Journo of the Month

Our journalist of the month this month is the fantastic Thomas Swallow. Thomas is the Style and Grooming writer for The Gay UK and has a passion for grooming, fitness and fashion. He’s also the guy behind @urbanmaleuk. Here, he answers the notorious Sunny Bird PR questions…

1.       What are the 5 words that best describe you?

Determined, enthusiastic, sassy, confident and well-groomed (I’m counting it as one word 😂)

2.       What magazine do you love reading and why?

My favourite magazine to read is GQ. I think it’s the only male magazine that features all the things I’m passionate about but holds the side of misogyny. As a gay man I can still like fitness, grooming and fashion, without it all being geared to getting laid. You know what I mean? 

3.       What is your favourite book?

Sounds cliché but it will always be “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. Read it in secondary school like most of the UK and completely fell in love with the book. I think it’s such an important literary piece that defines the injustice present within the world.

4.       Which song makes you dance?

Avicii: Wake Me Up

5.       What has been your best career moment?

Getting published for the first time and seeing my name in print. Pretty sure I cried on the phone telling my parents. Yes, I am indeed a sap!

6.       What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?

Well I was at university in Newcastle, so it would probably be to invest in better fake tan. You know, orange just ain’t a look! In all honesty I’d probably just have told myself to relax more. I used to spend so much time at uni thinking of what everyone thought of me, me being gay and my appearance. The thing is there was nothing wrong with any of it and as soon as I realised that, I just became so much more of a fun-loving and confident guy.

7.       Where are you happiest?

Sweden! I went on an exchange at university there for half a year and I just fell in love with the country. There’s just something about it that I find so relaxing. If I ever need to focus and get something done, I head there for a mini break. If you’ve never been, try it! Plus their summers are consistently in the mid 20s to 30s…. #JustSaying

8.       Who would be your number one dinner guest be and why?

I think it would be Jake Gyllenhaal and not just because I want to marry him, although if by some chance you’re reading this, yes, I am indeed single! I just found him such an inspirational role model growing up. He has such a liberal attitude to life and he was an English major at university, so we’d at least have a starting point to planning the wedding.

9.       If you could have any superpower, what power would it be and why?

I would like to be able to speak any language in the world. Sounds a bizarre one but I love travelling and making connections while doing so. Some of my best friends live in other countries and I just wish they didn’t always have to speak English for me. Currently trying to learn Spanish… it’s not going well!

10.   If you had to ask us one question what would it be?

What do you consider the most enjoyable part of working in PR?

Sunny – For me it’s all about meeting inspiring new brands. We are lucky enough to be surrounded by creativity on a daily basis and creative people and I love being inspired by them.

Laura – No two days are the same in PR and I love the variety of stuff you work on. You become an expert in everything from business bartering software to the science behind snoring. You get such a breadth of knowledge working in PR – it’s great for pub quizzes!

Georgie – I love how creative we get to be in PR. Every day we are given opportunities to stretch our creative muscles, whether it’s coming up with a new angle to get our clients in press or whether it’s putting yourself into the customer’s shoes to write up a press release.

Jess – Every day is different, one day you might be working on pitching a cool new product to journalists and the next you might be hosting an event for a client. You never know where the next week is going to take you, so it certainly keeps you on your toes!

Elizabeth – The most enjoyable part of PR is that it’s all about communication and I love communicating! Whether that’s through words, graphics, events, social media, websites, radio, TV, interviews, interpretative dance, etc etc, each opportunity to connect presents a new challenge and a chance to shine!

Rachael – I love that PR is part of the media industry, so we keep up to date on what’s going on in the world and the news, not only for our clients but generally in the media too. I love spending time researching what journalists are talking about.

Beating the Algorithms on Instagram

Instagram is arguably one of the fastest growing and developing social media networks out there, having grown from 700 million users to 1 billion in just two years. This puts it just behind Facebook in the social media rankings for active users.

Of that 1 billion people 34% of them are millennials, an audience that are far more clued up and cynical of brands on social media than their baby boomer parents. With 4.2 billion likes taking place on the platform each day (more than any other social media channel) Instagram is officially the happiest place on the Internet – providing brands with an invaluable route to reaching their millennial target audience in an organic way, cutting through the cynicism that millennials feel towards brands on social media and actively engaging them.

