What's going on
An eclectic view on the news of today from team Flagship… if it’s in the media (from plot developments in Glee to the financial pages of the FT) there’s a strong chance you might read about it here
Is the media simply collecting tokens?
10th February 2012Recently a former Radio 4 controller called for more ethnic minority representation on flagship programmes ‘Today’ and ‘The Archers’ which came weeks after the decision by Neighbours to move its first Asian family into Ramsay Street. This should be applauded as a proactive step...
View Post >News from Flagship to combat the January blues
23rd January 2012How did you get through Blue Monday? Or should that be both Blue Mondays? That’s the problem with pseudoscience (harsh? Check out The Guardian on this): first, you’ve got to devise an absurd “formula” for ‘the most depressing day of the year and then...
View Post >Why I think the South West has so much to smile about this year!
What ISN’T there to smile about in the South West? We are so lucky with spectacular countryside, miles of coastline, a laid back lifestyle and – of course – cider (there is always need for cider)! I am always amazed (though, on reflection, I...
View Post >Feel good news from Flagship
Winning Awards We’re delighted to have been shortlisted for the new ‘Golden Hedgehog Awards,’ a new awards programme run by PR moment and sponsored by Precise and the PRCA. Our work on the English Language Day ‘Location Lingo’ campaign has been nominated. The campaign...
View Post >Case study: Making people smile can lead to award winning work
Humour can be a creative way to capture the attention and imagination of the public and this is what Flagship used at the heart of its campaign for the English Project when it reached out to the nation and asked people to nominate their...
View Post >Guest post: A funny thing happened on the way to a rubber chicken dinner
To the best of my limited knowledge, Peppercom is the only strategic communications firm in the United States that offers clients a comedy experience. Some clients may think our work is a joke, but that’s a different matter entirely. We use the words ‘comedy...
View Post >When PR stunts hit home! Bravo Wikipedia
18th January 2012This morning, like every morning, as I drove my way into work, I listened to Radio 5 Live (easing my way into the day). The show was, like many I have heard rumbling around on the net, on TV, on twitter and amongst colleagues,...
View Post >Fined to get fit
5th January 2012Now here is a clever idea. A new app has been developed that fines people when they don’t stick to a pre-agreed gym programme, and rewards those that do with the money collected in fines. According to the people who developed www.gym-pact.com it’s all...
View Post >Never work with children
5th December 2011Apparently over 20,000 people contacted the BBC to complain about Jeremy Clarkson’s latest outburst. Now, I’m no flag-waver for the bejeaned buffoon, but I think we should cut him some slack this time. After all, most of us know what Clarkson’s for. In short,...
View Post >Intern-al politics
2nd December 2011As the graduate recruitment market continues to tighten, internships have become the Holy Grail. So much so that an event was held at Number 10 last month to discuss social mobility and internships with the main topic of discussion being whether a good internship...
View Post >Keep Calm and Carry On…with the commercialisation: it’s good for our spirits
Reports published today suggest Brits are demonstrating ‘Blitz spirit’, and despite the economic doom and gloom, we’re actually pretty resilient here in the UK. The idea of ‘Blitz spirit’ conjures feelings of nostalgia and we do indeed have a current enthralment with objects and...
View Post >Mike Tindall situation threatens accessibility of rugby stars to fans
15th November 2011On Friday Mike Tindall was fined £25,000 and dropped from the England team following his behaviour at the World Cup. A truly sad end for a man who has earned 75 England caps and was part of the winning World Cup squad in 2003,...
View Post >Events we’ve organised
27th October 2011Our events team is highly experienced and just as excited about organising launch parties on the high seas, running ‘the event of the summer’ in London for client Greenwich or coordinating a design festival across central London. If you’re interested in the types of...
View Post >Flagship news
In October we announced the exciting news that Flagship Consulting and Peppercom Inc, a leading US communications agency headquartered in New York (“Peppercom”), are forming a strategic alliance to provide clients with a broad range of marketing and communications services in the UK and Europe....
View Post >Creating local waves around national events
The theme of this newsletter is “events” – happenings in the real (and now virtual) world which gather a group of like minded people together. We are pretty good at events in the SW – from the America’s Cup regatta, which has just happened...
View Post >Advertising is dead. Yeh right.
