To smoke or not to smoke? The Help programme 2005 - 2008: a life without Tobacco

The European Union has made the fight against smoking one of its top public health priorities, because tobacco accounts for over 650,000 deaths every year in the European Union. This includes 19,000 deaths from passive smoking and these people have never even smoked!

On the 1st March 2005, the European Commission launched a large media campaign “HELP – For a life without tobacco“, which was one of the largest public health awareness-raising initiatives ever organised in the world and it was conducted in all (then) 27 EU countries.

The general motto of the campaign was to provide „Help and support“ - young people (15-34 year-olds) were the main target of the Help campaign because of their attitude that “denormalisation of smoking“ is trendy in Europe.

Few more facts:

• MTV created a TV add and website in 2006 - the purpose was to target young people and so they came up with a catch phrase „Tobacco…where do you stand?“
• Since 2006 there were online campaigns for youth in all European countries and pan-European portals such as Yahoo, MSN or Meetic.
• A powerful viral was launched in October 2007 - a fake online store www.nicomarket.com (7.5 million video views, 450,000 visits).
• A specific Internet website (www.help-eu.com) - active in 22 languages.
• There was a strong and immediate response to the broadcast of Help TV spots as they propelled visits to the www.hrlp-eu.com website: proof that the campaign was effective!

After 4 years of the campaign, the results are impressive:

There is a large media coverage with TV, press, radio and internet releases – to be more specific, there are over 6,800 articles and reports in the media since the beginning of the help campaign.
According to latest enquiry, a one third of Europeans declare to having seen the Help campaign – it is amazing!
Also7 million Internet users for the www.help-eu.com website and more than 1,100 national events performed europe-wide.
340,000 europeans measured their tobacco-related carbon monoxide levels.
4.5 billion media contacts achieved in 4 years (TV + Internet).
59% of young Europeans (under 25) saw at least 1 Help film and 82% of young Europeans liked the advert.

For the conclusion..

I would like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.“ – this is a greate sentence which says that smoking is pointless bad habbit, which kills. I´m glad that The Help Programme was so successful!

Beer Campaigns

The summer is getting closer by every day.
And summer is exactly the perfect time when launch simple but effective PR campaigns, to get people involve and guarantee them somewhat brand loyalty . One Biggest area of such involvement and campaigning is in the beer marketing. They have to come up with a good messages every summer to get people active with their brand .According to Rauno Stüff the marketing director of Saku , 20% of Estonia’s beer drinkers are totally loyal to three beers – Saku Originaal, Rock and A.Le Coq . 80% is open for others. So there is a constant need for campaigning.
Saku Origina’s Last summer campaign included a message that Original is a friends thin (sõprade värk) where over 300 pub partys with a value of each 5000krm were given out between participators. The campaign went nicely with the message. You and your friend can go to a pub party and do the friends thing. But of course to participate you had to buy the beer and then you got a code what you had to send by sms- another great way to make money but not very appealing ,not exiting enough. Saku even launched a video for that campaign http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYifncd_-Ic Or it was not exactly for the campaign but with the same message , and eventually , you just got tired of it
Because, it all has been weak. No power has been put in there or nothing exiting enough for us to remember anything about Saku Original after the commercial break. Even though the messages *friends thing*was quite unique, it still did nothing to promote itself
There is a good example of an Austrian Commercial that is so brilliantly done with so much power that the song stayed in my mined for very long time It is massive with great messages- Made From Beer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH3GH7Pn_eA
The Latest Campaign that Saku launched was for Saku Rock, and this time they really got it. It was simple , it was big and in the poster it did just say main points -Rock.ee and lots of stuff . So people understood that it is a campaign with cool stuff and to get more information you must go to the website. If a person is attracted to go to your website, he is yours to keep, because he has been active enough with your product to actually go to the site and all you now have to do is give information in an entertaining way.
www.rock.ee Is specially made Rock beer environment, where you can just spend hours to get through all the cool stuff. This time it not only about the the Beer, it was abos about the lifestyle- and that is a powerful point to communicate.
But let’s wait and see what will the summer bring and what messages will be set to us next to get us hooked. And will they add power this time!


