I was happy to see B-M back on the industry radar screen at this year’s Asia-Pacific PR awards. B-M China won “Product Brand Development Campaign of the Year” for its work on behalf of our client Wrigley, and I was honoured to receive the “PR Agency Head of the Year” award (which was truly a team trophy if there ever was one).

One of the highlights for me this year was being able to hand Brian Cronkhite of B-M Shanghai the “Corporate Communicator of the Year” award for the WPP X Team – in which our firm plays a leading role – for the Ford Motor Company.

Today in Singapore I enjoyed speaking at a great industry platform, The Holmes Report’s Asia-Pacific ‘ThinkTank Live.’ The topic: “How Asian corporations are using social media to communicate with global communities.” Click here for a copy of the presentation.

See the below or click here to review the presentation.

The event also garnered media interest, with this article appearing in the Korea Economic Daily (Korean language):



by Bob Pickard

Last week when I was travelling to India, one story totally commanded the news: the hunger strike of social activist Anna Hazare, who was fasting to force pressure on the Indian government to enact a tough new anti-corruption law.

Day after day, every newspaper front page was dominated by coverage of the Anna protest, and in channel-surfing India’s many all-news TV networks, you would think there was nothing else going on in the world.

The Anna story received such massive publicity, to the extent that one can reasonably ask whether the media was just covering a phenomenon or actually also helping to create one for commercial purposes.

Certainly there were many conditions conducive for a craze, starting with a vast audience of consumers coveted by media organizations in a hyper-competitive news market (media of all kinds – including traditional and new – is growing in India).

As a country with a rising middle class that’s become increasingly fed-up with the negative consequences of corruption in society, India is surely ripe territory for such a popular protest. The middle class already numbers 160 million people and a study by India’s National Council for Applied Economic Research predicts it will explode in size to 267 million within five years (still a minority of India’s 1.2 billion people it should be noted).

Following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Anna’s emphasis on nonviolent methods struck a chord and he seemingly achieved ‘societal alignment’ with communications content that resonated with popular sensibilities. His approach recalled the passion and success of storied protests from India’s independence movement (Indian Independence Day’s arrival on August 15^th was a timely milestone).

Conflict and contrast help drive the most vivid news coverage, and the government’s handling of the situation provided both for this story. Conflict: Anna was arrested at one point, which supplied grist for the media mill. Contrast: The fact that Anna shares in common with the Prime Minister an older age (both are in their 70s) provided ample opportunity for media to portray Anna as being vivified by ‘people power’ with the PM seeming wan and remote in comparison.

Momentum perceptions played a key role in the Anna story. Large and animated crowds were always in the backdrop, and later on as the hunger strike progressed, so were what seemed a bigger and bigger team of doctors tending to Anna. As the hero of the story became weaker, the apparent popular sentiment became stronger and larger at the same time owing to a classic ‘bandwagon effect.’

This created an audience-grabbing suspense; the question was: ‘will the government give in before Anna passes the point of no return?’ The prospect of a brave death draws a crowd in the media, especially if it is going to be on principle in support of a cause so many believe in.

This gripping drama, easy to follow and relentlessly repeated in the media, transfixed India and achieved world attention as few stories do (amplified and accelerated by social networks).

I don’t know if there was a public relations strategy devised and implemented by ‘Team Anna.’ If there was, I would give it high marks for results, because it looks like the Anna phenomenon is poised to effect political reforms and changes for the better.

Notes:

1. Thanks to Prema Sagar and Rahul Sharma for sharing their insights on this topic…both brilliant observers of the India public affairs scene.

2. I was already working on my Anna article when I saw this Reuters blog and thought the headline was perfect and so have repurposed it here in this post’s title.

Travelling in Europe the past few days, this Reuters headline caught my eye: “Asia surpasses Europe in millionaires and wealth” (based on a study published by client Merrill-Lynch).

It seems an apt milestone given that I have been delivering speeches on the theme of “the rise of Asia in the world of PR” and what European companies need to know about communicating in the region.

I think most people realize that the global economic order is shifting and that one day China will become the world’s largest economy. What’s less understood is how fast this is happening and the sheer scale that Asia is forecast to achieve during our lifetimes.

Citigroup recently projected that the Chinese economy will be bigger than each of America’s and the EU’s during the 2020s. By 2050, it will be much bigger than those combined, with about half (49%) of the world’s economy in Asia, up from 29% today. By then India will have the second largest GDP, the US in third place, followed by Indonesia and Brazil with individual European economies trailing far behind.

The PR industry will reflect this new economic order, with Asia commanding a much greater share of investment in communications services than ever before. By some estimates, the entire global PR consulting sector is worth $10 billion, but currently no PR firm bills even $100 million in Asia.

Two trends will change that soon enough:

First, the well known Western multinationals will boost their PR spending in Asia.

Today many of these are chronically under-investing in the region, with budgets flat and overly weighted towards mature Western markets. Many suffer from dated thinking about the fair market value of PR in the East as well as from chauvinisms concerning service quality rooted the stereotypes of another era. Still, for these companies, thriving in the future means more PR investment in Asia, the region that offers far greater growth potential than developed countries drowning in debt.

Second, the now one third (34% according to Forbes) of the world’s largest 2000 companies now based in Asia.

We’ve never heard of most of these emerging multinationals, and now they are starting to invest real money in global communications from an Asian platform.

That’s an important point, because PR campaigns in Asia have often been ‘hub and spoke’ efforts where decisions are made in Western capitals with regional headquarters city hubs administering implementation. Domestic PR efforts have tended towards localisation of globally supplied template approaches to PR.

Nowadays, with the face-to-face agency-client relationship based at the Asian headquarters, PR people in the East are gaining more opportunities than ever to devise and manage global PR campaigns. This is proving quite an adjustment for some in Western agency networks unaccustomed to following leadership direction from Beijing, Delhi, Seoul and indeed Tokyo. It’s also daunting for some people in senior positions who may have never run an international campaign from Asia before and who I’ve noticed may therefore suffer from a lack of confidence in leading their global charge from the East.

There is a long tradition of complaining about Western-centrism in Asia, with many derisive of those with ‘global’ titles who are thought to lack understanding of the Asian context. Sometimes these complaints seem valid but what we’re going to find now with this shift of global PR power is that it’s easy to criticise but a lot harder to paint on the bigger global communications canvases were seeing on our side of the Pacific for the first time.