26th October 2011There have been many debates lately around the power of advertising and whether consumers are becoming numb to it, or simply taking every opportunity to avoid it, especially on television with the rise in online viewing and catch-up TV. I’m in the camp that...
View Post >A question of trust
Research results this week urged companies to improve the way they communicate with consumers and to strive to exceed regulatory requirements instead of seeing them as a barrier they have to find a way around. The report carried out for DLA Piper by polling...
View Post >Is this the return of the golden age of justice?
21st October 2011What do judges do? Well, if you want to be po-faced about it, they conduct court proceedings and dispense justice. But we all know what they’re really for: they’re there to be gloriously politically incorrect, to demonstrate their contempt for, and ignorance of, popular...
View Post >Sport shows that leadership takes many forms
18th October 2011At a recent Football Association breakfast event I heard Fabio Capello, supported by a panel of Stuart Pearce, John Barnes, Dennis Wise and Sir Trevor Brooking, take questions from Club Wembley members on a range of topics such as the future of the England...
View Post >Blackberry’s comms outage overshadows service issues
14th October 2011Blackberry has never been a trendy brand. Secure, safe, functional, great for dads – sure, but certainly not a phone you’d have to worry about flashing around on the train. But that’s fine – that’s exactly what Blackberry is known for, and that’s why...
View Post >Big Bang or Damp Squib?
10th October 2011Twenty-five years ago – well, give a day or two – the City resounded to a very Big Bang. Whether we feel that Mrs Thatcher’s de-regulation of the financial markets was positive or pernicious, none of us would deny its immediate and lasting impact. ...
View Post >Making progress on malaria
14th September 2011Yesterday I attended the launch of Roll Back Malaria’s Report on a Decade of Partnership and Results, alongside our client Sumitomo Chemical (maker of the life-saving Olyset net). Held at The Commonwealth Club, the event was attended by representatives from the WHO, London School...
View Post >Guest post: Why do young people fare so poorly in the media?
24th August 2011Post by Trudy Kilcullen, Chief Operations Officer at the Jack Petchey Foundation Following the recent riots in London and across the UK, headlines such as ‘Feral Scum’ and ‘Youths on the Rampage’ were rife within the media. Looking at the ages of those who...
View Post >Guest post: Can local media be rebuilt after the riots?
10th August 2011It was no surprise to me when I read Roy Greenslade’s blog post “Local newspapers fail to rise to the occasion to report on the riots” on Media Guardian. Greenslade is a respected media commentator and professor of journalism at City University – he...
View Post >Are law firms too posh to tweet?
5th August 2011If you’re after entertainment, I urge you to check out the reader responses on the The Lawyer’s website; usually they’re marvellous mix of vitriol and superciliousness. In short, lawyers, love a good ‘hate’ and a recent piece on who’s up and who’s down in...
View Post >And in the meantime…Flagship organised the event of the summer
27th July 2011It’s not often you get to watch the jaws of over 250 travel media and PRs literally drop in amazement, but that’s what happened when they arrived at the recent TravMedia event we held for our client Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. After...
View Post >How do you unlock the entrepreneur within?
20th July 2011Entrepreneurialism doesn’t always have to be linked to starting and growing a business: it can flourish in any commercial environment. That’s why head-hunters are always being asked by large, established businesses to find people with entrepreneurial skills. And we’re helping corporates to promote their...
View Post >Entrepreneurs are flourishing in the SW
Summer in the SW is always a time of renewed life. The influx of people, surfers on the beaches, walkers on the moors and, yes, even the jams of campervans on the A303 demonstrate just what this corner of the UK is all about...
View Post >It’s been a busy few months at Flagship…
We’ve been appointed to handle the launch of Altaia Partners, a consultancy specialising in advising corporates on people-related ‘change’ issues. The three partners have all worked in-house at a senior level and have a deep understanding of the impact of takeovers, restructuring, disposals or...
View Post >Introducing…Sarah Catterick
Hello Flagship watchers. I’ve recently joined the team as an Account Manager. I’m from North Yorkshire via Geordieland, where I took a Business and Marketing degree at Newcastle Business School, which involved a year’s placement at market research specialists TNS. Up till now –...