Because of this, 86% of top brands have Instagram accounts, but Instagram isn’t only great for huge corporates, it’s also equally brilliant for smaller brands and businesses who have a real opportunity to build a great network of customers on the channel. The great thing about Instagram is that it is an up and coming channel for businesses and brands, meaning that it’s far easier to master than Facebook for example, with less algorithms pushing brands to the bottom of people’s newsfeeds.

With these elements in mind we recognised that Instagram was a key social media channel for our business, with many sales of tickets for our courses coming directly from Instagram. In the month of January, we aimed to improve all our Instagram stats (post reach and post engagement on our best performing post, followers, overall post likes, overall post comments and our story reach) by 100% in comparison to December’s stats.

Getting the Strategy Right

In order to get 100% improvement across all stats we couldn’t rely on luck, so we formulated an Instagram strategy based on previous analytics. In order to compile this we looked back at the best performing posts for the last 6 months (these can be accessed through your Instagram insights) to understand what our audience liked to see. From this, we found that images tagging in lots of people and including our clients got great engagement and was something that we wanted to replicate. We believe firmly in not reinventing the wheel – if something has worked well recently, learn from that and replicate it in your future posts.

Interestingly enough, the posts that we had expected to perform just as well the second time didn’t do as well as we had anticipated, our likes improved in comparison to week 1 of December, but not enough for us to be hitting 100% by the end of the month. This might not be the same for every business account – some might find that replicating content is a great strategy to grow their channel and discovering whether it’s right for you is all about testing it out and seeing what happens! We learnt that it wasn’t right for our feed, therefore it was back to the drawing board and time to do some serious research with three weeks left to up our stats.

Improving Your Instagram Reach

Your Instagram reach is the amount of people that see your posts, whether that be on their main feed or on their explore page. Much like Facebook, Instagram reach differs from engagement as many people might see your posts without interacting with them. Reach is important to building a following on Instagram and getting in front of both new and existing followers and fans of your brand. The good news with Instagram is that reach is relatively easy to improve if done in the right way. In order to increase our own reach, we took several different tactics.

Hashtags

Firstly, we built up a bank of hashtags for our brand. Building a bank of hashtags isn’t as simple as tagging everything with #ootd or #love. Hashtags are under-used as a brilliant resource for brands. Research taught us that hashtags should be carefully selected. We created some guidelines for hashtag selection, these were:

1.       Hashtags should be community minded – simply selecting the hashtag with the most posts is rarely the right way to go for your business. Instead, find hashtags that generally have less than 50k uses to reach a really targeted and specific community of people.

2.       Hashtags must be targeted for the business – getting in front of people that aren’t interested or engaging with your content is pointless for hitting your business objectives. Hashtags should be targeted to reach people that you know for a fact will be interested in what you are posting about – whether that be new customers, other brands or organisations that you want to work with.

3.       Hashtags should be changed every month – like all elements of social media you shouldn’t stick with something because it worked once. You must constantly analyse your hashtags to continue to improve and grow. Plus, if you keep appearing on the same pages at some point that audience will tire of seeing your posts and it’ll be time to target someone new!

Instagram now allows hashtag analytics which is great to see. On your ‘insights’ page, you can view how many people found your posts via a hashtag and see which are performing best for your account. This can help you refine which hashtags you use and help you to improve your reach.

During our research we found lots of rumours that you should only use five hashtags on your posts or Instagram will flag you as spam. However, we tested this theory by posting with only five hashtags and posting with up to 30 hashtags (the maximum you can have on Instagram). Consistently, our posts with more hashtags on performed drastically better than those with only five hashtags, putting to bed those rumours.

Instagram Pods

One of the new tactics that Instagram users are taking to get around algorithms for reach is ‘Instagram Pods’. These are a relatively new phenomenon in the industry, having come about to get around the fact that Instagram prioritises content that gets lots of engagement, very quickly. Essentially, Instagram pushes to the top of your feed the posts that have had a ‘flurry’ of likes and comments very soon after being posted. Instagram pods are groups that Instagram users have formed, in which they agree to engage with each other’s posts as soon as they have gone live.

This is a tactic that we tried in the office, getting everyone to like and comment on the posts as soon as we have posted – and it worked! The first post that we tried this out on went on to become our best performing post of the month.

One key thing to bear in mind if you are going to try this tactic is that Instagram only really ‘counts’ comments that are longer than four words, and sadly, emojis don’t count either.