Rauno Stüff-http://est.best-marketing.com/index.php?lang=est&main_id=156&id=41

On the Edge

Last month A le Coq beer factory introduced a new product – classical rootbeer, that has some alcohol in it – up to 0,8%. According to the law a naturally fermentated (up to 1,2% of alcohol) beverage is not considered as an alcoholic drink and thus may be sold to minors. The package of this drink is also provocative – it is bottled in same size and form bottles as beer, which as we all know is an alcoholic drink. The choice of packaging serves to objectives, it’s cheaper to produce in existing bottles plus it gives a feeling of real beer for adults and a sense of forbidden fruit to minors. Funny thing is that sometimes in slang beer is referred to as “kali” (root beer in Estonian). Probably A le Coq has people who did see this coming and saw it as a great way to get some publicity.

It didn’t take long for the subject to pop-up in media. Kopli Art High School’s principle Märt Sults said publicly in media that he will lower the behavior grade of everyone who drinks A le Coq’s root beer in school after an incident where some students were consuming it. Even the police got called to school (http://www.delfi.ee/news/paevauudised/eesti/article.php?id=22826163). On what grounds I’d like to know? In the eyes of law it is equal to lemonade. Punish someone for drinking lemonade is like the medieval which hunts – if you drown you’re cleared of the charge (but dead), if you don’t you are and will be burned to death.

This brought some opinions to the media which were polarized, some favor it, some not. Any case, A le Coq had a PR issue on their hands, which they have handled well: they bought a page in Postimees and provided facts and figures about their product and also involved a specialist to give an opinion. “The stories about possible harm the fact that “Kali” is unsuitable for children is over exaggerated and misleading,” says Raivo Vokk, Tallinn Technical University’s Food Institution professor.

An online poll conducted by Postimees Online shows that 52,7% of people who answered favor the selling of “Kali” to minors and 47,3% are against it (http://www.postimees.ee/?id=107551).

Let’s do it 2009?

Will it be as successful as the last year’s campaign?

By reading comments on Õhtuleht (links: 1, 2) about Minu Eesti after 1 st May where some people say that the event was not as successful as said. Kuku's show of Vox Populi, aired on 08.04.2009, where they were asking people if they know what Minu Eesti 2009 is about. Users have commented on their webpage and it seems that they have no faith in that event and still the politicians seem to be behind it.

Not much news are written after the 1 st May, only Eesti Päevaleht writes that Tallinn University of Technology is looking for a solution how to market some technological ideas that people came up and on Let's do it official homepage they reported that smaller co-operations between citizens around the Estonia are done and lately was formed a "Carbage Club" who that their organization organizes the garbage cleanups and they raise awareness amongst the citizens.

So did anything big happen after the 1st May? Well, not yet. The 1st May think-tank was only a small part of the project where they collected the ideas and opinions of people around the Estonia. Currently the Let's do it team carry out an research, still collecting information and data and looking for experts to solve different problems. It's predicted, that processing the whole information will take couple of months or so.

I think that the 1st May event was succesful in many ways. First over the 11 000 people who attended got motivated and found people with similar problems or ways to help each other. So if there is no marginal success to point out, there are hidden affects of it and though the media hasn’t shown it, people are more active in countryside than in towns. For example what I learned from Saku is that people there have for 5 years now organized cleaning day’s once in year that were similar to Let’s do it 2008.

Let’s do it 2008 also won the best PR campaign in third sector and I believe that this year’s campaign could be even more successful as the 2008 cleaning event as the 2009 thinking is over but the process to analyze it and commence it has just been started.

PR 2.0 - what is it?

To sum it up shortly I'll borrow from deirdrebreakenridge.com: new media, new tools, new audiences. The appendix 2.0 is obviously a hint to technology where programs are usually marked like that, with a version number. And who is familiar with the term web 2.0 is right to connect the two terms. PR 2.0 is PR through new media channels like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, Twitter and Blogs, with Twitter being the fastest-growing of them all. In 2008 it gained 752% user growth and this year it continued with fast growth reaching to 10M users worldwide.