View Post >News of the World is now the news of the whole world
12th July 2011On Sunday the News of the World ended. Or at least we thought it had. Instead what has followed is an increasingly scandalous, spiralling web of events worthy of a big screen debut. A week later, the headlines of one paper (or three if...
View Post >When cyber space knocks at the door – brands caught up in News of the World phone hacking
6th July 2011Well, once again it’s been quite a day in the world of journalism and social media. Following on from the super-injunctions debacle, we are now witnessing a collective coming together on social media to pressure companies to stop advertising in the News of the...
View Post >James Brown to get the Boots?
8th June 2011In a world where the power of the celebrity endorsement continues to grow, there aren’t many large high-street retailers who don’t have a piece of this lucrative pie. Lily Allen, Kate Moss and Daisy Lowe are just a few examples of celebrities who have...
View Post >An age old debate – Facebook for under-13s?
31st May 2011Last weekend, comments made by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were taken to mean that he wants to get younger children using the social networking site. When asked about the issue at the e-G8 Internet forum in Paris on Wednesday, he claimed his comments were completely...
View Post >TravTweetup returns for the Summer
25th May 2011TravTweetup, the travel industry’s hottest social media meetup, will return on 21 June. We’ve teamed up with Flight Centre UK to host the event in Jetlag Bar – giving an aeronautical feel to the event, which lands on the longest day of the year....
View Post >Do super injunctions generate public interest?
23rd May 2011It has been an interesting week in the world of privacy. In the past two days there have been approximately 30,000 tweets relating to super injunctions and the footballer allegedly caught up in the middle of this media cyclone. In real time, this represents...
View Post >Why is corporate language so awful?
18th May 2011‘Why is corporate language so awful? Why are companies so pompous when they address an audience? Why are they so afraid of straight speaking and an individual human voice. And why oh why when somebody takes over at the top – of a company...
View Post >Guest Blog: The Bribery Act – Should we cancel the golf day?
4th May 2011Post by Ian Hargreaves, Litigation Partner, Addleshaw Goddard The media has generated a lot of heat, but precious little light, regarding the impact of the 2010 Bribery Act. Ken Clarke’s Guidance, as required by statute, intended to soothe the concerns of UK plc and the...
View Post >Getting to know our heroes
26th April 2011Us sport obsessives are …well…obsessed. You see, what might seem completely irrational behaviour to a non-obsessive – travelling hundreds of miles to see your boys in the first round of the Cup, committing to memory (without trying) the name of every football league ground,...
View Post >Social media’s role in disaster recovery
21st April 2011This year New Zealand was hit by the worst tragedy the country has experienced in my lifetime. The aftershocks of the Christchurch earthquake were felt worldwide by Kiwis in all corners of the globe. New Zealanders on the ground have very quickly started picking...
View Post >Encouraging behaviour change to help save lives
I am working on an exciting new PR project which the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) has just launched in partnership with our client, Olyset Net. The ‘Me and My Net’ competition aims to raise awareness of the importance of mosquito nets in malaria prevention...
View Post >Flagship talks tourism strategy on BBC politics show
19th April 2011Last month Flagship’s Sophy Norris blogged about the Department of Culture Media and Sports new tourism strategy. Her thought leadership approach clearly resonated with the BBC and last Sunday she was invited to appear on Andrew Neil’s the politics show. Watch it here.
View Post >Guest blog: What’s good for one good cause is good for us all
13th April 2011Leigh Daynes is director of advocacy, campaigns and communications at charity Plan UK According to the most recent figures available online, the voluntary sector spent £2.6 billion on marketing communications in 2007/8. This enormous spend has been matched by increased professionalism among third sector...
View Post >Flagship’s cutting of the month
11th April 2011Here at Flagship HQ, our monthly meetings always finish the same way – with an award for the best cutting of the month. We pride ourselves on achieving well placed coverage in the best publications and this month the Norwegian Cruise Line team came...
View Post >Whether MI5 spy or ‘Silk’ clad QC, we’re being inspired by career TV
5th April 2011It is not uncommon for profession based television programmes to enjoy widespread recognition both here in the UK and overseas, with hospital and police dramas having engaged audiences over the years. Recently, other sectors have been muscling in on the action, even capitalising on...
