Energy firm launches offshore wind farm project with Abchurch

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Energy firm Enterprize Energy Pte Ltd has launched its first offshore wind farm project in the Taiwan Strait. It is also considering a London listing in the near future.

Abchurch energy 1

Offshore wind farm

The Hai Long offshore wind farm project is a joint venture between Enterprize’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Yushan Energy, and Canada-based Northland Power.

Ian Hatton, founder and chairman of Enterprize, said: “From 2012, having recognised the combination of the Taiwan Strait’s excellent natural resource and the positive, pragmatic and balanced regulatory regime introduced by the Government of Taiwan we have progressively developed our presence in Taiwan’s exciting, but challenging, offshore wind sector.”

Hatton previously established Eclipse Energy which was responsible for the successful Ormonde offshore wind farm in the East Irish Sea.

This week’s top people news

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Your bitesize update on the latest People News and Moves featured on Gorkana this week:

Steffan Williams 2Porta Communications, the international communications group, has announced a series of changes to its board and management team, including the appointment of Steffan Williams as CEO.

Williams, PRCA chairman and former group managing director, is now CEO at Porta; David Wright, previously chief executive, is now executive chairman; Bob Morton has stepped down from the board and John Foley, formerly a non-executive director, is now senior independent director.

Kate Hoare Profile 2Houston PR has hired Kate Hoare as an account director in its London office as it develops its capital markets communications offer.

Hoare joins the agency from a client director role at Hudson Sandler, where she advised listed businesses, with a particular focus on leisure, retail, consumer and the industrial goods sector.

Francis and Bruce 2Marketing comms agency Cogent Elliott has hired Bruce Hutton as group chief executive and Francis Maude as non-executive chairman.

Hutton replaces Mike Phillipson, who recently left the agency after more than four years as chief executive.

Maude is a Conservative politician who served 25 years on the front bench in the House of Commons, including posts as minister for the cabinet officer and paymaster-general.

Claire Williams BCHealthcare communications firm AXON is set to establish an office in Switzerland to support global and European head offices of Swiss-based clients.

The agency has appointed Claire Olivia Williams as vice president to lead the Swiss business.

 

 

 

This week’s top trending features on Gorkana News

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Your bitesize update on the best PR opinion, events and insights on Gorkana News this week:

Paul Hood 2Interview: Gorkana meets…Dennis Publishing’s head of digital
Paul Hood, head of digital for Dennis Publishing, tells Gorkana’s Ben Spencer that 70% of tech titles on the newsstands are published by Dennis, talks about the publisher’s content partnership with The Mirror and reveals that he’s looking for PRs who can come up with “BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) ideas”.

Matt Cross BCInterview: 60 Seconds with Hotwire UK’s Matt Cross
Hotwire’s UK MD, Matt Cross, on the benefits of an expanding business, how the agency manages as an international business and why he’s a believer in ‘PR karma’.

 

pexels-photo-92042Insight: UK brand value remains ‘steady’ post-Brexit, but can nations control reputation?
Strategy consultancy Brand Finance reports that the UK’s brand value has remained ‘steady’ post-Brexit, coming in fifth in a list of 100 countries. Corporate reputation experts from Montfort, Bell Pottinger, Pagefield and Aspectus discuss how much control nations have over their reputation.

Artificial I BCInsight: Will AI have greater impact on comms than social?
Weber Shandwick’s report AI-Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence here we come!, released this week, shows that top global marketers believe AI will have an even bigger impact on comms than social media. Gorkana asks Weber and other agencies, including Firefly, Hotwire PR and Babel, what they think about the AI ‘revolution’.

KellyWilks 2Interview: Gorkana meets…Girl Talk
Kelly Wilks, acting editor at Girl Talk & Girl Talk Art, talks about producing content for pre-teen girls’ magazines, and how they fulfil a role as a ‘favourite big sister’ to their young readers.

