The Great Information Glut 2011

January 9, 2012: The rate at which information is being used, shared and saved in the workplace is increasing at an incredible rate. At work we’re constantly becoming more connected, using more technology and creating more digital information.

In 2009, Howorth worked with Hitachi Data Systems to develop a public relations campaign that would provide a first perspective on the ‘Information Glut’, in a report which underlined how many organisations had been choked or rendered inflexible by the sharp growth in information.

Two years on, Howorth and Hitachi Data Systems revisited the subject to analyse whether the information glut was still a growing concern for businesses in Australia and New Zealand. In order to better understand the macro economic effects of the problem, Deloitte Access Economics was also commissioned to assess the extent to which information glut was impeding business productivity, and the benefit of improved information management on performance and the broader economy.

The Great Information Glut 2011: key findings

Hitachi Data Systems commissioned an independent study conducted by AMR, which found that 40% of organisations in Australian and New Zealand are suffering from too much information, up 5% from 2009. Almost every respondent (95%) admitted they experienced some degree of glut, with a quarter reporting significant impact on organisational performance.

Analysis by Deloitte also found that information glut is affecting Australia and New Zealand’s GDP and therefore their global competitiveness – estimating mismanagement of information is costing Australia’s economy at least $3bn per year and New Zealand $400m per year.

Hitachi is calling for businesses to start acting in order to manage the growth of the glut, stressing that Australia can no longer afford to be a nation of business bystanders. This ‘information intervention’ requires organisations to take a big picture look at existing systems and strategically align information management with business imperatives.

Howorth devised a media strategy that would maximise the reach of this news, conducting a series of embargoed media briefings with business and technology media to amplify the amount of quality media coverage. Following the briefings, a general news release was distributed.

The launch of the report received significant media coverage, with more than 40 pieces of traditional print and online media coverage.

Highlights included:

• Neville Vincent, VP and general manager, was interviewed by ABC Lateline Business on launch day, outlining the key findings from the report. A six minute interview with Neville was also broadcast on Sky Business News’ Tech Report programme.
• 40+ articles appeared in titles such as AAP, News.com.au, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Technology Spectator, iTWire, Computerworld, Computerworld NZ, Computer Daily News, Channel News and The Channel, more than doubling 2009’s coverage.

You can download a copy of the Great Information Glut 2011 report here

Telstra Productivity Indicator 2011

In 2009, Telstra Enterprise & Government (Telstra’s largest sales and service division, which provides services to more than 1,500 large organisations) launched a three-year thought leadership campaign to re-position the brand from transactional supplier to trusted advisor and differentiate it from its competitors.

For the third year, Howorth worked with Telstra Enterprise & Government to launch the “Telstra Productivity Indicator” – a commissioned research report

surveying more than 300 directors, senior executives and managers around their attitudes and behaviours to productivity.  This year, the research focused on traits that successful businesses had in realising productivity improvements, a group Telstra labeled ‘Productivity Leaders’. Over the last three years the campaign has successfully been integrated into TEG’s sales and marketing initiatives, meaning that besides media relations activity, Howorth has been integral in developing internal collateral including sales materials, customer brochures and website copy.

The challenge in 2011 was in launching findings that would still continue to be relevant and interesting to Telstra’s target audiences and the media. As has worked well in previous years, embargoed media briefings were conducted with tier one business and technology media to maximise the amount of quality media coverage. Following the briefings, a general news release was distributed.

PR drove positive results with more than 40 pieces of traditional print and online media coverage achieved, with 31 articles appearing on launch day.

Key highlights so far this year have included:

• Paul Geason, TE&G Group Managing Director, was interviewed under embargo by eight national newspapers, news wires and business television programs including The Australian, AAP, Business Spectator, Sky Business News and ABC Lateline Business;

• 23 articles appeared in Telstra’s core media list (The Australian, iTWire, Business Spectator, BNET, Communications Day, Exchange, Sky Business News, BRW), doubling 2010’s day-one coverage;

• The Telstra Productivity Indicator continues its influence and reach to TEG’s key audiences – in April, the 2010 report was referenced in the Federal Government’s draft paper on its information and communications technology (ICT) strategy. Previous reports have also been referenced by Australian public policy think tank The Grattan Institute and in a speech by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Motorola DEFY Launch Event

Ogilvy PR’s technology and business to business public relations agency, Howorth Communications, has a long-standing relationship with Motorola and hosted an event earlier in the year, focusing on Motorola’s re-entry to the Australian market following a quiet period.  To continue this momentum, Howorth was briefed to host another event to launch its newest smartphone and hero device, the DEFY.