Tagging in Other Users

Using high-profile users to get in front of their followers is a great tactic to improving your Instagram reach. Sharing content from bloggers and tagging them in or tagging in prominent thought-leaders in your industry can improve your reach if you’re lucky enough to get a like back. When they like or engage with your content, your post will appear on the ‘explore’ page of their followers.

Improving your Instagram reach very much sits alongside improving your Instagram engagement and the two stats go hand in hand – improving your reach will improve your engagement and vice versa.

Improving Instagram Post Engagement

Post engagement is a key metric for achieving most business objectives on social media, and engagement is the buzzword of the moment – but how can you improve it? Well, Instagram, like Facebook, is all about building a community and encouraging organic engagement. Here’s how you can do that…

Engage with Others

Engagement is a two-way street, and you can’t expect to get tons of likes and comments on your posts if you’re not engaging with others. Following key Instagram users, whether that be new customers, other brands or existing customers, and engaging with them regularly will help you to build a community of loyal followers that regularly comment on and like your posts. Engaging with others is a long game, and miracles don’t come overnight. It’s not as simple as just liking a few other people’s posts, it’s about building an ongoing conversation with people that are key for your business.

Engage with Your Own Content

Whilst engaging with others is vital, it’s even more important to engage with your own content! It might sound silly but many brands put up a picture on Instagram and expect it to get loads of comments and likes, when the process doesn’t work quite like that. When people engage with you by commenting on your posts, demonstrate that you are active by commenting back quickly. Not only will they appreciate your time and energy, but by asking an open-ended question it keeps the conversational ball rolling, getting you even more comments and thus improving your reach.

Bring Value to Your Audience

Why should people actually engage with you? Do you have an answer to that question? Nowadays, you have to earn your engagement, and no one is entitled to it. In the social media industry, there are three elements to producing brilliant content that adds value to your audience’s day: entertainment; inspiration and education. If your content falls into one of these three categories then you’re on to a winner! Here’s a breakdown:

1.       Entertainment – is what you’re posting going to brighten someone’s day? Make them laugh or cry (in a good way of course!). Users will actively come to your channel if they know you to be entertaining.

2.       Inspiration – whether we admit it or not, most people use social media to improve their appearance in their social circles and show off the best parts of their life. Posting inspirational content encourages shareability, as users engage with your inspirational content to inspire their own followers in turn.

3.       Education – are they learning something? Remember, you are the expert in your own industry, and you can help to teach them something with your channel. Plus, this is a great opportunity to show off your own achievements whilst also adding some value for your audience! For us, sharing a great article that we secured for a client with some information about how we did it performed well.

Understanding how to bring value to your audience comes down to understanding them and what they want to see from you. By heading to your insights tab and checking out the audience insights you can find out more about your followers in detail. Then it’s all about brainstorming what type of content that audience would like to see and creating it.

Using Long Form Content

Adding value to your audience goes hand in hand with creating long-form content. The longer that a user spends on your post, whether that be reading the caption or writing a response, the more Instagram likes it and the higher up the feed it will end up. You can engage people for longer by using long-form content that they spend a long time reading, but make sure it’s adding that value for it to actually keep your followers engaged.

Use People’s Faces

Users like the personal touch on Instagram, a behind-the-scenes look at the human face behind the brand if you like. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that posts with faces in get 38% more likes than those without.

Our Most Engaged Post

Following our research, we put all our points into practise. We created a bank of relevant hashtags for our audience, wrote some long-form content that taught our audience how they could do their own PR and shared it alongside a picture of our lovely Account Manager Alex. We tagged in prominent journalists and brands including our client, Jimmy’s Iced Coffee and posted it. We then had the whole team like and comment on the post. As you can see from the below – it worked! The post went on to become our best performing post EVER and drastically improved on our best performing post from December – our likes increased by 142%, our comments increased by 366%, our profile visits increased by 350% and our reach improved by 111%!

Getting More Instagram Followers

We hear very often about businesses who are setting out just to get more followers on Instagram, especially as Instagram reserves the coveted ‘swipe up to buy’ feature on Instagram stories for those with more than 10k followers.

Having loads of followers isn’t relevant if the audience isn’t engaged, and we would encourage always prioritising genuine engagement over follower count. However, we totally get why businesses would want to improve their follower count, whether that be so that they have the same amount or more as competitors or whether it’s just to access the swipe up feature.

