Best green best PR campaign

Harvard’s Sky team, Charlotte West and Will Brown, were amongst the winners at the recent Guardian-sponsored Green Awards at London’s Guildhall. Sky’s “The Bigger Picture” is guided by a team of communications specialists from across the Bell-Pottinger Group. Sky picked up the award for best PR campaign in the £100K + category seeing off major competition from Marks and Spencer (Look Behind the Label) and ITV (The Big Clean-up).

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) has become the first media company in the world to achieve CarbonNeutral status. This is a major milestone for the company and will be reflected strongly in its overall brand values. Sky is not only adopting a CarbonNeutral stance on its own operations, but is also committing to engage its 8.1 million customers with practical and inspiring ways to become better informed and more progressive about energy use.

The work being undertaken by Harvard is part of a wider brief being undertaken by Harvard’s parent company, Bell Pottinger Group, and includes internal as well as external communications and social media activity. The Bigger Picture is aimed at encouraging both employees (via car-sharing, for example) and customers (through a variety of energy-saving ideas) to adopt greener lifestyles.



First 3G broadband USB modem in the UK

Vodafone recently launched its new 3G broadband USB modem. Being one of its most important mobile interconnectivity devices since the datacard, it demanded a campaign and execution that would achieve stand-out coverage.

To squeeze the most from the announcement, Harvard advocated kicking off with an “intention to launch” press release, announcing that the product was on its way – that alone secured around 20 pieces of coverage with most using a picture of the device.

Then, to increase impact for the launch, we arranged embargoed release of advance product for a number of Top Tier key media (The Register, Guardian, TrustedReviews etc) achieving 7 ‘editor’s choice’ or ‘recommended’ reviews on the day of the launch. The product was launched to the wider media supported by pre-arranged customer testimonials that placed the product in a business context.

These tactics have helped contribute to an extremely successful launch with around 35 pieces of coverage appearing in mobile / IT trade magazines and the national media to date. Further coverage is being maintained by an ongoing competition and advertorial programme.

Harvard Wins EDM account

As reported in PR Week, Harvard has won the PR brief to boost the profile of EDM, one of the largest electronic document management solutions providers in the UK.

The agency was hired by new CEO, Sam Ferguson who grew Edotech, another document solutions company, from a £20 million business in the UK to a European-wide services company turning over £120 million.

The PR brief is a B2B one, focused on communicating management vision and company success to the trade and business press – and also focusing on mission-critical business issues such as risk management, disaster recovery and compliance.

A particular focus will be placed on the company’s hosted digital offering – where EDM takes the physical data from customers (documents, letters, files, contracts etc) and digitises them for storage in massive, secure central servers at EDM. This has major advantages for organisations seeking to save costs on storing bulky paper documents, and staff costs for managing, searching for, copying or distributing physical documents .

Sam Ferguson commented: “ EDM has been quite internally focussed in the last year or so, integrating our acquisitions and merging the service offerings, infrastructures and people, and concentrating on our customers. The time is ripe now to communicate what we do externally – and why we’re leaders in our field.”

Chris Cartwright, Managing Director at Harvard, commented: “We’re very excited to be working with an industry leader on a campaign that is truly pertinent to so many business sectors. We’re looking forward to working with Sam and his team to raise the company’s profile and position it as a thought leader in this space.”

Harvard announces testing win with Empirix

Harvard will be working to raise the profile of leading voice testing company Empirix after winning the business alongside specialist consultant Collette Dunkley, founder of X&Y Communications, a sister agency to Harvard in the Bell Pottinger Group. Harvard will focus on building a business case for testing and monitoring of voice applications from the initial development of network equipment, through monitoring and testing of traditional and IP-based voice networks, to compete holistic analysis of contact centre systems.

Working closely with the European Managing Director, Frank Van Der Poll, and reporting to Marketing Director Fiona Curtis, Harvard will focus on building content that has real impact with the crucial CxO audience that Empirix wants to influence. The agency will target not only the core trade and technology media, but create compelling messages to gain coverage and build awareness in key vertical sectors including financial services, government and telecoms. In a break from previous Empirix campaigns we will move beyond product PR to focus on key issues that are of importance to the CxO. Issues such as customer churn, maintaining subscriber growth in saturated markets and delivering cost effective customer service without risking quality are all issues high on the CxO agenda, and within which there are interesting testing angles. Harvard will seek to maximise these to establish Empirix much earlier in the decision making process.

Ben Maynard, board director at Harvard, overseeing the account commented, “We were very keen to win this business as we the whole issue of testing is under-appreciated yet critical to best practice not only in technology but throughout business.”