The DEFY is built on the Android 2.1 operating system and the handset is water, dust and scratch resistant, making it the ultimate ‘summer-proof’ phone. It also features MOTOBLUR which allows users to sync all their contacts, messages and social media applications to their 3.7” screen.

As such, Motorola was targeting a young and active audience – consumers who want a phone that can keep up with their life but that also comes with all the features of an Android smartphone. The launch event had to serve a dual purpose – to educate media on the phone but also reflect the summer-proof and fun nature of the phone.

The Motorola DEFY event was hosted at the Ivy Penthouse, known for its exclusive and young energetic vibe. Ambassador of the DEFY handset and Pro skater Corbin Harris guest presented at the event, demonstratedwhy the DEFY is perfect for him and his lifestyle, even stating “It is so tough, I can’t even break it when it drops from my pocket“.

The public relations event consisted of two sessions, the first a private briefing session to all tier one, business, TV, lifestyle consumer and trade media hosted by Motorola and Telstra spokespeople, followed by a party, which was attended by a number of celebrities and social pages media.

The first session attracted 37 attendees from key media including; Sky Business News, Sydney Telegraph, Sydney Morning Herald, T3, Women’s Health, Cleo, Channel 9, Herald Sun, CNet, 2GB, Madison and Sun Herald S.

The second session attracted 30 key celebrities including; April Rose Pengilly, Alex Needs, Lincoln Lewis, Rhianna Fish and Roxy Jacenko. Also in attendance were seven snappers and twelve prominent social pages media.

The event was covered across a range of platforms.

Twitter activity was also significant with a peak in conversation which can be attributed to event use and encouragement of the #defy hashtag, including tweets from key celebrities April Rose Pengilly and Roxy Jacenko.

Ancestry Gillard/Abbott Family Trees

Challenge: To capitalise on the interest and broad media attention surrounding the 2010 Australian Federal Election, Ancestry.com.au set Ogilvy PR’s business and technology public relations agency, Howorth, the challenge to find an opportunity to get the family history website into the debate.

Idea: Research the family history of the two main candidates to discover their family pedigree and to investigate if there was anything in their family history that may have formed the basis for their political ideologies. This would create an interesting news angle, with human interest, and quite different from the traditional election coverage.

Insight: Research undertaken by Ancestry.com.au unveiled that for the first time in over 87 years, Australia’s elected Prime Minister would not be Australian born, with both Gillard and Abbott both from the UK.

Campaign: Working closely with Ancestry.com.au to research and pitch this unique insight to the media, Howorth negotiated an exclusive opportunity with Channel Nine’s Today Show. This was followed by both print and radio outreach, with many interviews conducted under embargo.

Results: The media outreach resulted in more than 44 ‘on message’ stories, including radio, television, print and online. Highlights included a five minute live-to-air TV interview on Australia’s highest rating morning show, the Today Show. The team also secured a full page feature article in The Daily Telegraph and an 18 minute interview with 2GB radio in Sydney.

In total the public relations campaign reached more than 3.4 million Australians, highlighting the value of taking a topical news issue and finding a related new insight.

Australia – Who Do You Think You Really Are?

Issue: As the generation gap widens and the population ages rapidly, Australia is in the midst of an identity crisis. Traditionally, family history has been passed down by our grandparents, however, as they pass away, so does their knowledge and many adults now know surprisingly little about their family history. To assist in closing the gap, Ancestry.com.au has worked over the last four years collating the Australian, Birth, Marriage and Death Indexes.

For the first time ever online, the records of those who were born, married or died in Australia from 1788 through to 1985 have been assembled into one fully searchable database.

Challenge: Researching a family tree has typically been a difficult process, involving long hours poring over microfiche in libraries and requiring a significant financial investment to obtain the necessary records. Additionally, this has traditionally been the activity of older generations. The launch of this collection makes it easier to research your family tree, and because of the depth of information included, generates mainstream appeal.

Insight: Through research it became clear that Australians did have a passion to discover where they came from and who their ancestors were. However many did not know much, if anything, about their family tree past their grandparents.

