Ogilvy Public Relations’ Australian operation has turned 10 and while most birthdays are a reason to reflect on the past, we decided to celebrate the occasion by looking forward to the next decade.

In partnership with the Australian chapters of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), Ogilvy PR commissioned research asking PR professionals their thoughts on the industry in 2021: What would our role be? What would be the industry’s biggest threat? How would we measure success?

Eighteen qualitative interviews were conducted with leading industry opinion leaders to help inform the quantitative study questionnaire. That questionnaire was answered by 300 Australian PR communications professionals during July.

Some of the findings were in accord with our expectations, others surprised us. A summary of the key findings can be found here and if anyone requires a full copy of the research results they can contact Katherine Scott at katherine.scott@ogilvy.com.au

But research should lead to something so we set about deciding just what we could do to ensure that Ogilvy PR maintains its position of professional and intellectual leadership in Australia for the next decade and beyond.

So we pledged to:

• Permanently stop measuring communications effectiveness by the much derided ‘Advertising Equivalent Value’ (AVE) in 2012 and evaluate the newly proposed ‘Value Metrics’ guidelines developed by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications;
• Bolster our strategy, planning, creative and insights capabilities by a further 15% in the coming year by redefining and reinvesting in existing roles. As the only Australian PR agency with a Strategy and Planning Director and a dedicated strategic communications research and insights brand Ogilvy PR will also begin the search for a creative director this year;
• Apply a unique 360 degrees communications filter to all briefs to further capitalise on a future where employee empowerment is paramount and digital engagement is an integral part of every consultant’s skill set; and
• Embark on an ambitious in-house training program aimed at giving consultants a better hands-on understanding of the operational demands of business and clients.

In company with IABC, we announced our plans and unveiled the research at two major events.

The first, in Sydney in front of a gathering of around 70 existing and prospective clients and industry professionals, featured a lively panel discussion moderated by Ogilvy PR Australia’s CEO Kieran Moore. Panellists were Nick Baker, the executive general manager of marketing for Tourism Australia, Ogilvy PR’s regional CEO and President Steve Dahllof, Leanne Joyce, IABC board member and group manager – communications with AusTrade, Professor Jim Macnamara, the deputy dean from University of Technology Sydney’s faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Tam Sandeman, the managing director of Impact Employee Communications, Ogilvy PR’s internal communications company.

A Melbourne event the following day attracted a crowd of around 90 people, with Steve Dahllof reprising his Sydney appearance on a panel which included renowned futurist James Cowley, Andrew Maiden, Telstra’s executive director – communications, Jacqui Moore, the group general manager marketing for Country Road, and Tony O’Dea, the manager – campaigns and research for the Victorian Department of Justice. Sarah Wilson, the prominent journalist and blogger, beautifully handled a last-minute transition from panellist to moderator when Q&A’s Tony Jones was an 11^th hour scratching due to ill-health.

The research findings and Ogilvy’s response garnered plenty of media coverage, with The Australian and a number of industry publications covering the issue. In fact, a week after the announcement the article was still tracking as the ‘most read’ article on www.campaignaisa.com

Research, action, reaction . . . it makes a good campaign template and puts the fizz of the future into a birthday bash.

Jones, the host of ABC TV’s Q&A program, was talking this week at the latest in a series of panel discussions on topical issues hosted by Ogilvy Public Relations. This time the topic was ‘Ogilvy On… NSW’ and around 90 invited guests gathered for breakfast at leading Sydney restaurant The Establishment to hear the panel’s views on next month’s election and its aftermath.

“So”, Jones asked Sean Nicholls, the Herald’s State Political Editor, “is Richo right? Will it be a slaughter of unimaginable proportion?”

“Yes,” was Nicholls’s succinct response, adding that the Nielsen pollster had pointed out that to get such dire results (Labor with a primary vote of just 22 per cent) was unprecedented this close to an election.

That set the tone for much of the discussion about the ALP.

Annabel Crabb, the Chief Political Writer for ABC Online, likened the State Government’s current standing to “the last days of Rome” and said that Monday’s Valentine Day’s announcement of free marriage certificates had her thinking: “Just go now”.

Neil Lawrence, the man responsible the successful Kevin ’07 campaign and the Executive Creative Director of the  STW Group, confirmed that he was also predicting disaster and quoted from the final line of a Frank Hardy novel, the Outcasts of Foolgarah: “The air was thick and black with chickens coming home to roost.”

It fell to the former Treasurer in the Iemma Labor government, Michael Costa, to give at least a glimmer of hope to his erstwhile colleagues. While agreeing that the Keneally Government would lose the election, Costa said he was “not convinced about the polls”, which he said would tighten in the lead up to the election, and believed the ALP primary vote would be in the low to mid 30s.

