Charming countries revisited

My most popular post this year, at least in terms of generating comments, was one on whether countries can launch charm offensives. This surprised me, because I thought that the concept of overhauling a poor reputation through better comms was reasonably well established.

Instead, the idea that a national government can put its reputation in the hands of a PR agency sparked some interesting responses. None perhaps more succinct that Tom Crampton’s remark that, unless the country itself has a reputation worth communicating, any image campaign would amount to ‘lipstick on a pig’.

Building on the debate, I’ve put together a feature for PRWeek UK that looks at this issue in a little more depth. Reputation of a nation puts six ‘countries’ under the spotlight – UK, US, China, India, South Africa and Dubai. Each suffers various problems in terms of how reputation issues are hampering the pursuit of specific goals. For example, China’s well-documented product quality crises continues to dog perceptions of its critically important manufacturing sector.

Nokia’s North American PR review

An RFI reaches me, detailing Nokia’s review of its North American public relations account.

I don’t know a great deal about who Nokia currently works with in the US but PRWeek US has reported previously that Ketchum handles some of this business. That may still be the case.

In any case, it certainly sounds like a fairly significant piece of business. Nokia is also currently reviewing its UK business, but there is no indication that the two processes are linked.

GolinHarris, meanwhile, handles Nokia’s international PR account – but that is not part of this review from what I understand.

Instead this looks like a classic procurement exercise. Nokia is keen on repositioning itself as a software/services player, rather than a mobile handset manufacturer, but there is little mention of this in the RFI. There is, however, some other interesting stuff.

Beijing hires H&K

So Beijing has hired Hill & Knowlton to handle its global comms account.

It reminds of the run-up to last year’s Olympics, when a Government brief aimed at tackling China’s global image problems was doing the rounds. That never materialised into anything, and it appears unlikely to be related to this – given that the H&K win seems squarely focused on the city of Beijing.

It is a little ironic that H&K appears to have secured this account on the back of it’s work handling global PR for last year’s Olympics. For those with short memories, China suffered a number of reputation issues in the run-up to the games. One year before the Games, this story concluded that H&K was ‘hardly empowered’.

Anyway, by the time the Games ended, the country had presented a reasonably credible account of itself – although things would soon change once the milk scandal surfaced. Still, this is a smart move by Beijing as long as both client and agency are serious about addressing the full range of perceptions and opinions they are likely to encounter.

And, no doubt, this is exactly kind of nice follow-up business H&K would have been hoping for when it won the Olympics brief in the first place.

A little idea

The Big Idea

Over the last three months I’ve been lucky enough to work on a project for PRWeek that has been truly eye-opening. Called The Big Idea, the project is best described as an experiment to see how different types of agencies respond to an integrated brief.

First, we needed to find the right brief. The NSPCC indicated its interest and, through the tireless efforts of its director of comms John Grounds and his team, we managed to turn the concept into reality through its Helpline marketing campaign.

Weber Shandwick to launch in Korea

Word reaches me that Weber Shandwick is poaching Edelman Korea chief Tyler Kim to launch its presence in that market.

It’s an interesting move. Korea has been a blind spot for WS for a while now and some of its key clients – such as Microsoft and MasterCard – must be wanting support in the country. And, no doubt, the agency is shelling out plenty of money to affiliates anyway.

WS Asia-Pacific supremo Tim Sutton confirmed the development, but his Edelman counterpart Alan VanderMolen declined to comment. More comments after the jump.

Ranking PR networks in China by revenue

PRWeek is running its 2009 Global Report Card here. It was a rather interesting exercise putting this together. As ever, though, our best intentions were hamstrung by the continuing (and unnecessary) unwillingness of holding groups to provide revenue numbers for their individual agencies.

I’ll save the big rant about Sarbanes-Oxley for a later date. Instead, working with a few top-level sources, I’ve managed to compile some numbers for what the big networks are approximately worth. Global numbers will follow later this week. Today is all about China: increasingly becoming the key battleground for networks desperately seeking growth.

Full ranking and numbers after the jump.

Grayling is the world’s third biggest independent PR firm?

Lots of coverage of Huntsworth’s decision to merge its 26 PR brands down to four. Grayling will undoubtedly benefit the most, becoming at a stroke an agency worth £70 million. The group’s company announcement, though, says that makes Grayling a ‘worldwide top three independent brand’. But is that really true?

Astroturf wars

There’s a piece in Politico.com examining the ‘astroturfing’ that has now become a rampant part of American politics.

Hard to disagree with the story’s general thrust, that the lobbying process is becoming dominated by front groups that are funded by well-hidden corporate interests.

It’s a little more sophisticated than China’s 50-cent army, but the thinking is pretty similar – creating a fake grassroots movement. It’s a useful way for an insurance company, for example, to lobby against a healthcare bill it might not like. As if such a thing could actually happen…

Looks like astroturfing is moving up in the world. Last year it was all about hiring a few students to make the right comments on blogs and forums. Or watching Edelman get crucified for creating the  now-legendary Working Families for Wal-Mart fake blog.

A couple of weeks ago, meanwhile, Spinvox was accused of astroturfing on the PRWeek site – a charge it has strenously denied. In the Guardian story I wrote on the practice, I managed to find only person who would actually admit to paying astroturfers – a marketing consultant who went by the moniker ‘Sillicon Calley‘:

“I have in the past hired people to astroturf, but always temporarily. If you leave the same people in for too long, they get too obvious and it’s easy to get someone to do it for like a week.”

Calley also refused to name her clients -  “it would kind of defeat the purpose, if everyone knew it was fake”. Ain’t that the truth.

Update: As if on cue, it emerges today that a PR firm has been astroturfing the user review section of Apple’s iPhone store. Pretty sophisticated pricing model – they actually charge per successful app download. Expect a hailstorm of ethics to erupt around this one – but it’s practically impossible to police. Unless, like Reverb, you set your strategy out in a document.

Where are China’s global brands?

Tom Doctoroff has an interesting article in AdAge, where he argues that a Chinese brand going truly global is still years away. It has already attracted some criticism on the comments, but will elicit little surprise from people familiar with this territory.

Doctoroff expands on many of the points he made in this feature I wrote for Media Asia earlier this year, which effectively concluded that – while the recession bodes well for Chinese brands – it would be a mistake to assume that they are ready to emulate the success that Japanese names like Toyota and Sony have had around the world.

For all of the reasons, check the stories above. Perhaps the best insight I received was from Larry Rinaldi, an adman who spent a tumultous few months as global CMO for Haier – widely cited as the most successful international Chinese business. Rinaldi was a little bitter, and understandably so, but he made some very important points about the structure, priorities and – crucially – budgets of big Chinese companies:

Japan: Politics as usual

Very interesting story from my main man David Blecken at Media Asia on Japanese political parties’ attempts to embrace digital communication as part of the general election campaign.

The moves seem more hesitant than full-fledged, given Twitter use is outlawed during the official 12-day election period. And most of the programmes appear relatively simple attempts to shift campaigning into an online arena. There does not, for example, to be much use of digital media to organise and mobilise supporters or raise funds.

The best bit must be the attack ad that the ruling LDP party is running on its website. Check it after the jump.