We believe that the best way to improve your follower count is to build an actively engaged following, thus killing two birds with one stone. Here’s how we improved our followers by 226% in January:

1.       Following and unfollowing – there is an easy way to get your name in front of potential customers, and that’s by following them! We aim to follow 50 new people a day where we can, which really improves our follower count. However, we don’t want followers that won’t engage with us, therefore we’re super careful about who we follow. You could follow those that like similar brands to yours, those that follow influencers that you work with or even those that actively engage with your competitors. Taking this approach will help you to up your followers without sacrificing engagement.

2.       Increase your post reach – it goes without saying that the more people you get in front of, the more followers you will get. Using the above tips to increase your post reach will help you to organically boost your followers.

3.       Get in front of the right people – using the right hashtags and engaging with the right people as mentioned above is key to building that highly engaged following that we all want!

Improving Instagram Story Reach

Stories is an entirely different ball game from feed posts which we have been discussing in this blog so far. Stories are a hugely growing feature of Instagram, in fact, they’re growing 15 times faster than feed-based posts! We found stories the most challenging element of Instagram to master as they are a relatively new feature and there isn’t too much research out there yet. In the end, we managed to improve our story reach by 27% - it was the only stat not to hit 100%. Whilst we didn’t quite hit our target, we were pleased to have improved the reach at all due to how challenging it was. Here’s how we did it…

How Do Stories Work?

Stories are prioritised on your ‘storyline’ (the bar of stories across the top of your feed) by the brands and accounts that you engage with most. The more of someone’s stories you watch the higher up they will appear. In order to get around this, improving your stories reach must be approached as a long game. Consistently posting ultra-engaging and super-targeted content on your stories will make users realise that they want to be checking out what you’re up to, and the more they visit your stories the higher up they will appear. Therefore, creating story specific content (not just sharing your feed posts to your stories) is really important.

Make Use of Story Features

There are certain features available on stories that aren’t available on feed-posts, such as GIFs, location tags and hashtags. Making use of these distinguishes your stories from your feed posts and engages users far more than generic stories, meaning they won’t click past your content so fast!

Tag in Other People

On stories you can tag in other Instagram users, who can then share your content to their own story. This is a great way of not only improving your story reach but also getting on the feeds of brands that you admire and in front of those all-important potential customers.

Our best performing story was one that tagged in Sunny our MD, who has a highly engaged following on Instagram, which she then shared to her feed. This prompted lots of her followers to then visit our profile and engage with our feed posts too.

Summary

Overall, Instagram is a great platform for reaching a millennial audience in an organic way and cutting through the noise of advertising on Facebook. Remember though that millennials aren’t the only people on Instagram, so it’s all about checking out those audience insights to see who is following you.

Since doing this research and putting it into practise, our Instagram is consistently achieving almost 100% better than it was before the research, and the great part is that many of these tips are things that can be put into practise quite easily and quickly. For example, having a bank of hashtags in the notes on your phone that you can copy and paste onto all Instagram posts.

Like all social media, what worked for us might not necessarily work for you – so make sure you test all these tactics thoroughly to understand what works best for you and your business.

The Good, The Bad and The Viral

The team have started 2019 with a creative bang (who said January blues?!) and scoured the world of PR for some inspiring and insightful PR campaigns. From a hard-hitting domestic violence campaign to gravy scented candles and gender-revealing pasta dishes, this month has it all.

So grab a cup of something warm and enjoy the team’s top picks for this month’s Good, Bad and Viral PR campaigns.

Domestic Violence Reversable Poems

Domestic violence charity Refuge launched a hard-hitting Christmas campaign aimed at turning attitudes of domestic violence on their head. Working in partnership with McCann Bristol, the charity ran a series of reversible poems, which, if read normally conjured images of a traditional family Christmas. But when read in from bottom to top the lines revealed the horrors of a household living with domestic violence.

The poetry campaign was promoted across Twitter and on the charity’s website, as part of a global initiative called 16 days of action (25 November – 10 December) to raise awareness of violence against women and girls.  It is part of Refuge’s ongoing mission to help victims of abuse, as research shows two women a week are killed at the hands of a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales, and another three women commit suicide each week as a way of escape.

Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, said: "Domestic abuse is the biggest issue affecting women and children in this country today – it really is a life and death issue. Yet still too few women know how to spot the signs of domestic violence, realise that domestic abuse is a crime or know that Refuge is here to support them.

