PR Case Study: Brands2Life – Cards With Heart

PR Case Study: Brands2Life – Cards With Heart

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Brands2Life helped Moonpig’s Valentine’s Day cards to stand out by forming a partnership with NHS Blood and Transplant to send organ donor cards to loved ones.

Campaign: Giving Cards With Heart for Valentine’s Day
Client: Moonpig
PR Team: Brands2Life
Timing: February 2018

Summary

Some cards mean more than others. To help Moonpig stand out from the crowd on Valentine’s Day, Brands2Life formed a partnership with NHS Blood and Transplant to allow customers to swap their usual Valentine’s card for an organ donor card. The cards encouraged people to sign up to the organ donor register and, crucially, tell their loved ones about the decision.

Objectives

Moonpig briefed Brands2Life to deliver a socially-driven Valentine’s Day campaign which would help them stand out from the crowd. The campaign needed to reflect Moonpig’s brand positioning; heart over humour, but with a touch of Moonpig’s trademark cheekiness.

The campaign needed to:

  • Drive traffic to the website during a crucial trading period
  • Generate positive online coverage and social buzz
  • Deliver increased levels of engagement and reach on Moonpig’s owned channels

Strategy and implementation

Moonpig’s brand is based on a delicate balance of heart and humour. Having devoted its previous two campaigns to ‘haunted’ gin and edible stationery, Brands2Life decided to go back to the brand’s heart with this Valentine’s campaign.

Focusing on cards, the most well-known element of Moonpig’s offering, Brands2Life settled on the creative platform of ‘giving a card with heart’. With debate in the news about moving to a system of presumed consent for organ donation in England, Brands2Life wanted to see if there was a way to offer two really important cards in one; a Valentine’s Day card which also signed you up to the organ donation register.

The agency approached NHS Blood and Transplant with the idea and during the initial conversations it became clear that the cards could perform two, equally important, roles; enrolling more Britons onto the NHS organ donor register and igniting a conversation between loved ones sharing their donation wishes.

This conversation matters to NHS Blood and Transplant because organ donation doesn’t go ahead without a family’s support. The partnership formed quickly, with Brands2Life providing creative direction on the limited-edition range of six free cards. These were aimed to prompt couples into kick-starting a conversation on the awkward subject of what happens should something happen to one of them.

The cards were designed to break the ice by reimaging classic love lines. These included: “I only have eyes for you…. unless they get donated to someone who needs them – which is also cool” and “Urine my heart, urine my soul… but one day my kidney may be in someone else.”

To give the campaign a human face, two of the cards were designed by people directly involved in organ donation: Jess Harris, a Londoner waiting for a kidney and pancreas transplant, and Kimberly Chard, who has cystic fibrosis and had a double lung transplant in 2015.

To reach a key Moonpig audience and help give the campaign a boost on social, Brands2Life got the help of ex-JLS star JB Gill and his wife Chloe to design a card. The couple had a personal connection to the cause, and they took part in a photoshoot, interviews and social media posts explaining how organ donation was a topic close to their hearts.

Each card included a cut-out organ donor card and directed people to the website to sign up. To ensure further reach across all channels, Brands2Life also created assets for social media channels, including a humorous video asking couples about their favourite parts of one another’s bodies, and imagery of the cards and designers.

Results

The campaign aimed to kick-start 6,400 conversations with the free cards – one for every person in the UK currently waiting for an organ transplant. As the campaign was focused around Valentine’s Day there was a small ten-day window to activate the campaign before this calendar date.

Moonpig’s website received over 11,695 unique visits, double the original target. Consumers purchased a total of 618 cards and 262 people signed up to the organ donation register as a direct result from the trackable link from Moonpig in the space of a week.

NHS Blood and Transplant reported a significant uplift in both traffic to their website and organ donor sign ups over the ten-day period the campaign ran, compared to the previous year (with similar levels of marketing activity, though the activity cannot be attributed to one sector of marketing mix).