 

This week’s top agency news

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Your bitesize update on the latest agency news featured on Gorkana this week:

PR Week Awards Unity 2Unity and The Romans were the big winners at last night’s PR Week Awards, with Unity claiming the biggest haul with seven awards, including the Gold Award for Consultancy of the Year.

Unity also picked up the Gold Award for Campaign of the Year (Techniques) for its Spark Something Good campaign for Marks & Spencer, and was also named Mid-sized Consultancy of the Year.

Laurna Woods Jessica McAndrew 2Creative comms group Beattie is to launch a “vlogger dating forum” to match vloggers and bloggers with brands, and is setting up a video and content studio in Scotland.

The video and content studio, which will be based in Beattie’s Media Village in Falkirk, will be used to produce videos and vlogs for clients in the UK, US and other countries.

accountant-accounting-adviser-advisor-159804 (1)Omnicom Group has reported UK organic revenue growth of 5.2%, year-on-year, for the third quarter of the year ending September 30 2016.

In its public relations businesses worldwide, which include FleishmanHillard, Fishburn, Ketchum and Porter Novelli, it reported a 4.4% organic revenue increase in Q3 compared to the same period last year.

Juergen ParrGlobal communications firm Hume Brophy has opened an office in Frankfurt which will be led by Juergen Parr (pictured).

The new office will be the agency’s seventh international base and allow the firm to provide European, Asian and US clients services in Germany. It joins other branches based in London, Dublin, Brussels, Paris, Singapore and New York.

 

Maritim Hotels hands UK PR brief to Clareville Communications

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Germany’s largest owner-managed hotel group, Maritim Hotels, has appointed Clareville Communications to handle its UK PR activity.

Maritim has 34 properties across Germany, as well as hotels in Mauritius, Egypt, Turkey, Malta, Spain and China.

Clareville, which already manages PR activity for Maritim in the US, has now been briefed to raise the profile of the brand’s international hotel network to meeting and event planners, travel trade and consumers in the UK.

Mark Spivey, director of international sales at Maritim UK, said: “We work hard to ensure we’re the venue of choice for meeting and event organisers, business and leisure visitors. The work of Clareville Communications, and their significant experience across these sectors, will go a long way towards achieving this.”

Gorkana Executive Club: Transparency, technology and flexible working will boost PR gender balance and diversity

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More transparency over pay bands, better use of technology and flexibility in working patterns and practices were just some of the solutions suggested to encourage gender balance and boost diversity in PR and communications from discussions at an exclusive Gorkana Executive Club event this week.

Sue Hardwick BC

Sue Hardwick

The discussion, part of Gorkana’s quarterly Executive Club event programme, was kicked off by Angela Oakes and Sue Hardwick, co- founders of the Global Women in PR networking and leadership group, as they shared results from its recent GWPR Global Gender Pay Gap survey, conducted by OnePoll, which highlighted a £12,600 pay gap between women and men “in an industry dominated by women”.

The survey also revealed that men in PR are more than twice as likely to reach the boardroom than women.

Angela Oakes BC

Angela Oakes

“Coming up with solutions to these issues is vitally important to our industry,” Hardwick insisted, as the room agreed on the importance of effecting cultural change in the sector.

The survey findings triggered a wide-ranging and diverse series of discussions – under Chatham House rules – about the challenges that women in PR face as they build their careers and recommended solutions from the senior communications and PR professionals in the room.

Among the recommendations for the PR industry to consider were:

  • Measure staff by performance, not presence in the office
  • Recognise the best organisations in the industry who have pioneered successful diversity initiatives
  • Encourage organisations to be transparent internally on their salary bands paid to different roles
  • Enable the ‘mum’s army’ to come back to work after maternity leave with flexible working from home
  • Mentoring programmes for women who are building their PR careers
  • Encourage ‘blind’ recruitment which eliminates conscious and unconscious bias

Oakes said: “The Gorkana Executive Club offered a fabulous opportunity for 35 senior communications leaders to come together and openly discuss the gender issues in the PR industry today and what can be done to address these.