"We want women to know that, no matter what time of year, no one should suffer in silence and they should ‘turn’ to us for support."

The hard-hitting poems were featured in multiple publications including The Sun, Refinery 29, The Pool, Cosmopolitan and The Independent.

KFC Sold Gravy-scented Candles

What could cheer you up more on Blue Monday than a KFC gravy scented candle?

KFC cleverly launched a limited-edition gravy-scented candle to bring happiness to KFC fanatics on Blue Monday!

There were just 230 limited edition candles up for grabs, they were available on a first-come, first-served basis. They were also free! To accompany the delicious gravy scent, KFC unveiled a new KFChill experience which allows users to listen to sounds of their KFC Gravy Mega Box. Choosing between the sounds of frying chicken, falling fries or simmering gravy.

KFC have released a chicken scented candle and bath bomb in the USA before but this is the first time a KFC scented product has been released in the UK.

This campaign achieved coverage in national newspapers such as The Sun, The Evening Standard and The Mirror, and The Metro!

The Gender-Reveal Lasagna

Is it gross or pure genius? The launch of the gender-reveal lasagna (yes, we know this is not how you spell lasagne – but it is how they’ve spelled it so we kind of have to too!) pretty much broke the internet this month!

US restaurant and catering service, Villa Italian Kitchen, announced that they were introducing a new dish that would reveal the sex of your unborn child – the perfect addiction for your next baby shower?

The Italian creation consists of a secret pink or blue interior, made from layers of cheese, Alfredo sauces and Italian pasta. It doesn’t come cheap though, the dish is priced at $140 and serves 12 people.

Journalists from around the world took to Twitter to discuss the bizarre PR pitch that had just landed in their inbox, with one announcing: “Possibly the best subject line in an email ever: "Gender Reveal Lasagna?! – Villa Italian Kitchen Invites Guests to Celebrate their Bundles of Joy with Boatloads of Cheese!". The noise of tweets resulted in the #LasagnaReveal trending on Twitter.

Despite many negative responses to the latest way to reveal the gender of your little bundle of joy, the stunt did exactly what it set out to do and had everybody talking about it. A cheap photoshoot and some food colouring, and your brand is being talked about across the world! Plus, we’re sure they have been inundated with requests for the sought-after dish, boosting sales.

The news was featured in many publications across the UK and US including Daily Mail, The Independent, The Mirror, Grazia Daily, BuzzFeed, MSN, Metro, I Heart radio.

Clear Channel Homeless Billboard

A company called Clear Channel Sweden has teamed up with the government to protect homeless people when the weather drops to freezing conditions in Stockholm.

The company helped homeless people find their nearest shelter through innovative technology; they swapped the boring ads on billboards with directions to the nearest homeless shelter which we love. Across Stockholm, 53 billboards were activated for the program and they focused on areas that were most commonly used for homeless people. We think this is a brilliant use of technology and makes us happy that it is helping homelessness in one country, even if it is just a little.

Clear Channel International said “thanks to technology, we can develop solutions that can help people and cities”. This campaign had a positive response and featured in multiple publications including The Drum.

Uber links up with Calm to offer wellbeing exercises whilst travelling

Mindfulness and meditation is definitely a buzzword at the moment and it’s something that we’ve got involved with in the Sunny Bird PR office, with many of the team trying out the Calm app for guided meditations, which is why we love this collaboration between Calm and Uber.

The two companies have teamed together to help bring some relaxation to our hectic lives with their meditation exercises for Uber passengers. The apps have released four exercises of varying durations designed to fill a taxi journey lasting 3 minutes, 5.5 minutes, 12 minutes and 30 minutes. The campaign is accompanied by a survey that shows that 54% of Uber riders use their time in a cab to scroll through emails, social media and the news on their smartphones. Uber are aiming to turn taxi rides on their head – turning them into opportunities to relax and unwind.

This great campaign achieved articles in The Independent, Gizmodo, Metro and London Evening Standard.