The campaign positioned Moonpig front-and-centre for Valentine’s Day with over 300 pieces of coverage, 100% including reference to Moonpig and 98% including Moonpig branded visual assets. The partnership generated some brilliant opportunities for landing the message of having ‘that’ important conversation with a loved one; kicking off the conversation was a four minute, dedicated interview with the card designers on Sky News Sunrise, as well as further interviews for the designers.

The video also got people talking, with over 530,000 views on Moonpig’s Facebook page and huge engagement levels on social with all platforms seeing significant increases of engagement and reach:

  • Facebook engagement: +125,309%, with reach +3,101%
  • Instagram engagement: +404%. Instagram especially saw a huge engagement rate increase of 11.5% compared to Moonpig average of 2.28% in February
  • Twitter engagement: +1,399%

Moonpig and NHS Blood and Transplant both supported the campaign on their own platforms, including social channels, newsrooms and blog posts and internal channels with newsletters, email signatures and ‘lunch and learn events’. These activities added to the campaign’s reach.

60 Seconds with Tank PR

60 Seconds with Tank PR’s Trevor Palmer

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Trevor Palmer, director at PR agency Tank, talks about the agency’s expansion, linking digital and PR activity and falling for a Vanessa Paradis lookalike back in the nineties. 

Why did you set up Tank?

I was lucky enough to work at an advertising and PR agency called Rock Kitchen Harris. It was Mad Men meets Silicon Valley (genuinely). There were tonnes of genius characters of all ages, with loads of creative freedom and we did fantastic work for amazing clients and had a scream. It made me love work, which until that point, I hadn’t.

I moved on from RKH, missed it terribly and came to realise that the only way to get that atmosphere and environment back was to create it myself.

The agency is based in Nottingham. Why did you choose the city and how does it differ from being based in London?

I worked for a couple of London agencies in the late 90s. I probably would have stayed there, but was seduced back to Leicestershire by a Vanessa Paradis lookalike. London was great at night and weekends, but I suppose I was underwhelmed by the places of work – I know how good it is there though and at the time I was just doing the wrong work.

Fast forward almost a decade and I had made my name in the industry and knew the market, and had lots of clients ready to sign before I started. These were all over the country and, like now, in 2010 communications were sufficiently good for it not to matter where you were based. Nottingham was just where I lived at the time.

You’re set to expand to a new office. What are the benefits and challenges which come with that?

The change is long overdue, so there are mainly benefits: more space, multiple large meeting rooms, room for a bar/café reception, staff room, large kitchen, sweeping halls, a good space for talks and sublime views over a majestic churchyard.

To the challenges. We have non-execs, who among other things are helping us to create solid processes and better develop our people, and each time we expand, it just works as the nuts and bolts are in place. If we can find the talent (hardest bit in the East Midlands) I think we’ll get to 40+ in the next 18 months.

As an integrated agency, how important is it to link digital efforts to your PR activity?

We have been integrating digital with a purpose since 2010. Tank has always been about that from a social media and SEO perspective.

Even probably 18 years ago (pre-Tank) when some clients would chastise you for trying to justify your existence with ‘worthless web coverage that nobody reads’ – I presumed that would change. Perhaps not to the extent that it has though.

If you had to pick one aspect of Tank’s work which is most crucial to its growth, what would it be?

Our ability to think in stories. We’re a bit like the Marines – except everyone’s a writer and not a rifleman. Not all of our team write in their day-to-day roles. But they all can, and think in that way.

This makes our content strong and appealing to clients and journalists. We have our news judgement, but also our ability to create something that someone genuinely wants to read, publish or share.

How do you measure your PR results?

By the smiles on clients’ faces! The PR industry spent decades debating the value of AVE, and while it was sleepwalking the digital industry came in with actual proof of results via analytics et al.

