch of the TV show ‘Modern Family’ picked out the classic characteristics of the average household. According to the research, the average modern family earns £39,223 a year, owns a blue Ford and is in bed by 10:23pm every weekday night (Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Sun)
• Pret a Manger proves to be better than sliced bread, as the British chain has won the Golden Retail Brand in Paris, nine months after it opened its first branch there (Metro)
• People are increasingly going to work when they are ill, according to The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development as a result of the threat of redundancies and worries over job security, highlighting a culture of ‘presenteeism’ (across the board)
• Yorkshire has been named Britain’s best holiday destination, with figures by Welcome to Yorkshire revealing that there has been a 12% increase in international tourists (Telegraph)

Posted by Julia on October 9th, 2012

As the rain comes down, the award season is hotting up, and at Finn Towers we’re delighted to have earned a place on the shortlist for the PRCA’s Small Consultancy Of The Year Awards 2012.

We’re up against some great PR talent, including Manifest, Dynamo, Third City, Cubaneight and Voice Communications. Looking forward to meeting the competition, in what will no doubt be a standard, raucous PR tear up at the awards do on Tuesday 13 November.

And in other news, the digital team has treated themselves to a trip to the freezer, as our digital work for Fab ice lolly has secured a place on The Grocer’s MAP awards in the Best Use of Social Media category.

Pass the Berocca.

Posted by James on September 26th, 2012

Thanks to everyone who came along to the second Finn breakfast briefing with Mr Linkedin, Mark Williams.

The size of the audience was clear evidence that we’re all keen to make the most of Linkedin and effectively use it as business development tool. Key pieces of advice that we took out were:

• scheduling status updates and accepting Linkedin connections during the golden hour – 8:15am – 9:15am – for maximum visibility of activity
• waiting until you’ve engaged with a prospect (possibly through a Group discussion) before inviting to connect
• the power of building recommendations, and not just reciprocating recommendations
• making the most of company pages (and being aware that they may well change in the very near future)

Thanks to Mark who has agreed to share his presentation, and also to our partners, Adam Recruitment and The Search Laboratory.

We’re currently planning our third event, so please keep checking the Finn site for further details.

Posted by Judith on September 13th, 2012

We’re delighted to announce that Alastair Gornall has joined the board of Finn PR as Non-Executive Chairman. Alastair, who was CEO of Reed Exhibitions and before that founder and CEO of Consolidated Communications, will work with our management team to provide strategic consultancy and mentoring.

Richard Rawlins, founder and MD of Finn worked for Alastair Gornall at Consolidated Communications in the late 1990’s.

As Alastair says, “I am really excited to join Richard and the team at Finn at this exciting time in the agency’s growth story. Finn is one of the few PR agencies I’ve encountered with genuine digital and social media expertise. They have an exciting vision and I’m sure will become recognised as one of the pioneers in this space.”

Richard Rawlins, MD of Finn adds, “Having Alastair on board provides invaluable knowledge and advice, helping to accelerate our growth plans and focus the board on a winning strategy. Alastair also brings infectious energy and enthusiasm, which has already facilitated some great successes for the agency.”

Posted by Richard on June 15th, 2012

Mark Ritson writes an excellent regular op-ed column in Marketing Week. Except this week, in my opinion.

His argument is  that Apple’s success  proves that the ‘modern’ measures of success for a brand (reputational factors like diversity in the boardroom, a robust CSR strategy, engagement through social media and the use of customer data and insight to create great products) are wrong.

Apple has a white, middle class, male board and no CSR strategy.  Mark, it is fair to say, is not a fan of social media for brands. That Apple famously does not engage with its fans through this channel is manner from heaven for him.  Indeed, the brand has little regard for research or insight, believing that it knows what its customers will need before they realise it.  Steve Jobs often quoted Henry Ford: “If I’d have asked what my customers wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse’.”

Ritson argues that Apple’s performance based on the modern indices of brand strength is poor, yet it scores brilliantly on the most traditional rule “To thine own self be true”, on in Apple’s case “Think Different”.

Does this prove that CSR, social media and diversity are defunct as measures of strength? Of course not. For some brands having a diverse board and a strong CSR strategy is being true to themselves.  So long as a brand understands clearly its role in its customers lives, then modern reputational tools like CSR could be very applicable.

It’s easy to use Apple as a prove point that modern marketing theory is hocum.  It doesn’t make it right though.

Posted by Richard on June 6th, 2012

This week’s Marketing Week has a great piece by Nicola Smith demonstrating how social media comment has a direct impact on search results.  She quotes research by iProspect  which shows that most brands aren’t thinking about the link between search and reputation.

The article lists a number of topic areas to help brands to leverage the social space to optimise search: make content king, make content social and shareable, leverage news and rich media and where possible enable and activate a community around your brand.  In other words, create content which consumers genuinely want to engage with.

No huge surprises there.  Even less surprising is my opinion, which is that proper  PR (not SEO content blah-PR) is the discipline which strategically drives these areas.

Smith’s  final tip is interesting though: focus on Google+.  Why?  Because as Gareth Jones, head of online marketing at Carphone Warehouse explains: “It is not because we expect to get 250,000 [Facebook] fans but because we know that Google, through its natural listings, disproportionately rewards social signals if they come from Google+.  Out thinking is that if we have lots of fresh content going into Google+, that content will be beneficial for us in terms of search listings”.

Yet as Smith’s article explains, “a comScore study in February found that users spent on average just three minutes on Google+during January”.

What a delicious irony that for all our efforts to create content which is genuinely useful to people, what Google really wants is to force us all to use a platform which for the moment, nobody uses.  Who said the web was democratic.

Posted by Richard on May 22nd, 2012

A perfect encapsulation of why the channel should never be the idea.

For us the order of play is consumer, brand, insight, idea…then channel

Why we're about content then channel

Posted by Richard on May 4th, 2012

Our approach to digital is content and user-led. Because if you can first understand your consumers’ online behaviour, and then unlock how they use and share, you can encourage your fans to do the heavy lifting for you, thus reducing your reliance on digital marketing spend. And who wouldn’t want to be more efficient when it comes to budgets?

We’re applying this thinking to yoomoo, a new brand of frozen yogurt which has recently hit the supermarket freezers. The brand has two distinct audiences; the main shopper – mums 37+ who are interested in consuming content, participating ocassionally in social media and to a much lesser degree, creating their own content. Then there’s the end consumer; 15-25 year-old women, and true digital natives who love to create and share visual content with their friends.

We took the brand’s central creative theme – how do you moo?, a simple call to action encouraging consumers to show how and where they consume the product, and encouraged the younger fan base to unleash their creative flair. This wave of content would widen awareness about the new product range, carried with the powerful endorsement of its new users.

To superdrive the viral nature, the website has been developed with Facebook Open Graph. It allows users to express how they interact with the brand and product range, through different actions, making the web experience much more shareable. So, if you’re an Angelmoo fan, then we make it easy to tell your world through Facebook.

In addition, visual-based social media channels, including Instagram and Pinterest, have been integrated into the site to fuel further content creation and sharing, all of which will drive further viral brand awareness and web traffic. And finally, a suite of fun digital apps and games have been developed which are rolling out over the course of the year, to keep the site live, and content fresh.

It’s early days yet, but since going live just two weeks ago, traffic has increased 150%, and engagement has doubled.

So, just one question remains, how do yoo moo?

Posted by James on April 5th, 2012