PR 2.0 also creates a new job title - community manager. A CM is a web 2.0 expert who knows how to monitor brand visibility on the world wide web. They read technocrati, twitter, messageboards, blogs and social networking sites to collect bits of information about their company and react accordingly. Being proactive by offering updated information to people who for example tweet on topics concerning your brand/company is a good idea. In Estonia this would be needed only in big companies that create fuzz in the web, so you probably won't see many people that are called CM-s in the next couple of years.

There is a variety of free tools to monitor PR 2.0, which could be useful for all of you in the future, for example:
How Sociable? - measure your brand visibility in popular social networking sites.
Twitter search -enables you to search the twittersphere for keywords that you want to monitor

And for example, you can share this post via new media from here:





The problem of PR 2.0 in Estonia is the audience, not a sufficient number on internet users use web 2.0 services(maybe youtube), they usually just surf on news websites etc. Rate.ee, which has the most users in Estonia, current count being 347 296, unfortunately is a very closed portal, although considered to match web 2.0 standards, compared to facebook for example. Rate.ee can be used to do PR 2.0 but not as efficiently as other social networking sites, as it is oriented to direct marketing and is with a more central approach with its architecture. Another pinch is is the age of the reachable audience, people over 30 almost never use the applications mentioned before, this sets certain limits to what it is worth doing PR 2.0 for. If your MAPs include youth then you most certainly want to look into it. Check out these these sites for more information: briansolis.com, shiftcomm.com and kommunikatsioon.com(in Estonian, an interesting reading where I learned much stuff I wrote here in this post and also got the video).

And now... your future!?!?


Chicago PR - A Day in the Life from Allie Osmar on Vimeo.

Baltic PR Awards 2009

On the First and Second of April
Baltic PR Awards 2009 were held in Riga In the Stockholm School of Economics
Awards were given out in 10 categories
Corporate and Business Communication
Issues & Crisis Management
Internal Communication
Consumer Relations
Public Affairs
Corporate Responsibility
Digital Communication
Public Sector
Sponsorship
International Communication


Estonia was also represented in the winning list
Thanks to the PR firm Corpore who won the first place in the sponsorship category with the AEG Electrolux and Bocuse d'Or Acatemy: Cheering for the best chef.

Teeme Ära! 2008 ( Let's Do It! 2008)
Won a third place in corporate responsibility category

All together judges from UK, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria,Norway and Holland evaluated anonymously 97 received PR campaigns

Corpor has been recognized also in European Excellence awards 2008 with the same project but won it with Estonian Tyre Association: Tackling the dumped tyre problem.

Cheering for the best chef itself was competition held by Bocuse d'Or Estonia to find the best chef in Estonia.
The winner was chosen by the favorites of media and opinion leaders and was crowned in 16 of March 08
Bocuse d'Or Estonia is one stage in the overall European Chef competition Bocuse d'Or Europe

For more information:
Baltic Awards 09 - http://www.lsaka.lv/?p=3866&lang=982
Corpore - http://www.corpore.ee/
Bocuse d'Or- http://www.bocusedor.ee/

Best PR acts of 2008 selected

Here's a news article from EPRA that I translated into english with my added comments:

Estonian Public Relations Association (EPRA) jury announced in Tartu at marketing conference Password 2009 the best PR acts of year 2008 that were divided into three categories - public, third and private sectors. As 2008 was the year of innovation, additional prize was given for most innovative PR campaign. In total 13 great works of PR were applied which all were seen as professional and well prepared.

2008 years best public PR act won campaign for celebrating Estonian Republic jubilee which standed out with its aforethought, coverage and project leading.

Symbol they used, the leaf’s that also visualized 90 was catchy and people loved this and many companyes wanted to put this on their products and packages. 

Teeme ära 2008 won every possible award

Best PR project in third sector was selected the nationwide cleaning campaign “Teeme ära 2008” (Let’s do it 2008) which was unprecedented and with its communication were able to involve the most volunteers in the history. 

The Let’s Do it 2008 PR campaign’s communication were mainly channeled through internet. They used internet community websites like Orkut, Facebook, bkite.com, twitter, flickr, googlemaps, ect.

In private sector were the most applied works and from the tight competition won the Corpore leaded AEG Bocouse pro-chef competition (Ordered by AEG Electrolux), where taking in mind their target group they developed a perfectly working output and message.