“Employers need to look closely at their internal gender pay gap and they need to hold on to talented PR women when they reach mid-career level by offering more flexible working options. Equal pay and a balanced boardroom are not only commercially sound propositions, but above all the right thing to do.”

Jeremy Thompson, CEO (EMEA & India) Cision / PR Newswire, facilitated the discussion and concluded: “The Gorkana Executive Club is a networking forum for senior PR and communications professionals who come together to discuss hot topics and ideas. This particular event, which we ran in conjunction with Global Women in PR, was the best attended and most hotly debated to date.

“The issue of gender pay gap and diversity is as big an issue in PR as elsewhere, but as we heard on the night, the industry is full of ideas and enthusiasm to drive change. We are delighted to give this important issue a platform and want to play a key part in the debate; as such we committed to follow up early in 2017 to track progress and keep the debate live.”

 

Will AI have greater impact on comms than social?

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Weber Shandwick’s report AI-Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence here we come!, released this week, shows that top global marketers believe AI will have an even bigger impact on comms than social media. Gorkana asks Weber and other agencies, including Firefly, Hotwire PR and Babel, what they think about the AI ‘revolution’.

According to Weber Shandwick’s report, AI is defined as the following: “[AI] is a field of technology designed to create computers, machines and software that are as smart as humans, and which are able to perform the same tasks that normally require human intelligence.”

It surveyed 150 chief marketing officers across the UK, US and China and more than half of them (55%) expect AI to have ‘a greater impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had’.

Nearly six in ten (58%) of respondents believe that within the next five years companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed. Furthermore, 68% of the CMOs reported that their company is currently selling, using or planning for business in the AI area.

So, what do comms pros make of this? What does AI mean to them and, most importantly, do they think it will make a bigger change to the industry than social media has?

Yes

Ian Hood, CEO and co-founder at Babel

“There is little doubt that AI technologies will eventually have a greater impact on marketing and communications than the current raft of social media platforms and technologies. Arguably, social platforms have only ever been an enhancement technology in that they simply supplement what we have always been doing (connecting, communicating, sharing etc.). They make those things much easier to do, and they significantly broaden the audience and interaction, but we’re doing the same basic things as we were pre-Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Snapchat/Instagram.

“AI is whole different kettle of fish in that it is a replacement technology. It replaces humans and has the potential to do a vast range of things better than humans. It will cost a lot less and it will all happen in some less than obvious ways. For instance, we already have media outlets that offer little more than aggregated news from other sources. Yet it’s conceivable that a future AI-driven media outlet could automatically produce high quality, original content based on aggregating and interpreting information from a variety of sources. It could even interview human spokespeople. When that happens, how do we communicate with the media outlet? Maybe we adopt our own AI!”

Yes

John Brown, group engagement head at Hotwire PR

“In short, the research is spot on. Automated content will be the first real step towards marketing teams utilising artificial intelligence effectively. With the rise of bots, we’re scratching the surface and we’re definitely going to be going through a learning curve where there’s going to be an awful lot of terrible content and painful interactions as we start fumbling around in the AI world.

“The challenge is going to be crossing the void where AI goes from being a wholly crap communications experience, to being an intuitive and somewhat emotive one. Ultimately, AI should be on every savvy marketer’s radar and social will blend into the background as merely another platform for the ‘marketing robots’ to do battle on.”

No

Claire Walker, founder and CEO at Firefly Communications

“We’re all familiar with pop culture iterations of AI, from the Jetsons’ Rosey the robot to Star Wars’ R2D2 – but in reality, AI has a subtler application than human-like robots! Today we use AI in the form of apps and devices such as Siri and driverless cars, to make predictions, offer recommendations and automate tasks. In the next few years, we will see AI implemented across most, if not all, industries – including public relations.

