Much excitement at Launch Towers this week as the teams behind the inspiring Scott-Amundsen Centenary Race to the Pole recreation met TRH Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Earlier this year the five team members completed their arduous trek, covering 920 miles in the process. Incredibly, the Scott team reached the South Pole 100 years to the day as Captain Scott did, before he began his ill-fated return trip.

The Duke is patron of the expedition and joined team members in London to show his support. As you might expect, there was much media attention focused on Kate’s attire but when Prince William held the oh-so-cute three week old Hugo Vicary, son of Scott team member Vic Vicary, the media and social media sphere went into overdrive.

Fantastic front page coverage followed for the Legion, with much of it mentioning the heroic efforts of Lt Col Henry Worsley and his Army team-mates in raising funds for The Royal British Legion’s Battle Back Centre.

The expedition raised a staggering £160,000. And Team Poppy at Launch has been honoured to be involved and supporting them every step of the way…

When I saw the headline Simon Cowell Confronts Brick-Wielding Intruder in London Home, I assumed Jessie J had drastically misinterpreted the scale of the ‘battle’ between Britain’s Got Talent and The Voice UK.

As it turns out, it wasn’t the aggressively-fringed pop starlet but merely an “overzealous fan”. To someone as used to facing down lunatics as Cowell, I doubt this intrusion barely registered.

Instead, he was probably wondering how his Saturday evening light entertainment juggernaut was bested in the ratings by a BBC show that spurned a crucial plank of his TV Midas touch formula.

To him, spending a few hours mocking a procession of attention-seeking wannabes as they desperately try to outdo each other in their efforts to “stand out” (ie look mental), is the raison d’etre of the modern talent show.

That The Voice has drawn first blood despite the fact the judges don’t get to see the contestants until they have passed judgement, must have galled him mightily.

To add insult to near injury, not only was BGT beaten in the head-to-head ratings battle, The Voice was much more popular online than its established ITV1 rival.

TV-themed social media hub Tellybug claimed The Voice was the subject of 60% more searches on Yahoo! than BGT, and Twitter users were also talking more about the BBC programme, with 130,351 tweets about The Voice during its transmission. The equivalent figure for Britain’s Got Talent was 63,639 tweets.

While tweets about The Voice dropped markedly once Britain’s Got Talent began on ITV1, the BBC1 singing show was still the more talked-about while the programmes were overlapping: between 8pm and 8.20pm, The Voice was the subject of 37,136 posts on the social network, compared to BGT’s 20,079.

Will Cowell’s ire last? It’s doubtful. His success is fuelled by coverage and, as showbiz PR legend Mark Borkowski pointed out, the publicity battle was clearly dominated by one man alone.

“You can’t manufacture, train or interview for a showbiz force like Cowell,” wrote Mark and he’s right. Even without the break-in, the coverage of The Voice would have hinged around Cowell anyway.

Until the Beeb grows “publicity balls” (Borkowski again), Cowell’s opinion on Saturday night TV will carry infinitely more weight than anyone at the BBC.

When people ask you on a Monday what you got up to over the weekend, one answer you maybe don’t expect is “I helped to break a world record”. But that is exactly what the Meteor meet and greet team said and did a couple of weeks ago.

Early on a Saturday morning armed with coffee, the Meteor meet and greet team – or the Meteorites as we like to call ourselves, arrived at a car park in Gatwick Airport with our fighting spirit intact. The record we were trying to set was for one person to park 50 cars in a car park in under an hour.

The team got to work straight away, making sure the photographer, videographer, official time keepers, and of course the 50 cars were all in place. As the clock struck 1030, we all got into position and held our breath as the starting horn blew.

The Meteor meet and greet driver was on fire, expertly screeching cars ranging from BMW 5 Series to Fiat 500s into the spaces and sprinting back and forth to the start line. When the 50th car was parked and the horn sounded, all eyes rushed to the clock. We had successfully set a Guinness World Record, parking 50 cars in a car park in only 22 minutes and 16 seconds.

Once the XP side of the event was complete, Launch Group set the all-channel wheels in motion and achieved some fantastic on and offline coverage.

Check out the video here:

Launch started life as a consumer brands project PR agency in 2001.  We were one of PR Week’s best new agencies of the year, attracting great people and great clients alike.

In 2005, our offer began to integrate media relations, digital and events.  We launched our corporate team around this time too.

And now, towards the end of 2011, we’re talking to people about our all-channel PR offer.

Innovation is good in business.  In fact, if you don’t innovate, your business quickly loses its shine and appeal.

All-channel PR?

It’s logical – whatever you have to communicate, to whichever audiences, we consult around the key PR channels-to-market to do it.  And we have all the capability in-house.

