So it’s d-day today for the London mayoral candidates. The culmination of months of blood, sweat and tears to decide the direction of London for the next four years. Quite exciting really isn’t it? Well, not if you take a straw poll of the Launch office. There is a significant portion of people who aren’t going to be voting today. They have their reasons, but one can’t help but think, as Blonde_M pointed out to me on Twitter yesterday, that politicians aren’t doing enough to inspire people to want to be involved.

This election campaign feels like a real damp squib to me. Apart from a few flare-ups between Boris and Ken (including some rather amusing swearing), no-one is standing out. Maybe it’s due to over-familiarity with the candidates, but I don’t feel that any of them have made a real effort to separate themselves from the pack, to stamp their authority and their vision on their campaign. It’s (unfortunately) come down to personalities – who do you like? And if you don’t like any of them, what do you feel like doing? Exactly….not voting at all.

Obviously politics relies a lot on personality, but one really felt that after the General Election social media would play a huge role in UK politics in the future (as it does in the US). However, whilst the mayoral election race has generated a lot of conversation online (according to this anyway), and even predicted the result, it hasn’t been harnessed or crystallised by any of the parties or the candidates. Yes, Boris did an #askboris twinterview, but a lot of the questions were like the man himself – hugely frivolous. As far as our research here can tell, there  isn’t even a hashtag that has been decided for interested people to group their conversation around. #londonelects is getting a fair amount of activity today (polling day), but it is nothing to the #GE2010 that captured imaginations two year ago.

Maybe I’m just being too unrealistic and idealistic, but I think it’s up to politicians and their advisors to explore new channels to come up with new ways of inspiring new people to vote and get involved in politics. If Obama and his team can do it, why can’t we do it in England? Admittedly, we don’t have Jimmy Fallon, but there are plenty of other options.

Today’s date (11.11.11), a perfect palindrome and a particularly poignant Armistice Day as the Royal British Legion commemorates its 90th Anniversary. To say it’s been busy at Launch Towers would be an understatement. The RBL team has been working relentlessly in the lead up to Remembrance Sunday securing media opportunities left right and centre. With too many to mention individually, I’ve compiled a few highlights from the last couple of weeks.

Boris meets Doris

Boris Johnson appeared with Launch’s very own Harriet ‘Doris’ Murphy to launch London Poppy Day, the largest single fundraising day in the capital with servicemen and volunteers aiming to raise over £500,000 in just 12 hours. Thanks to Harriet (and of course Boris), the pictures made it to page 2 of the Evening Standard and kick started the media frenzy…

London Poppy Day

Question: What do you get if you cross nearly 1,000 men in uniform and a load of poppies. The answer is London Poppy Day, a PR dream and enormous honour.

The largest fundraising day started with a bang with Launch’s illustrious team leader Rebecca running round London trying to coordinate service personnel, beneficiaries, route master buses, Olympic cyclists and a number of national film crews. Whoever said working with children and animals was difficult should speak to Rebecca about coordinating the PR for London Poppy Day! Joined at her side by media hound Charlie who was last seen running after the TFL commissioner’s routemaster bus as it left without her and the BBC London film crew who had come down to film the bus! Thankfully she caught up with it and the team achieved some astounding coverage (personally some of the best I’ve ever witnessed) including numerous broadcast interviews with BBC London News and ITV News.

Piggybacking the news agenda

A particularly great piece of ‘PR piggybacking’ also occurred. Cue ITV News broadcasting a piece on the opening of a new road in the city complete with vintage cars driving down Regent Street. I can only imaging their PR team’s frustration as some rather dashing soldiers holding trays of poppies appear in the back of the vintage cars. Sorry!

May the force(s) be with you

To mark the end of London Poppy Day with a total of nearly £450,000 raised in just 12 hours, the team headed down to Leadenhall Market for a glass of wine with the soldiers. Without giving too much away, we lost an umberella and gained a few friends…..my lips are sealed *ahem*!

Shoulder to Shoulder

In true ‘All Channel PR’, some phenomenal digital work as we also launched Shoulder to Shoulder. The RBL team capitalised on the random appearance of Suggs in the building and added to the virtual wall of Remembrance alongside the Saturday’s, Lorraine Kelly, Barbara Windsor, Andy Murray to name a few. The number of people currently standing shoulder to shoulder is 17,000  but is increasing by the day.

From Cupcakes to Bling….Poppies take over the world!

Any of you watching  Live with Gaby today will have seen Flossie cup cakes for Remembrance Day and Recipes for Remembrance….massive well done to Larissa, the relentless phonecalls have paid off! Twitter also went crazy last weekend with the airing of Strictly Come Dancing and the X-Factor….well done to Charlie who couldn’t physically have featured more poppies on primetime TV if she had tried!!

And finally… today the team went down to Silence in the Square. A truly moving experience for me personally given that my grandfather died serving his country in the Navy. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with the Launch team to achieve the phenomenal amount PR coverage for the Royal British Legion. What a fantastic start to my time at Launch.

So, The Evening Standard is the latest title to venture into the world of freesheets (although note to all – this hasn’t happened yet as one Launcher found out the other night when grabbing a copy on her way home…).

My first reaction was one of shock. Having been of the opinion that London can only sustain one evening free-sheet I was disappointed to see the death of (in my mind) the vastly superior Londonpaper in September, leaving us with the celebrity-riddled London Lite. But my opinion had been justified. And now I’m proved wrong again.

On reflection, though, it is a bold move by Geordie Greig the editor. When I first started commuting (we’ll skirt over the date), just about everyone in the train carriage would be reading a Standard. Once the London Lite and Londonpaper appeared, you’d be lucky to see one or two copies being read. It obviously hit the Standard hard.

It’s an innovative, brave tactic that the Standard hopes will arrest its slide in readership. As a free-sheet, the circulation could rise to more than 600,000 a day – up from a measly 235,977 a day, meaning that the Standard will presumably find it easier to secure advertising – and charge a premium rate for it as well. So far so good; if there’s no advertising then there will be no paper and no-one in PR wants that…

But it will lose sales revenue of more than 10m a year, which will be hard to recoup. And what will the impact be on quality? Despite sometimes feeling as if I’m reading a Boris Johnson-Pravda sheet, I actually like the Standard. I like the range of features, I like the bashing they give Transport for London (who, let’s face it, are always going to benefit from some external campaigning), and I like the supplements. I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

London needs – and deserves – a good, quality, intelligent newspaper that is targeted at Londoners. And LondonLite, I’m afraid, just ain’t that. As newspaper owners review their business models the Standard is daring to do something different, and, for that, I applaud it. 

As a born and bred Londoner, I know a thing or two about travelling on the underground. There are certain things that I have had to learn to accept, such as wannabe rude boys who insist on wearing their jeans around their knees and playing their music for all to hear, and businessmen who can’t seem to manage to fold the newspaper back on itself, preferring instead to read the FT with their arms stretched out to full capacity. But there are a few things I cannot and will not accept:

1. Coughing / sneezing / yawning – You would think that covering your mouth / nose with your hand while you cough, sneeze or yawn is basic manners, and yet it seems that many grown men and women still have trouble managing this. Instead they insist on showering me with germs, and forcing me to inhale their dodgy morning breath.

2. Public Displays of Affection - There is nothing worse than being penned in next to loved-up couples in the first heady throes of romance, especially at 7.30am on a Monday morning. Kissing on public transport is absolutely not necessary. Undoubtedly you’ve just spent the entire weekend together, and you will – undoubtedly – see each other again at the end of the day, so please be rest assured that your relationship will survive if you are not glued together for a 20 minute train journey.

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