PR caught up though, and now makes use of the bits it needs. We use what the clients are comfortable with, but most commonly: form completions, key message penetration, enquiries, traffic, keyword position, reach and sales. The one that still has ultimate power though is: ‘They called us up and said they’d seen us in X’.

One thing that we will never sign up to is guaranteed results, as a lot of digital agencies are starting to promise. We always get the results (all of our clients will testify to that) but you cannot guarantee that any number of media or non-media publications will use something when you’ve said they will, before you’ve worked on it. Clients who understand PR and have worked with good agencies, understand this. Guarantees are for electric razors, not PR agencies.

Finally, name something Nottingham offers which London does not.

A less complicated and distracting stage, on which to better rehearse global domination.

Use AI to excel in the next frontier of PR

Opinion: We must use AI to excel in the next frontier of PR

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Kerry Sheehan, the CIPR’s AI in PR panel PR director, talks about how AI is shaping the next frontier of PR and considers the findings of the panel’s new research paper.

Use AI to excel in the next frontier of PR

Kerry Sheehan

The fascinating thing about AI has been the ‘fear’, or at least the idea, that it’s coming after our jobs. Some people have been quick to ask: “When will a machine do your job better than you?”

This week sees the publication of Jean Valin’s fantastic CIPR AI in PR Panel paper – a must read for all PRs. It highlights how AI may affect the PR industry and the opportunities it brings, with in-depth analysis of the skills and PR tools currently being used across public relations.

The real story is that AI is already ingrained in the practice of PR. In fact, it’s time for the PR world to embrace artificial intelligence.

AI and automation is coming for PR

PR and artificial intelligence are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. In fact, less than 5% of news stories that discuss the PR industry also mention AI.  But AI isn’t going away.

Current estimates put as many as 40% of tasks currently performed by people across all sectors being automated with automation and AI technologies. And for the PR mainstream, the technology is starting to catch up.

AI has changed, and will continue to change, the way we search for content and digest news and views. As for our jobs, new technologies, software and innovations in PR are working to give the PR pro more power in an industry that has yet to see the kind of human and machine interaction other sectors are witnessing.

However, as Jean Valin’s analysis points out, we are a long way off from seeing AI replace humans in PR.

PR must embrace new technologies

It’s clear in assessing what technology has done for marketing that PR pros really do have to be on the tech side of change.

So far, we’ve been relatively quiet on the conversation about what AI can do for us – and it’s this much needed discussion the CIPR AI in PR Panel is facilitating.

As Jean Valin’s paper highlights, the reality of AI for the PR profession is that it’s been the not-so-scary backbone of innovation in the sector for decades. We only need to look at AI as augmented intelligence which offers the possibility of owning an increasing number of inputs and outputs in a way which humans can’t do without a helping hand.

Research and analysis has been done by humans in the past, and often still is. But with AI software, PR measurement technologies can reduce time spent reporting by almost 75%. As data gets more and more unwieldy, AI is the power that helps us tame it – and we need to embrace that.

Having access to tools that alert you when your competitor is getting a big increase in coverage (or share of voice) and suggests your next move can only be a positive addition to our toolbox. The same goes for tools that highlight the fine-tuned stakeholder audiences you need to work with more to get the results you need.

However, as you delve deeper into AI products you realise that human input is critical. An example of this is PR analytics. Someone has to give the tools the parameters to look at and evaluate otherwise the output won’t tell you the correct story.

The human touch will always dominate campaigns and PR programmes. But we should always be leveraging tools which use AI to make our next PR move more powerful – or even suggest a tactical move we did not know we needed!

PR software won’t stop at reports and media contact lists. There’s huge value in offering PR professionals tools that truly understand their workflow and offer processes that eliminate errors and duplication.

To discover more about the future of AI in PR and how technology can streamline your workflows, download Jean Valin’s new CIPR #AIinPR paper here.

Big Brand Ideas announces six new hires

Big Brand Ideas announces six new hires

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Integrated agency Big Brand Ideas has appointed six new members of staff to work across its various teams following a number of new client wins.

