This day, we visited two prominent media companies in London – Battenhall and Burson, Cohn, and Wolfe.
Battenhall is a newer venture at only 6 years old, but has already won 10 Agency of the Year awards for their innovative work. They are a communications agency for the social media age. They consider social media to be a specialism and aim to reinvent how public relations is done. They are among the first in PR to utilize social media and it all started with founder David Bervie accidentally creating a blog.
Battenhall is sought out by big companies including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and they don’t even advertise themselves. They use a smorgasbord of tools to aid them in their work of gauging trends, learning of news, auditing social media – NewsJacker, Waze, Radarly, and HypeAuditor, to name a few – to reactively monitor data for their clients. We got to listen to members from different departments. One of the most striking similarities in all of the employees that shared presentations with us was that they are all happy and passionate about their jobs.
Burson, Cohn, and Wolfe is an integrated communications solutions agency who have moved into integrated marketing as PR is changing. Their creative team works will all divisions, including healthcare, technology and innovations, corporate affairs, and public affairs. They offer clients creative support, brainstorming facilitation, platforms for expression, aid in production, and creative training. They’ve done work for large companies like Hotels.com and Pfizer.
We had a really interesting exercise where we broke into groups of three and worked to tackle a possible business venture. We were to develop a media approach that targets a new market for a product following the steps they use in their own creative process. Once we established a clear (enough) message and intention on how to strike the interest of the new market, we were instructed to switch ideas with another team for actual campaign development. This was a good metaphor of how quickly things can change in the media business.
The most valuable lessons I got out of this day were to never let anything be detrimental to my creativity and to never stop working on my technological skills.