“There is no doubt that AI will impact the communications industry, but it will not have the same disruption effect social media has had. Whilst social media presented a whole new medium for brands and public figures to directly connect and engage with target audiences in real time, AI will streamline day-to-day activities so that communications professionals can direct their resources to more important tasks.

“For example, repetitive tasks such as compiling campaign reports and sourcing relevant influencers will soon be fully outsourced to AI-powered services. However, it will be a long time before we see AI becoming smart enough to understand the nuances of brand messaging, audience preferences and local trends to develop effective communications strategies or content, nor can AI replace the human touch required to foster relationships with influencers.”

Yes

Patrick Chaupham, executive vice president, creative technology strategy at Weber Shandwick

“Nearly six in 10 UK CMOs (57%) consider AI to be a disruptor of marketing, believing that AI will have a major impact on the disciplines of marketing and communications. In fact, 47% go so far as to say that AI will have a greater impact on marketing communications than social media did.

“UK marketers have a lot to prepare for! Positively, 55% of UK CMOs believe that AI will not be able to replace creativity and creative-type jobs, and CMOs will have to leverage their creative strengths to take on fairly significant challenges of the disruption ahead.”

International Organization for Migration hires PHA Media

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IOM Field officer at work in Lampedusa. © IOM/Alessia Capasso 2011

IOM Field officer at work in Lampedusa. © IOM/Alessia Capasso 2011

PHA Media has been appointed by the UK office of The International Organization for Migration (IOM) to support the promotion around Anti-Slavery Day and International Migrants Day.

For both events, PHA Media has been briefed to focus on media outreach, case study placement, thought leadership, social media strategy and event support. The projects will focus on raising awareness and opening conversations around migration in the UK.

Dipti Pardeshi, chief of mission at IOM UK, said: “We are very pleased to be collaborating with PHA Media to enhance our work promoting a more balanced narrative about migration in the UK. These dates are important in our calendar and we are keen to ensure that all efforts are made to raise awareness of key migration aspects both for migrants and host societies.”

Sabah Khan, account director of PHA Media’s campaigns and causes team, added: “We are honoured to be working with such an incredible organisation, which do fantastic work in responding to migration challenges on a daily basis. We are keen to help them achieve their aim in encouraging an objective and positive discourse around migration and build their reputation within the mainstream world based on their expertise and experiences on the matter.”

MHP advises Luceco for main market IPO and beyond

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MHP Communications has been appointed to advise Luceco, the manufacturer and distributor of LED lighting product and wiring accessories.

Luceco BC

Luceco technology

The agency will advise on Luceco on its financial communications, having already worked with the company as part of its £209m main market IPO.

MD Tim Rowntree and director James White lead the MHP team. They are supported by senior account manager Ollie Hoare and account executive Rossina Garcia.

Luceco supplies trade distributors, retailers, wholesalers and project developers with a wide range of products across its four key brands of BG Electrical, Masterplug, Ross and Luceco LED Lighting, working with a bluechip customer base that includes Tesco, B&Q and Screwfix.

Miele hands brand building brief to Stir PR

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Domestic appliance manufacturer Miele has chosen lifestyle agency Stir PR to handle its UK PR.

Stir PR Miele

Miele

Established in 1899, Miele is an independent, family-owned, German manufacturer and supplier of washing machines, ovens, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators.

Stir has been briefed to grow brand awareness for Miele cooking appliances within the M25, as well as drive traffic to Miele’s new lifestyle site, Der Kern.

Stir will also work closely with the brand’s digital agency, Mr. President, to create engaging content for both influencers and consumers.

Sarah Tadier, senior account director at Stir, will lead the account.

Zoe Carter, PR and consumer marketing manager at Miele GB, said: “With their experience in handling premium consumer brands and speaking to our target audience, as well as their strong relationships with relevant influencers, Stir PR was the clear choice to take on the job of increasing awareness of Miele in the UK.

“We look forward to seeing Stir use its fresh approach and implement its ‘think beyond’ mantra in the coming months.”