With just one month left of the year it seems like everyone has their sights set on the future. For us, that means onboarding a new team member, starting work on an incredible new client brief, and finding room in our trophy cabinet for more national awards.
What it doesn’t mean is banging on about a future skills shortage many believe is set to plague the comms industry. Instead, we were one of the first agencies to join the Manchester Press Association’s drive to promote the media and marketing to the next generation, ensuring the forecast drought will hopefully never materialise.
The #NativeCreative event welcomed school-age children from across the region, with Smoking Gun facilitating and co-creating the PR and social media zone. Our staff were on hand to answer questions about day-to-day life in the most exciting professional sector imaginable, with MD Rick Guttridge involved in a Meet the Bosses panel.
The final “meet the bosses” panel @MPAweareyou #NativeCreatives need diversity of all culture, age and education to meet the needs of dynamic and diverse organisations pic.twitter.com/LfRRW0zCW2
— Adam Petch (@AdamCareersAdvr) November 14, 2018
A week later he was then part of the PRWeek Breakfast Briefing, dedicated to the question of PR measurement and evaluation— a subject we have focussed our blog posts on during November. Take a look at this report from the morning debate for proof that our team is committed to improving transparency, relevancy and legitimacy of campaign results. . It was also great to see AMEC officially launching its 3M maturity mapper concept, which Rick was part of the initial beta research and heard in detail at the Barcelona summit earlier this year, a system that helps organisations work out where they sit in their journey of evaluation process development.
It’s one of the reasons Smoking Gun just walked away with two CIPR PRide Awards, for Gold Media Relations and Silver Consumer Relations— our efforts for our FMCG client have helped treble the size of the company, turning it into the fastest growing brand in its category. Impressive outcomes made possible because our targets were directly linked to real business objectives, a key aspect of new approaches to PR measurement.
Elsewhere, we continued to make national headlines across our beloved brands, including five minutes on BBC television for Bravura Food MD Lisa Gawthorne. We’ve also been producing some top quality creative to help draw social media attention to the businesses we represent.
All of which goes some way to explaining why a fabulous online estate agency has just become our latest signee, watch this space for more news on that, and why the super-talented Olivia Bence has decided to join our office as a new Account Executive.
How’s all that for combatting the winter blues?