That gave some solace to Gladys Berejiklian, the Shadow Minister for Transport, who was clearly uncomfortable with incessant talk about record landslides and slaughters of unimaginable proportions.

Pointing out that the Coalition had not unseated a sitting government in NSW since 1988, and before that in 1965, Berejiklian predicted that the polls would narrow. “We can’t afford to, and won’t, take the result for granted,” she said.

Berejiklian said a Coalition government would concentrate on “making NSW No 1 again”. “We are languishing behind other States,” she said, naming issues like the economy, infrastructure and health reform as issues on which an incoming government would concentrate.

However, Simon Sheikh, the National Director of the political activist group GetUp!, had some sobering news for Berejiklian: in his opinion the budget limitations meant that unless there was a complete renegotiation of Commonwealth/State relations then the State’s budget would be unsustainable in 30 years.

That was a theme seized on by Costa, who said that regardless of who was in Government the growth in health and education would absorb the entire NSW budget in the next 30 years. “The state system is broke,” he said.

Patricia Forsythe, the Executive Director of the Sydney Business Chamber, said her organisation – and business in general – was expecting an in-coming O’Farrell government to focus on jobs. “Business is looking for a sense of certainty,” she said, adding that the cancellation of projects in the past had led to huge damage to the State’s reputation with business.

Forsythe said business wanted to see a clear plan for the next 20 years, with a pipeline of projects that would bring certainty to the economy.

Nicholls said that public sector expenses had “exploded” but the Coalition did not want to talk about public sector job cuts. Berejiklian said the growth in public sector expenses could be addressed by cutting government waste and said there were no planned cuts to the public service.

Crabb said that at both a Federal and State level neither side of politics wanted to talk about hard decisions.

And so it went: lively, opinionated, informative and fun. Just another ‘Ogilvy On…’ event.

The latest Nielsen Australian Online Landscape Review for December 2010 shows that 14,330,878 Australians were active online during the month, an increase of just 1 per cent on December 2009. The time spent per person was just over forty hours and 20 minutes, once again a small increase of 3 per cent on the previous year.

Nielsen data for the past three years shows a remarkably similar story. From January 2008 until June 2009 the active online usage hovered on or around the 12 million users each month. July 2009 saw a change in methodology and a spike in usage to just over 14 million, and that’s remained pretty steady ever since.

Likewise the time spent per month. In March 2008 it was just over 20 hours, creeping to tick over 24 hours in June 2009. The methodology change almost doubled that figure to around 40.5 hours in July 2009 and despite peaks (43 hours) and troughs (35 hours) the graph has remained fairly constant.

Last December the heaviest traffic was between 4-5pm, which was a slight spike in a heavy block of usage between 3-6pm. This may reflect the kids getting home from school and/or office boredom.

Wednesday and Thursday, with 78 per cent of the online community active, were the busiest days, followed by Friday (77%), Monday (75%) and Tuesday (73%). Saturday (70%) and Sunday (69%) prove that weekends remain days of comparative rest.

Any thoughts that the internet is a predominantly male domain are dispelled by the 49.2 per cent female and 50.8 per cent male split, with female users dominating in the 18-34 age group (1,762,000 males to 1,975,000 females).

The top 15 sites throw up few surprises, with Google, NineMSN, Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube filling the top five spots. The one brand to make a big move was the department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts – the only government department in the top 15 – which came in 14^th with a unique audience for the month of 3,889,000, an 9.1% increase on the previous month’s visitors. I suspect that’s a result of interest in the Murray Darling Basin decision which came out in December rather than a sudden upsurge of interest in arts or heritage.

So what does it all mean? Nothing earth-shattering, but after the exponential growth of online usage over the past 15 years it does indicate a maturing of the online space. And it’s a maturing at a very high level – it might be a plateau, but it is a pretty substantial plateau:  14.3 million active online in December is a huge number, as is the 40 hour/month average usage time.

It’s the future, but it’s also now.

Studdert was speaking at the third in a continuing series of Ogilvy PR breakfast events designed to inform and stimulate a select group of guests.

This week’s topic was Ogilvy On…Profit vs Public Good with the subject being the value of social marketing.

Held in Sydney’s Establishment Ballroom, the 80 invited guests were treated to a lively panel debate, moderated in his usual entertaining, forthright style by Tony Jones, the host of ABC TV’s Q&A program.