For innovation year prize the Loovagentuur Maailm organized the world’s first song festival held in Võru’s local language UMA PIDO. The prize was given for organizing communication for this festival ordered by Võru Institute which brought together over 10 000 people forming the cultural event no.1. Project keyword was acting together and joining the community.

Campaigns were judged by EPRA public relations experts: Mart Soonik, Aive Levandi, Tiiu Allikmäe, Aili Ohlau, Erkki Peetsalu and Janno Toots.

via EPRA

Would you be a PR genius or devil?

...well, both actually, for successful career!

„PR is manipulative weapon” – it has been said by a lot of people. 

So that’s why I wanted to write here some jokes I read about PR manipulators (that means, about us), which are confirming this statement are behind this humor there is a truth –  in nowadays world PR people often are crossing the line, because they have the power and knowledge to make things much bigger than they are. And sometimes they go too far. But on the other hand, can we say that only PR is an industry, which manipulates people? Think about it!

Well, here is the first one: 

A mathematician, an accountant and a public relations officer all applied for the same job with a large company. The interviewer called in the mathematician first and asked, "What does two plus two equal?" The mathematician replied, "Four." The interviewer asked, "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looked at the interviewer incredulously and said, "Yes, of course: four, exactly."Then the interviewer called in the accountant and asked the same question, "What does two plus two equal?" The accountant said, "On average, four - give or take 10 per cent; but on average, four."Then the interviewer called in the public relations officer and again posed the same question, "What does two plus two equal?" public relations officer got up, locked the door, closed the shade, sat down next to the interviewer and whispered, "Well, what do you want it to equal?"

I liked that, because it brings out one of the main questions in public relations: what kind of image would you like to create? -  Quite often it will be our job to create “something“ from “nothing“. Yes, maybe we can use the word “manipulative weapon“, but hey, that´s life! And we can get money for doing it.

Of course another situation is acting unethical way. This is something which any educated person shouldn´t do. But for example, in the process of creating this “something“ we should make things better than they are, otherwise we won´t succeed. A good point is that it´s hard to make your product successful, without using PR service. So let´s talk things better!

"I'm thinking of leaving my husband,” complained the wife of a well-known public relations expert."All he ever does is stand at the end of our bed and tell me how good things are going to be.

Probably we are doing the same thing in the future – telling ALL THE TIME how good things are going to be. But the truth is even if we supposed to be manipulative geniuses. Sometimes we can still make a mistake, or two, or create a total mess. It could happen to each one of us, right?

The doctor stated that God had created Eve from Adam's rib. This, of course, had been a surgical procedure. The engineer argued that, earlier, God had created order from chaos. This had clearly been an engineering feat. "But," asked the public relations consultant, "who do you think created the chaos in the first place?"

Everyone knows that PR people have to fix several problems. Well it´s their job and they have to be responsible for it. But the funny part is that if something goes wrong, still a big amount of people (also journalists) are blaming PR people for it. So I believe that through these three (or five?) years we are studying here, we should also grow a „fat skin” (as Estonians would say)

And here is the last one, which I liked:

The two young sons of a public relations professional were walking home from Sunday School when one turned to the other and asked: "What do you make of all this business about the devil that we studied today?"

The other boy replied thoughtfully, "Well, you know how Santa Claus turned out. This is probably just Dad, too."

Jokes are taken from Public Relations: a Matter of Spin by N. E. Renton

Unethical PR in the nearby past in Estonia

When trying to recall unethical PR strategies in Estonia I remembered two incidents - Swedbank's (formerly Hansapank) youth campaign for their NPNK products and services; and the demolition of Sakala cultural centre. I'll try to explain both of them in this blog, at first about the NPNK campaign.

In april, 2005, bigger cities were flooded with rat-signs stating the letters NPNK, they covered all the bus-stops, lightposts, trash-bins and so on. You could find stickers and posters literally everywhere you looked, free t-shirts were distributed in large amounts. At first they stated nothing more than the letters, but a day later a website address appearaed, it was www.zone.ee/npnk, Zone Media provides free web space for everyone that registers. The website claimed to be a website for independent squatters ("Squatting is the act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting), and their goal remained unclear, yet squats are usually places for young creative people to get together. The campaign appealed to youth and they became carriers of Swedbanks message, unknowingly.