PR Campaigns - The Good, The Bad & The Viral - Christmas Special

As 2018 draws to a close and we head into the holiday season we’ve been taking a look at some of our favourite Christmas campaigns from 2018. From scripts painted on train platforms, to stepping into Christmas with Elton John and slightly-more-exciting-than-usual socks we’ve narrowed down a plethora of Christmas PR campaigns to our favourite four… 

It’s A Wonderful Line

Recently, the issue of mental health at Christmas has come to the forefront of the media, with many charities raising awareness that for some, it is not ‘the most wonderful time of the year’. In order to raise awareness of the issue and help people struggling over the holiday period, Virgin Trains has teamed up with their long-term charity partner Rethink Mental Illness for an uplifting festive campaign.

The script of the classic Christmas film, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is appearing on train platforms over advent to show how powerful simple acts of kindness can be. The 1946 film is famed for being an uplifting Christmas staple, but it also deals with the difficult story of one man’s struggle with a life that hasn’t gone to plan.

The bright yellow text covers 7.5km of platforms on the Virgin Trains route from London to Glasgow at stations including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston, Carlisle and Glasgow. The platform text also includes online links offering simple ways to intervene when someone is struggling with mental health.

Throughout December, travellers will also be able to watch It’s A Wonderful Life on-board Virgin Trains while volunteers from Rethink Mental Illness will be fundraising at stations throughout the campaign period.

This thoughtful Christmas PR campaign has received widespread coverage in the likes of the Daily Mail, Stylist, Huff Post, The I, Lonely Planet and Heart FM.

Follow the journey on social media with #itsawonderfulline.

Merry Greggs-Mas!

We’ve all fallen victim to the Christmas shopping mania - rushing into town to pick-up last-minute gifts only to be met with crowds of people and a rather miserable drizzle that seems perfectly designed to make your hair frizzy. Luckily, Greggs are on hand to help this year with its free gift-wrapping service.

To help alleviate some of the stress that the build up to Christmas brings, Greggs hired their own Christmas elves to treat customers to free gift wrapping whilst they enjoy a complimentary glass of mulled wine. The campaign was inspired by a survey of over 2,000 people that revealed 69% of the nation find Christmas stressful.

The stores also brought out their own range of Christmas stocking fillers such as branded Christmas jumpers and a sausage roll phone case (we’re adding that straight to our Christmas list)!

The campaign achieved coverage in regional papers such as Birmingham Mail and Time Out magazine. We think it was a great way to attract new customers and get the loyal ones in the Christmas spirit!

The Nation’s Least Favourite Christmas Present…

We’ve all been there… attempting to buy Christmas gifts, only to resort to Marks & Sparks socks again. But, this year, Gigs in Scotland have cleverly taken on the nation’s favourite plan B Christmas gift with a twist…

Gigs in Scotland have turned the gift into a must-have for every music fan with their range of ‘Sock n Roll’ socks, which are actually a ticket into some of the country’s best music events for 2019!

Each pair of socks comes loaded with a unique gift card code, redeemable online at Ticketmaster and include tickets for TRANSMT festival and Summer Sessions. They’re the perfect gift for music-lovers!

We love the way this campaign combines the classic (and often deemed ‘boring’) gift of socks and gift cards to create a funny, relatable and most importantly, desirable gift that solves the woes of many Christmas shoppers. And with coverage on the Scottish Sun, Glasgow Live and Edinburgh Live it can definitely be considered a PR success too.

Step into Christmas with Elton

Every year we eagerly wait to see what heart-warming, tear-jerking advert John Lewis has created, but this year it’s caused mixed reviews. The short films featured in the run up to Christmas have previously featured Monty the penguin, trampolining dogs, monsters under the bed and the man on the moon, but for 2018 the brand has resorted to old-fashioned star power to sell Christmas with Sir Elton John singing his Your Song anthem.

The advert highlights the importance of gift-giving and how Elton’s gift of a piano from his grandmother helped make him the global icon he is today.

For the first time, John Lewis introduced an experiential element to its Christmas campaign this year using 83,000 stores to screen the film at 6am before it was officially shared on social media at 8am (also a breakaway from tradition as customers usually wait for it to appear on their TVs first).

Customers also had the chance to step in to the set of the advert and interact with props in 2,000 sq. ft experiential space. John Lewis even hosted a musical light show featuring Elton’s ‘Step into Christmas’ from the shop window every 30 minutes on the day it launched.

As much as we all love Elton, this campaign received mixed reviews with some viewers slamming it as an ‘awful’ advert for not being about Christmas. Some have also complained that the advert is a plug for Elton’s biopic ‘Rocketman’ set to launch next year and his last world tour. Another issue raised is that John Lewis don’t actually sell pianos, but since the complaints started rolling in, they have started selling them - the first time in decades.