Creative Idea: With the information available in the collection and results from the research, the public relations campaign idea focused on asking Australians to rediscover “who they really are”, in order to drive a renewed interest in genealogy.

To bring this theme to life, Ogilvy PR’s business and technology public relations agency, Howorth, dug through the collection to uncover multiple human interest stories which would resonate with modern day Australians. The allure of ‘celebrity names’ was used to help Australians understand the depth and breadth of the type of records available.

By asking ‘who you really are’, it encouraged speculation of famous connections, including the Murdoch Family (Head of News Corp), Sir Donald Bradman (Famous Cricketer), Henry Lawson (Poet) & Edmund Barton (Australia’s First Prime Minister).

Campaign:  The public relations campaign featured a strong overall communications programme which included a digital and online strategy, backed by strong radio and print coverage to help drive discussion about family history and to set the news agenda on launch day.

Under embargo, Howorth negotiated a series of radio, print, online, TV and newswire exclusives with Australia’s most prominent and influential journalists. Additionally, Ancestry.com.au actively used Twitter and Facebook to promote where and when you could hear Ancestry.com.au speaking about family history – either at events or on radio. This included posting coverage and links of details of live radio interviews.

Outcome: Overall, the public relations campaign generated over 70 pieces of coverage (including 15 radio interviews) and reached over 5 million Australians during the two week campaign.

The collection launch resulted in Ancestry.com.au receiving its highest number of unique browsers to the site in one day. After the campaign, the website continued to receive a high volume of browsers and registrations – with registrations for the free trial membership increasing by 348 per cent from the previous year, and paid membership by 246 per cent.

The campaign has firmly placed family history back at the forefront of conversations and at the same time established Ancestry.com.au as the leading authority for family history.

From Clink to Click: ancestry.com.au calls up the past

Challenge

Do you have a convict ancestor? If you did, would you know? In its first project for Australia’s leading family history website, Ancestry.com.au, public relations agency Howorth led a PR campaign to launch two new convict-based historical record collections to the public. These records (the Convict Registers of Conditional and Absolute Pardons, 1791-1846 and the New South Wales Certificates of Freedom, 1827-1867) complete the journey from arrest to release of almost one third of all convicts transported to Australia.

With more than 2.3 million criminal and convict records now available online, Ancestry.com.au made the entirety of its 15-part Australian Convicts Collection accessible for free for eight days in January 2010. With the door to the past wide open, Howorth had to convince the public to come knocking.

Insight

Howorth constructed a public relations campaign, tied into Australia Day, to get consumers thinking about how their families originally made it to the Lucky Country, before encouraging them to dig down into their own pasts.

Creative idea, relentless execution

Howorth knew it needed a high-profile partner for the campaign launch, so secured a national News Limited exclusive for Australia Day itself, which resulted in coverage in all news.com.au sites across Australia. Metropolitan radio talk back programs were also targeted with embargoed material so they could incorporate the story into the weekly plan. Following this initial coverage burst, the release was then issued to all other media.

Outcomes

The response locally for the convict collection was overwhelming, with more than 200 pieces of coverage, including breaking news online across Fairfax and news.com.au, and radio news bulletins. 20 radio interviews were conducted across commercial, AM and community radio, from the ABC to 2GB, with some stations syndicating the interviews across their networks and regions to raise coverage levels even further. Print coverage included major pieces in the Hobart Mercury, Canberra Times and Sunday Territorian. Through social media engagement, public relations agency Howorth also generated 21 ‘Tweets’ on the open Convict Collection indexes, with some of the influential Twitter users having over 1000 followers.

As a result of the PR campaign, Ancestry.com.au received their highest ever unique visitors for a single day on Australia Day (25^th January 2010 ).

Gratifyingly, the client was thrilled with the results; “The Howorth team achieved results well beyond our expectations. This is a great start to our relationship,” said Debra Chesterton, Managing Director, Ancestry.com.au.

A smart way to revive a brand …. AND …. launch a smart-phone

Challenge

After several years losing market share in Australia, public relations agency Howorth successfully orchestrated Motorola’s comeback, with the launch of its new range of Android powered smart-phone devices. Howorth’s objectives? Simple – create mass-market interest across consumer and technology media, reaching out to consumers looking for a new smart-phone.

Insight

Differentiating a phone from the pack can be difficult, but Motorola’s new Android range of smart-phones held one key ingredient , MOTOBLUR – the first mobile experience to deliver your social life straight to your mobile phone, streaming conversations, friends and widgets right into your handset to provide a never-ending flow of updates.