On the panel were Peter Ritchie, the former chief executive and chairman of McDonald’s Australia, Dr Christine Bennett, the chief medical officer and director of healthcare leadership at Bupa Australia Group, Tim Gartrell, the CEO of newly launched not-for-profit group GenerationOne which aims to alleviate indigenous disadvantage, Tony Thirlwell, the CEO of the Heart Foundation of NSW, the NSW Shadow Treasurer Mike Baird, Tom Beall, the managing director of Ogilvy PR Worldwide’s global social marketing practice, and Greg Sam, the joint managing director of Parker & Partners, Australia’s leading bi-partisan public affairs company and a member of the Ogilvy group.

The discussion started with a debate about the definition of social marketing. Most thought it boiled down to promoting change for social and public good, without profit being a motive. Beall, while agreeing with that definition, recalled that 25 years ago when he was invited to join Ogilvy from the public sector to set up the social marketing practice in Washington he was assured that he would be “working on the side of the angels”. Ritchie, however, saw it as an organisation adopting a continuing positive social role within its community so that the organisation actually lived that role and came to be seen in a positive light.

Thirlwell related the concern within some parts of the Heart Foundation when they allowed McDonald’s to carry the foundation’s tick of approval on some of its products. Some were outraged at the charity being associated with a fast food outlet but Thirlwell said the reality was that an enormous number of people ate fast food on a regular basis so it made sense to try and encourage the industry to have healthy options on offer.

The talk around fast food led to a discussion of obesity levels, with Bennett, who also was chair of the Federal Government’s National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, pointing out that 50 per cent of our health burden relates to how we live our life.

The problem, of course, is how to change people’s behaviour. Gartrell said the difficulty GenerationOne faced was that there was widespread awareness of the disadvantages faced by Australia’s indigenous population – which meant that awareness campaigns were not needed – but attitudinal change by white Australians was essential before real change could occur.

Beall said the object of most social marketing campaigns was behavioural change and cited the Heart Truth campaign which he ran in the US. The campaign started seven years ago and its aim was to raise awareness of heart disease among American women.

At the time, even though heart disease was the No 1 killer of women, it was largely seen as a man’s disease.

The campaign, which is still running strong, has been shown to have raised both the awareness of heart disease and of the symptoms and has markedly decreased the female rates of death from the disease.

And, just in case you were thinking about it, the consensus was that fear campaigns generally don’t work.

After the panel session, Beall gave his top five tips for any organisation considering engaging in social marketing.

1. Be audience-centric. Know who you are talking to.
2. The importance of research. Research the market, but also know what other competitive forces are out there.
3. Talk to other stakeholders. Extend your reach to other interested groups in the field and get them involved early on in the planning stages.
4. Don’t depend on just one communication channel. Audiences hear messages in wide variety of places and media and it is important to have a presence in all those places.
5. Assess what you are doing as it goes on and be open to change if the evidence suggest it’s not working as well as you thought it would.

“Remember who your audience is,” the client was told. “There’s a huge difference between talking to A Current Affair and talking to the 7.30 Report.”

Abbott thought his audience was the political insiders being wined and dined at the National Press Club. His knee-raised, arms-splayed, loud-laughing, bad-joking, interjecting persona might have raised a cheer from the Liberal faithful in the room but that’s not who his real audience was. If you are talking to Tracey Grimshaw or Kerry O’Brien then you had better understand that while they are conducting the interview you are really giving answers to the hundreds of thousands of viewers out there.

Abbott forgot that and came across to the wider public as aggressive, undisciplined and (whisper it quiet) almost Lathamesque.

Our client was also told never to trash an opposition brand. He could say his product is better, faster, more efficient than other brands but he should never resort to saying another brand was no good and he should never ever ever attack another brand on a personal level.

Abbott had a duty to attack the government’s health plan, and because he has decided not to release the Coalition health plan until closer to the election it was difficult to attack in a constructive way by comparing it unfavourably to his own product. Yet he broke the golden rule when he went after Kevin Rudd on a personal level. Perhaps he was looking for the nightly news grab, but once again he misunderstood his audience.

Making jokes about Rudd being a boring speaker might be all well and good in Parliament – or at the National Press Club during a normal presentation – but personal attacks just don’t fly with anyone except the rapid supporters.

When Mark Latham spoke before the 2004 election of the Howard government being a “conga line of suckholes” Labor stalwarts cheered because he was “giving it” to the Coalition. Undecided voters – the ones he had to impress – wondered whether he had the gravitas to be Prime Minister. A couple of months later they decided, and Latham was no longer.

The Australian public want their leaders to be respectful. They have got to be able to envisage them at important occasions, see them at the White House or a world leader’s forum.  They want them to fight, but by the rules of good behaviour.