What caught my eye in the first couple of days was that the space where the posters were glued on the bus stations and trash bins, usually a place for ads, was blank beneath the posters. Also, the supplies handed out and glued all over the city must have cost at least a couple of hundred thousand kroons, where would some independent squatters take that kind of money and what what is their purpose? This smelt an awful lot like a lie. A friend of mine was distributing stickers for NPNK, he was hired by the ad agency Tank. By that time it was ofcourse clear that this is some big corporations viral marketing trick. He wasn't told any information on whats behind it, but he was said that it's okay to stick them on Hansapanks atm-s. When I queried the domain www.npnk.ee, of course it was already registered. And what a suprise, it was registered to a ltd company, whose address was Liivalaia 8... guess which companies headquarter is on the same address? Bingo.

After a week NPNK had gotten a lot of publicity - advertisement for free. They got the front cover of Estonias most read daily newspaper, Postimees covered with their logos for 0 kroons, a place that is not even available to buy for advertising. Of course, as we all know from Principles of PR, publicity is uncontrollable. As it revealed that Hansapank had lied on the campaign and claimed to be someone it's not, youth who had respect for subcultures like squatters got angry. At least one official movement was started to protest against Hansapank. They started a squat in Hansapank and demanded the following things:

1. Hansapank will apologize publicly for taking advantage of the squatters subculture, faking a grass-roots campaign, misleading the public and for betraying the trust and cincere wish to support actions like squatting.
2. Hansapank will give up the brand NPNK and campaigns like this and other unethical advertising strategies in their forthcoming economical activity.

It seemed that Hansapank itself was startled as well that their campaign met such a resistance among the very ones they were supposed to influence to become users of NPNK. Being suprised they did at least a couple of things right - they called the protest movement leaders to a meeting. Of course they did not give up on the brand where they had buried a lot of money. But the protesters at least achieved one of their goals - Hansapank apologized publicly and admitted that the campaign, done like this, was a mistake.

How to sell batteries

Lately I found myself admiring the success of one specific regular household battery and no, I'm not talking about the forever going rabbit powered by Duracell.

Namely Panasonic has introduced a new battery called EVOLTA (“EVOIA” in Europe) that lasts longer than any other and recognized by Guinness World Record as the world’s “longest lasting AA alkaline battery cell”

My first sightings about this battery evolution were in technology blog called Engadget in somewhere at the end of last year. The news itself is more than a year old. The first thoughts were that why there is a news article written about a regular battery?

Lately I noticed a package of those batteries in a store near my home village. The package design and the world EVOIA caught my eye and I recognized them: “Oh hey, aren’t those the batteries said to be world’s best?” 

I thought how well did it succeeded as a PR campaign for this simple everyday item.

Let’s imagine that you are at the beginning of the process of bring the new battery to the market. Currently in the lead is the well known Duracell with their rock climbing bunny and right after that seems to be the Energizer with the similar pink drum banging bunny. So what to do with those market leading rabbits?

Well the Panasonic got somehow the Guinness World Record for their innovative battery that outlasts the competitors by 20-30%. What a good chance to but a well known and trusted Guinness World Record logo onto the package making the batteries look professional and not comparing the performance by how high can a cute stuffed rabbit clime on the cliffs. 

So why did I chose that brand of batteries? Look at it this way: if you are at shop choosing between different products, what are the main things you decide on when buying a regular battery? For me it’s how long they last as simply there is nothing other to compare. So if Panasonic has this flashy yellow sticker on the package stating: “World’s No. 1 Long Lasting” and they have Guinness World Record to stand behind that statement then for me it’s a sale! If you ask that is the 20-30% longer lifetime also expensive, then 3-5% difference in price is still worth it. You then don’t have to change the batteries so often and by that you also keep the world a greener place as you use fewer batteries.

In my opinion, the EVOIA has a good chance on becoming the market leader in a few years or so. 

Introductory

[names, pictures and description of students here]

Tarmo Saluste
Annika Parm
Eva Berendsen
Jass Seljamaa
Marleen Roosna