View Post >TBU11 – A call to action
28th March 2011Sophy and I spent last weekend at the Travel Bloggers Unite conference held in Manchester, where we spoke on ‘branding doesn’t engage people; people engage people’. We took the audience (which ranged from new to established travel bloggers) through the importance of personal branding...
View Post >Guest blog: New Bill will make it harder to bring libel claims
15th March 2011Post by David Engel, Partner, Addleshaw Goddard The Coalition Government today published a draft Defamation Bill and opened a consultation period on its proposals, which closes on 10 June 2011. Many of the provisions appear primarily to codify and put on a statutory footing the...
View Post >Q: When is a strategy not a strategy? A: When the DCMS puts out its new Tourism Policy
11th March 2011Or: ‘How to make friends and state the bleeding obvious’ OK, so I have had more fun making up titles for this response to the Departure of Culture Media and Sport’s Tourism Policy (DCMS) than I fear I will have writing about it. But...
View Post >Guest blog: Should PR challenge clients to think about their moral values?
8th March 2011Professor Roger Steare FRSA, Director at ethicability discusses business ethics in PR. Some say that “business ethics” is an oxymoron. And for some businesses, this is probably true. It’s not difficult to find banks, big oil companies, arms manufacturers and tobacco companies that have...
View Post >Flagship launches digital division
28th February 2011Capitalising on our award-winning digital work with clients Discover Winchester and Docklands Light Railway, Flagship has launched a dedicated digital and social media division. The division provides a range of services for B2B and B2C companies from digital PR and social media management, to...
View Post >View from the South West
The importance of social and digital media continues to dominate the business world, with The South West recognised as a region with a vibrant Creative Industries sector. The announcement in November 2010 that the New Creative Industries iNet (Innovation Network) will bring £3.2 million...
View Post >Bowled over by the ads?
11th February 2011I always like seeing what advertisers come up with for the cherished (and uber expensive) Superbowl adverts – although apparently thousands of American’s in the know (and with the means to do it) tuned in to the BBC’s coverage of the match to avoid...
View Post >Discovering London’s Real Gems
10th February 2011Over the past few months Flagship has been working with Docklands Light Railway to uncover London’s Real Gems. The initiative aimed to encourage residents, commuters and visitors to East London to submit suggestions of their favourite neighbourhood gems around the DLR network. We asked...
View Post >Popping Up; New Faces and a Creative Spring Clean (PART 1)
4th February 2011“BEING CREATIVE” can sometimes can be like, so URGH… ESPECIALLY in February when the baubles of Christmas are long gone and the beach balls of summer are simply too far away. This is simply NOT ACCEPTABLE if you work in PR… So – you...
View Post >What does 2011 mean to the Golden Age of Travel?
The beginning of a new year inevitably comes with predictions on how individual industries and the overall economy are going to fare in the year ahead. If there’s one thing we learnt in the world of travel in 2010 – it’s that we can’t...
View Post >Tweeting Transparency
3rd February 2011The recent OFT ruling on endorsed tweets is a step forward in online transparency. Consumers will no longer be marketed to without being made aware of any commercial motivation behind a comment or review. The very nature of ‘endorsing’ tweets goes against the transparent...
View Post >Confused into submission
I’m sure that the number of TV adverts that annoy, or just plain baffle me, has increased in recent years. I feel like I can no longer think of an advert that doesn’t annoy me, even though I’m sure there are plenty that I...
View Post >Mexi-can you say that?
I don’t envy the Mexican Ambassador one bit. His job is to protect his country’s reputation and when someone calls your whole nation feckless it can’t be a great for morale at the embassy. However, anyone would think that Top Gear was an official...
View Post >Social TV viewership
Recent TV viewership figures have shown that audience ratings are growing, and not only that, all the TV we are watching is helping to make us more sociable both on and offline. Speaking from personal experience, Monday mornings in the office throughout the autumn...
View Post >More PR than an Oscars Ceremony
4th November 2010Epic was definitely an apt name choice for the ship we launched to the media on behalf of Norwegian Cruise Line in June. One of the world’s largest ships, Norwegian Epic had so much on board we weren’t short of media angles – it...
View Post >i Spy
Press baron Evgeny Ledbedev has hailed the launch of i - essentially The Independent's little brother - as "a red-letter day for newspaper readers". The paper is being promoted as "your essential daily briefing...attractive to those who prize intelligence, convenience and desirability".
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