Sachin Desai and Anna Nicholls join as senior account director and senior account manager respectively. They will be part of the agency’s client services team looking after all integrated accounts, including PR briefs.

It has also appointed former Rugby Players Association communications manager Patrick Giffney as PR outreach manager, with Tamsin Dyson hired as PR outreach executive. Ben Clay and Howard Reeves also join as PPC manager and senior creative artworker.

Jon Butler, managing director at Big Brand Ideas, said: “The team at Big Brand Ideas has grown significantly this year alone which reflects the demand of brands wanting to work with agencies offering an integrated approach.

He added: “We’ve recently set our five-year vision which focuses on using our bespoke Intelligent Engagement approach to deliver seamless, highly agile, efficient and effective results for clients. The new recruits join at an exciting time of new client wins and I’m looking forward to working with them to see the benefit their knowledge and experience will bring to our team.”

  • Pictured (l-r): Ben Clay, Sachin Desai, Howard Reeves, Anna Nicholls, Patrick Giffney and Tamsin Dyson
Fake news is the biggest challenge facing the media today

Fake news is the biggest challenge facing the media today

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The rise of fake news has led to journalists becoming much more conscious about what they publish, celebrity content director Jack White revealed in Cision’s latest webinar.

Discussing the findings of Cision’s 2018 State of the Media report, both White, who works across Now, Women’s Own, Woman, and Women’s Weekly, and Sean Allen-Moy, account director at W Communications and a former journalist, agreed that the impact fake news has had on trust in journalism is the biggest issue facing the industry.

After the study showed that 51% of journalists surveyed in the UK thought that fake news would make readers more sceptical, White said: “When we talk about how fake news is affecting the media, I think that in many cases audiences don’t believe anything anymore. These days, our news stories have to be immediately believable.”

Allen-Moy added: “We see Donald Trump using the term ‘fake news’ and think it’s a bit of a joke and flippant, but if the most powerful man in the world can describe CNN as fake then it gives licence to people to doubt the news. He’s effectively created catchphrase to any story or piece of information we don’t want to believe.”

Accuracy is more important than speed

White noted that the discussion around fake news and the misinformation of social media meant that it was now more important to publish news which is right rather than to publish first.

This backed up the report’s findings; with 81% of UK journalists saying that their top priority was ensuring content is 100% accurate. Some 37% also believed that social networks and search engines bypassing traditional media has been the biggest test for journalism over the last 12 months.

“As publications we have a responsibility to maintain the standards readers have come to expect; accuracy is more important now than it ever has been,” White warned. “Getting it right is the difference between retaining readers and losing readers.”

Allen-Moy added that journalists should not try to compete with social media users to get news out first and instead focus on being right.

“When you’re competing against potentially every Twitter user in the world, you’re going to find it very difficult to win the race to be first,” he said. “I think accuracy and authority are the key now.”

Declining reader trust

A recent example of declining trust in the media is the coverage of sexual harassment in Hollywood and the media, which won The New York Times and New Yorker magazine a Pulitzer Prize.

However, Cision’s research suggests journalists are split about the question of how these revelations affected journalism’s image. Some 36% said the coverage strongly enforced the media’s role in such issues, while 29% thought it hurt journalism’s image.

White believes that even a story which showcased the good journalism can do for society was tarnished by a number of outlets running the story with sensationalist headlines and clickbait articles, explaining the split of opinion found in the survey.

“This scandal allowed some publications to use sensationalised headlines and clickbait in a way which would stop people from believing the stories,” he said. “Clickbait might work now, but in the long-term readers will stop believing you and stop coming to your website.”

He added, however, that trustworthy news and content would not require a form of authenticity label in future, as “our label of authenticity is our long-standing brand which does not put out fake news.”

PRs must also be accurate

With this pressure now cascading onto journalists, PRs need to be authentic when pitching to journalists. Allen-Moy noted that the increased pressure for journalists to be accurate meant that PRs need to provide them with accurate information in-turn.