We understood that the media would need to try out the phone themselves to get the full effect of the MOTOBLUR package, so they could appreciate first-hand how it could link their lives via the web. As a result, Howorth’s public relations strategy was designed to ensure media had maximum exposure to the MOTOBLUR experience – from one-on-one demos and the opportunity to take handsets for review, to a fully immersive and interactive launch.

Creative idea, relentless execution

Rebuilding a brand and restoring consumer confidence is no small feat. Public relations agency Howorth held 12 one to one briefings and handset demonstrations in the lead-up to the event, with outlets handpicked to ensure a wide depth of coverage on launch day. Media were enticed to explore MOTOBLUR before its official launch included the Daily Telegraph, Sydney Morning Herald, Channel 7, Channel 9, T3, Grazia and Women’s Health.

The focus then switched to the event itself. Taking over the Cargo Hall at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, MOTOBLUR’s features were unveiled through stunning visuals presented on a mammoth concave screen: embracing our presenters to showcase social streaming as life in motion, a network surrounding us in all that we do.

Outcomes

On the day of launch, Motorola and Optus spokespeople conducted one to one media briefings at the event with key influencers The Australian, iTNews and iTWire.

These interviews, plus our strategic warm-up prior to the event, generated more than 100 pieces of coverage across metropolitan, consumer, technology and business media (print, broadcast and online). Highlights to date include a demonstration on Channel 9’s Today show, the front page of Australian T3, and pick-up across a range of specialist outlets like Gizmodo, ITnews.com.au, Good Gear Guide, Zoo Weekly, Smarthouse, iTWire.com.au, CNET Australia and GadgetGuy.com.au.

Small gadgets, small budget, BIG results

Challenge

Public relations agency Howorth began working with Australian family-owned Mac accessories distributor Try & Byte in November last year, briefed to raise awareness of their website via positive media relations.

Creative idea, relentless execution

A distributor of new consumer products aimed at Mac users and general consumers, www.try&byte.com.au regularly releases innovative technology to its customers.

With a small budget, we needed to find effective ways to pitch the latest Try & Byte accessories and products into consumer and consumer technology media. We therefore focused on the latest five products available on the site, selecting highly targeted media for reviews and profiles.

Outcomes

Our public relations campaign has so far reached over 4.5 million Australians through media coverage: punching well above the investment. Coverage has included a cover story in Macworld and articles now running into the double figures across tier one targets like The West Australian, The Courier Mail, Gizmodo, Cybershack, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sunday Herald Sun, Girlfriend and Home Entertainment Magazine.

Microsoft Surface Launch

To mark the commercial availability of Microsoft Surface, Ogilvy PR’s technology public relations agency Howorth worked with Microsoft Australia to host a media launch event to showcase the features of this innovative new hardware device at their Australian headquarters in Sydney on Tuesday, 9 February 2010. Surface is a new multi-touch product, developed as a software and hardware combination technology. The device allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of gesture recognition.

The launch produced fantastic results for Microsoft, with 32 key media and analysts attending the public relations event including The Australian, SMH.com.au and CNET. Following the launch, over 40 pieces of coverage were published across a variety of online, print and broadcast outlets, including key metropolitan, consumer, technology and business media targets. Stand out pieces following launch included a five minute, live-to-air interview on Sky Business News’ Tech Report and a live demonstration of Surface on Channel 9’s TODAY program. The show’s technology editor, Charlie Brown, and host Karl Stefanovic demonstrated the Surface product and discussed its potential commercial uses.

Howorth’s primary PR role was to drive awareness across broadcast, consumer and IT media to strengthen Microsoft’s profile as an innovator and leader in the technology field, as well as to promote Microsoft Surface as a desirable and game-changing product to potential partners and customers. The results of Howorth’s PR strategy helped generate an extremely positive buzz around the launch event. The coverage that appeared in the days following positioned Microsoft as an innovative company and highlighted the collaborative and inventive features of Microsoft’s new Surface unit.

Following the launch, Microsoft Australia Developer Evangelist, Michael Kordahi praised Howorth’s efforts by saying, “Howorth deserve some major credit for delivering a successful launch. They not only delivered, they delivered with the highest of standards and passion. Despite the very aggressive timeframe of the launch, they provided a-class service.”