Whilst this campaign received mixed reviews, we liked it for it’s truly integrated nature. No longer relying on just an advert to get Christmas sales up, John Lewis and Partners utilised creative, experiential PR stunts and social media to boost their presence.

As usual for any John Lewis Christmas advert, it has been shared endlessly with articles on Vogue, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard, Daily Mail, The Sun, I News and Sky and many more.

Best Bits of 2018!

As we move rapidly through the festive season and ever closer to the new year, the team have been busy reflecting on one hell of a year! As this year draws to a close we thought we'd share with you our best bits from 2018!

The Team

The team celebrated a host of promotions and new starters this year including Lizzie who was promoted to PR Account Director and Alex who was promoted to Junior Account Manager. Lu, Georgie, Laura, Jess, and Kelly all joined the team in 2018 on a permanent basis and we also welcomed Raluca and Rachael as interns. A busy year indeed! #dreamteam 

The Clients

Our growing team in 2018 was thanks to our growing client base this year with an amazing 20 new clients joining us! 

The Courses

2018 was the year that also saw the SBPR team deliver our 'Reaching Millions' PR & Publicity Courses which were so well received that they've turned from a one-time event to a regular occurrence. Held in London and at our offices in Bournemouth, we've now had over 100 attendees not including our social media courses, strategy workshops or press release workshops! 

The Work

In between courses, workshops and strategy clinics we achieved some amazing results for our clients this year. Highlights include 60 features for new client Jimmy's Iced Coffee as well getting Jim's face on the front of The Grocer, Dr William Bird from Intelligent Health being featured on BBC's Spotlight, securing 90 VIP guests at the launch of luxury Chinese restaurant 1805 in just five days, getting 4 million listeners for Ramsay Health Care UK in just one day of radio interviews, securing 200 VIP guests at the Bluewater Spa Launch in the Connaught Hotel, securing brand-new client Carbon Retreat a feature in the Daily Mail just days after signing with SBPR, increasing the reach of Miss Dorset 2018 by 11 million people, securing over 120 features for The Green House Hotel including the Carbon Cost of Weddings and the UK's first Vegan Wedding Package, securing 170 VIP guests as well as BBC coverage for the opening of Revolución de Cuba bar in Southampton, and getting our client Tara Howard from the Venus Awards on ITV's This Morning!

The Social

This year the SBPR team have achieved some incredible results on the SBPR social media channels with our Facebook reach increasing 533% from 3,000 to over 20,000 this year, a 140% increase in followers on Instagram, our Linked In followers increasing by 87% to over 4,000, and our engagement on Twitter increasing 67% from 0.9% to 1.5%!

The Awards

This year, Sunny Bird PR proudly sponsored the PR Excellence Award at both the Dorset and London Venus Awards. The whole journey was fun, inspirational and rewarding, we met so many incredible women who were all achieving so much in their fields, it was truly very difficult to choose only one winner for each area! We were also fortunate enough to celebrate three of our own clients being finalists in the Dorset Venus Awards (in different categories!) and got to celebrate with the lovely Kelly as she won the Sustainability Award! And at the London Venus Awards we had two of our clients in the finals, Marisa Peer and Alice Morrison, and we also had our resident journalist, Steph Clarkson in the finals for Journalist of the Year!

We would also like to thank Tara and the Venus team for choosing me for the front cover of their programme, it was such an honour to be chosen and so much fun doing the photo shoot - thanks as well to Tailor Made Estate Agents for letting us use their fabulous properties in Sandbanks for the location of the shoot.

As well as sponsoring an award we were also shortlisted for an award by Team Jobs at the Dorset Business Awards. SBPR were up for Team of the Year award and we were all super excited at even being nominated. We were up against some stiff competition and didn't win this year...but watch out 2019...we're coming to get you!

2018 was the year of the awards as we attended the OK! Beauty Awards with our longest-standing client, Good Night. The SBPR had curated a social media campaign for Good Night's latest product, Sleeping Beauty, thanks to a great product and our hard work....we won (and we got to meet lovely Peter Andre which was easily the highlight of the year for some of us!)!

Needless to say we’ve all had a truly fabulous year both as a business and as a team. A massive thank you to all our clients as we wouldn’t be here without you! And we massively look forward to enjoying next year with you all too.