Clients should be guided, clients should be advised, and they shouldn’t feel hampered by one dimensional offers.  There’s too much at stake in the real / virtual / consumer / corporate inter-connected world and the relationship between experience / content / digital and media needs to be well explained – and bought in part (if that’s the need against the audience), or in whole.

Some clients come to us and say – ‘we’d love a bit of that.’  And that’s great.  Others come saying ‘we’re not sure, you tell us’.  And that’s equally, if not more exciting.

One size doesn’t fit all.  Having all the channels open and available has to be in a client’s best interest.

Add amazing people, brilliant thinking, collective culture and nice coffee and you’re probably on to something.

Recently I’ve found myself watching hundreds of videos by brands from all over the world – this might have something to do my new obsession with Twitter – but it’s got me thinking…

I’ve noticed a pattern emerging which goes against what traditionally experience / events are measured on.  Before the explosion of the digital age, brands focused on how many people they could get to physically engage with their brand experience – the more the better.  Yes there are numerous variables, but the fundamental goal was volume of engagement.  Direct brand experiences for the masses is still a core component to the experiential marketers toolbox, but now we have new exciting shiny social medial tools to play with.

These new online tools allow us to turn the engagement theory on its head.  No longer do we need thousands of willing consumers to interact with a brand for it to be a success. All we need is a few willing participants to have an amazing experience which they’ll want to share.  You then capture this experience and stick it online for people like me to OOO and ahhh over.

BUT…  Is it really that simple?  And do massive consumer engagement experiences have a shelf life?
The answer, surely, is to combine the two, but if you haven’t got the budget to engage large numbers then the second option isn’t a bad one.

Give them a great experience.

Capture it in a compelling way.

Share it.

More to come from the Launch XP and Digital teams soon.

Over the last few months we have been working with Capital One on their Credit Made Clearer initiative. Working with Professor Geoff Beattie of Manchester University (aka the Big Brother psychologist) research out this week has revealed that Monday 26th September to Sunday 2nd October is the worst week of the year for money worries.

The study revealed that the biggest factors that make this week the worst week for money are: the bills coming in for our summer fun, the cost of kids going back to school and university, preparing for colder weather and, not least, the realisation that the great Christmas spending spree is nearly upon us.

But it’s not all doom and gloom – the worst week for money was also a great week for coverage, with the story being picked up by the Daily Star, I, The Times online, Daily Express online and Guardian online to name just a few. So far, we have achieved 330 pieces of coverage with more to come so watch this space!

Gnarled media commentator Roy Greenslade used his Guardian blog last week to flag the one-day National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) PR courses for journalists wanting to make the leap into public relations.

Greenslade was very sniffy about the course curriculum, which included lessons on how to write press releases, how to organise press conferences, and “the differences between PR and journalism.”

Unlike Roy, I have no problem with hacks becoming flacks. I was a journo for about eight years before joining Launch and have found the transition to the ‘dark side’ (or ‘light side’ as I have learned to call it) to be a rewarding and interesting career change.

My problem with this course is that promising to teach an “understanding of modern marketing methods that are needed to successfully fulfill any role in PR” in a single day is unrealistic.

While an understanding of newsrooms, editorial workflow and commissioning – not to mention impeccable writing skills – are undoubtedly useful in PR, hacks should be under no illusion that they will thrive in PR just by turning up.

It takes hard work and an acceptance that you will go from a position of relative power to one where the most junior of your colleagues can wipe the floor with you on the most basic PR tasks. I spent four years on the industry title PRWeek, but found that while I knew the industry inside out, I could no more produce a media list than programme the Large Hadron Collider.

Journalism has been decimated over recent years, with titles merging or going online (if they’re lucky) or folding (if they’re not). Both inevitably involve redundancies, but with severance packages notoriously meager and the freelance sector hit by a double whammy of oversupply and cuts in commissioning budgets, many desperate hacks will consider £375 a bargain price to pay for an easy ride into PR.

I have no problem with the NCTJ itself (indeed, I am an alumnus of one its journalism courses) and I’m not saying don’t do this course, but I worry about the struggling hacks who will see this as a passport to an easy new career on its own.

To them I say this: if you really want to find out whether you can cut it in PR, do some work experience in an agency for a couple of weeks. At the very least you’ll save yourself £375.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on an exciting campaign with Disneyland Paris here at Launch Towers to promote their Magical Moments Festival by launching their first ever Photographer in Residence.