“Obviously, fake news is a huge concern for journalists and the journalism industry, so don’t try to trick a journalist,” he said. “Don’t try to hide a brand mention, don’t pretend something is new when it isn’t and do not pretend you have an exclusive when you don’t. Journalists have enough enemies and sceptics who don’t believe what they’re saying, so be honest with them.”

He added: “As consumers are more wary and sceptical about the news, then journalists effectively have to be too. What we need to do as PRs is set our standards high and ensure that what we are selling into journalists is accurate.”

Journalists and PRs working together

One aspect of a journalist’s working life which the report confirmed was the importance of working well with PRs. Some 70% of journalists globally said that their relationships with PR professionals remained as important as ever, with 20% saying those relationships are now more important.

Allen-Moy noted that the combination of needing to be accurate, an increasing workload and more space to fill means that journalists need help from PRs now more than ever. This gives PR professionals an opportunity to get their story across, but they need to do it correctly.

He said: “Journalists are busier than ever and there are fewer of them, so help them out, do as much of their work for them as possible. You need to spell out the story to them.”

White added: “I believe it is really important to build a relationship with PRs, as then you can keep coming back to them, you know what they want and you know what they can offer to you.”

To find out more about the issues facing the media industry, download Cision’s 2018 State of the Media report by filling out the form below.

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Opinion: The future of video reporting is sponsored content

Opinion: The future of video reporting is sponsored content

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Dr James Ohene-Djan, co-founder of reporting network WinkBall and senior lecturer at Goldsmiths University, discusses the rise of sponsored video content.

Since the dawn of the digital age, the blistering pace of change in the news and media industry has produced such an enormous revolution that academics and commentators struggle to describe what has happened, let alone predict the future.

The tech gurus of yesteryear have gone the way of the anchorman’s moustache – and futurologists, so recently a feature of media boardrooms, are subtly relegated to the status of ancient soothsayers.

Ever since video killed the radio star, predictions have been made about the end of news reporting and journalism altogether. AI systems and the rise of the machine will, of course, obliterate human input, turning the whole medium into a giant video game. Or will it?

History and the human connection

Upon closer inspection, these doomsday predictions never quite stand up to historic reality. When commercial broadcast radio launched in 1906, there were widespread predictions of the death of books. When TV was invented, it was to be the end of radio and so on.

Digital convergence has meant the greatest media boom the world has ever known. But it has proven hard for the industry itself to bottle up and sell.

However, as with so many revolutions, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

At the root of all media is the human connection. From a one-to-one Skype call to a podcast that reaches millions, or the coverage of global sporting events that reach half the planet – people are interested in people, and they are interested in seeing the world through the eyes of others.

Interviews and eyewitness accounts remain the most relevant and pertinent way to report on events and stories. When the famous war correspondent William Howard Russell reported from the front of the Crimean war in 1854, the nation was enraptured, The Times made its fortune and the newspaper format came of age.

The dawn of sponsored video content

This year sees the launch of a new, albeit tried and tested format, of reporting on events and stories but tailored for the age of digital video.

WinkBall has developed a sponsored video report, gleaned from the best standards of broadcasting and converted into a digital commodity that can suit any digital medium.

Whether delivered by smartphone, set top box or in the back of a cab, the sponsored report is designed to take the consumer to the event, and the sponsor to the consumer, without compromising the integrity of the report or the messages from the sponsor.

One thing is for certain: in this changing media landscape we are never going to run out of events to cover and will never run out of businesses wishing to reach consumers and associate their brands with relevant, compelling news content.

The sponsored video news report is the perfect match for businesses and publishers alike. It offers a clean break from tedious video ads slapped onto clickbait content.

Sponsored news reports represent a flight to quality, a boon to aspirational journalism and a chance for a new generation of videographers, reporters and producers to ply their trade.

The more things change…