My Best Hire
09 Dec 2005
Chris Hamer, MD of Triangle PR, on the '110 per cent' Maha Bishay.
For many people Tony Blair's third election victory will have been the political event of 2005. But for me the year's most significant moment was the speech I heard in the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, a few months later.
How tedious that, yet again, the doomsayers foretell a time when sharp-suited management consultants will run all the strategy, with us dim-witted PR types scraping around issuing press releases and polishing their shoes (Letters, 2 December).
The IPA welcomed your feature ('End this practice,' 2 December) on our confidential pitch advisory service.
Laudable though much of 'A question of quality' (TNS Annual Report, 25 November) was, I couldn't help but feel it conflated two things: industry standard media evaluation and kitemarked PR standards.
'Why don't we trust government stats?' (Analysis, 18 November). Because they are marketed to us, rather than presented factually.
It is hard to know who will look more silly – Werner Seifert, the ex-Deutsche Boerse CEO threatening to publish a kiss and tell story of his attempted takeover of the London Stock Exchange, or the current management of Deutsche Boerse, who are trying to stop him.
In the last PRWeek of the year, it seems appropriate to touch on Christmas, but perhaps for the sake of political correctness I should refer instead to that glorious Americanism ‘the holidays’. Certainly the C-word seems to be causing the now traditional festive stress in council PR offices.
You might have your messaging, media relations and direct communications with stakeholders sewn up. But if you are working for an organisation that provides goods or services to masses of people – and employs large numbers who get to meet the public and customers – beware. This is why I believe PR should...
As 2005 comes to a close, we look back on a year when some dramatically improved their reputation and others let the opposite happen.