The photographer’s brief was to capture magical moments for families on Resort that they can treasure forever. Choosing the right photographer for the job was not difficult – it had to be the man that captured arguably the most magical moment of 2011 – Hugo Burnand, the official Royal Wedding Photographer

A huge number of entrants applied through Facebook and between the 12^th and 15^th August 21 lucky families experienced the Royal photographic treatment and walked away with a special family portrait.

The campaign has been very successful, with over 100 pieces of coverage to date including the Metro, Express and OK! Magazine with more to come so watch this space!

The football season is back under way (hooray! Well, for me anyway). The traditional season opener, the Community Shield, has whetted our appetites, The Guardian have put out their excellent 2011/12 season guide, and it’s nearly time for the Premier League to get into full swing once again. Hopefully the football will make up for a decidedly quiet summer in the transfer market. Indeed, so bereft have the papers been of transfer talk, that Twitter has been dominating the back pages in its stead.

Joey Barton arrives at training

Yep, Joey Barton (@joeyb7arton) enraged his current employers Newcastle United by tweeting his dissatisfaction about the club’s board, also claiming that they were seeding negative, untrue stories about him in the local press. For those of us who follow sports news regularly, it wasn’t a massive surprise – Joey’s updates have been brewing up to this boiling point for a while now. He looks certain to leave (as if he wasn’t going to anyway), but his story has caused plenty of anguish and discussion in the media about footballers using Twitter.

Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that I’ve posted on this before (goalkeepers making a fumble with Twitter). Football clubs need to concentrate on getting the basics right; banning players from using it is not going to work, as it will produce massive opprobrium for the legion of fans already signed up for their heroes tweets. Manchester United has a clear internal policy guideline on what its players can and can’t tweet about, which is a sensible first step. Twitter training would be another obvious suggestion, but I can’t imagine a group of players who earn on average £33,868 a week will really take it that seriously. Besides, training isn’t going to stop someone from posting something that they regard as a ‘joke’ (see: Carlton Cole); it was funny when you told the dressing room, so why wouldn’t your followers get a kick out of it too?

No, I think we’re going to be in for a bit of a rocky ride this season, and a few more fires are going to have to be put out by clubs before players truly realise the impact their 140 characters can have. The wider issues is the fact that for fans (and journalists), access to players is so often merely an afterthought of promotional activity for sponsors. Having someone like Wayne Rooney or Joey Barton tweet so honestly and emotionally gives us a rare glimpse into inner workings of the dressing room. It’s an almost like a snapshot of a different time, when footballers could be found drinking in the pub after training. A reminder that footballers are normal, not untouchable superstars.

Ryan Giggs has had a busy couple of months. As if battling salacious reports of bedroom shenanigans with Z-list reality TV ‘stars’ and his sister-in-law wasn’t enough, the Manchester United veteran has become an unwitting poster-boy for the growing movement of discontent surrounding the super-injunctions.

The Daily Star are obsessed with Ryan Giggs

By suing Twitter, he’s also been at the forefront of the debate on what constitutes libel in the social media age, and has even been mentioned in Parliament. Not bad for someone whose sole goal in life thus far has been to hurtle down Man U’s left wing and deliver perfectly weighted crosses to the incredibly wide forehead of Wayne Rooney.

Now Giggsy appears to have been awarded one of the UK press’ highest accolades: the most consecutive front pages for an individual EVER. No doubt fired up by the chance to expose the injustices of the super-injunction system, the Daily Star has run 14 consecutive Ryan Giggs-related front pages. That’s not just mentions on the front page (as he got on day 15 when he was ‘relegated’ to the sidebar by Ashley Cole – the shame), but actual splashes.

The only let-up between the 6^th and 21^st of June was from the Daily Star Sunday, which cut Giggsy some slack by replacing him with P-Middy (that’s the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister to you and me).

To put this into context, the Daily Express – for whom Princess Diana is pretty much its raison d’etre – only published 11 consecutive front pages following her death in 1997 according to The Media Blog.

Quite why the Daily Star appears to have been caught up in this incredible rut is unclear. The affairs of global sports megastars David Beckham and Tiger Woods have not received nearly the scrutiny awarded to Giggs who, until now, has held next to no interest for anyone aside from fans of Manchester Untied (and occasionally, Wales).

Giggs has always been pitched as a ‘model professional’, dull to his core and of no ‘use’ to the tabloids. Now the illusion appears to have been shattered, perhaps the Star felt it needed to get its money’s worth? Or perhaps by turning the screw so relentlessly, the Star is sending a stark warning to anyone in the public eye who refuses to ‘play the game’ that they will face a terrible vengeance should they ever slip up?

Whatever the reason, the exercise in Giggs-mania has surely pushed the ‘public interest’ argument to its limit in more ways than one.