The same is true of leading brands. We want them to be respectable, we want to be able to display them on important occasions and we want them to spruik their wares in an engaging, innovative and positive manner.

The guy I was training now understands that. Tony Abbott still needs to.

In what was always going to be a PR disaster, Woods and his advisors opted for the golfer to read a statement of remorse in front of a handpicked audience, with no questions asked, when he made his first face-to-face utterances about the sex scandal that engulfed his world, and ours, late last year.

Wiser counsel would have had Woods subject himself to the sort of questions that Tracey Grimshaw put to rugby league’s Matthew Johns in the wake of his sex scandal last May. Grimshaw asked all the questions that people wanted answered, leaving viewers able to make up their own minds on the genuineness of Johns’s contrition and remorse. The general perception is that Johns passed that test and both he and the public now feel free to move on.

Woods, however, has still to answer the questions of why, and how could he, and what was he thinking of, and what about his wife and kids. The public still wants to know, and the journalists still want to not-so-politely enquire.

If Woods thinks that returning to competitive golf in the oh-so-regulated Masters means he will be able to duck such questions then I strongly suspect he has another thing coming. The Masters will no doubt try to weed out what they see as the trouble-making tabloid journalists, keeping the media to the golfing faithful. But while golf writers have traditionally shied away from asking questions about anything other than golf there is little doubt that respective editors will have stiffened their spines considerably with subtle lines like: ‘’If you don’t ask the right questions  don’t bother reporting back for work the following week.’’

And if the Masters organisers, or Woods’s minders, try to ban any non-golfing questions then be prepared for a media walkout.

The questions will have to be answered, either at Augusta or the next tournament or the next, dragging out a matter that should have been settled months ago.

But that’s what happens when a crisis strategy is all about control, with barely a nod to candour.

The growth of social media over the past decade has been exponential, so much so that the legal and ethical restrictions that society has for virtually all other activities have struggled to seem relevant.

“The internet is different”, people cried, “Its very basis is the free exchange of information.”

Well, maybe.

A Victorian man posted an anonymous comment on HotCopper, a stock market discussion forum. The comment, about a WA technology security company and its managing director, was defamatory. The managing director tried to get HotCopper to identify the poster. HotCopper refused, but was forced to by a court order. The registered name ended up being false but the poster was eventually tracked down and taken to court for defamation – the result being the $30,000 verdict against him. Two other supposedly anonymous posters on the same site have court action pending against them.

The moral: a court has shown that anonymous is no longer anonymous, and the normal rules of law will apply to anything you say.

In Queensland an outpouring of grief over the murder of a young girl led to a tribute page being set up on Facebook. That page was defaced, with people posting insulting and derogatory remarks and links to porn sites.  The call was for Facebook to “do something”, with the general tenor being that Facebook and other sites should be responsible for the material they contain. But, as University of NSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile was quoted as saying on smh.com.au, making website owners or internet providers more accountable for online content would lead to their demise and see the end of free social networking sites.

The moral: administrators of Facebook pages need to be aware of their responsibilities. If you set up an open site then you should be able to moderate it – around the clock if necessary. If you can’t then either don’t set up the site or bring in reinforcements.

In Italy, the six month suspended jail sentences given to three Google executives has led to a further outcry. The executives were on trial for defamation and for violating Italy’s privacy laws. The trio were found guilty of the privacy charges in that they were held responsible for Google having hosted the offensive video. The video was online for around two months but was taken down as soon as Google was informed of its contents.

Google announced it would appeal, saying the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

Google said the European Union law gave hosting providers “a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence…  If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.“

Well, again maybe.

It would certainly create havoc with the Google business model, but perhaps that’s what the judge was getting at. The reasons for the decision have yet to be published but Marc Rotenberg, writing in the Huffington Post, says that there seem to be similarities between this case and cases in the early 1900s which established a person’s right to privacy in the US. Those cases established that a person’s image could not be used for commercial purposes without their permission. Rotenberg says that the Italian case hinged on the prosecutor’s claim that Google was making profit out of the video, which was driving people to the site and its advertisers.

The moral: not certain yet, but it may well be that if you are making money by hosting advertisements on site then you may end up being viewed as a commercial operation rather than just a host.

And to finish with Lara Bingle, the social page habitué who announced that she was taking legal action against AFL player Brendan Fevola after a nude image of her was made public on a website and in a magazine. The picture shows Bingle naked in a shower trying to cover herself.

Bingle is taking action “for breach of privacy, defamation and misuse of her image.” Just what that will result in is anyone’s guess, but it could end up a cautionary tale about mobile phone cameras, ease of downloading and the relentless spread of the web.

The moral: be careful of the company you keep.