We’ve Merged

As many now know, Bespoke Communications has merged with Direction@JWT to create BespokewithDirection. Will post link to article in today’s Sunday Business Post later which explains all, but suffice to say I am personally delighted with the move. Allows us to grow to a team of 12 offering expertise in PR, Social Media, Experiential Marketing and Promotional Marketing. Great opportunities for us to create exciting, well thought through, well

Bespoke has merged with Direction@JWT to create BespokewithDirection

executed communications campaigns for clients.

Find our web page here, Twitter here and we’ll be up on Facebook sometime next week once new emails are up and running. Will migrate blog also in coming week or two.  Lots done, much much more to do. And looking foward to every bit of it.

To Martha!

Arthur’s Day was an unqualified success. In Dublin anway. The Buzz around the city (especially around Bespoke HQ next door to Whelan’s and The Village) was palpable all day both on the street and online. Not least on Twitter where thousands of Tweets were sent throughout the day about who was playing where. Haven’t experienced anything like it since the MTV Music Awards were held in Dublin.

Some cracking photos of the various gigs and performances throughout the city here.  Team Bespoke headed to The Church where we got to see Kasabian.  While there was loads of hanging around, they did put in a great performance when they eventually got there after their gig in The Storehouse. Great venue too. Tom Meighan even got his hair cut for the occasion and went one further than most by wearing an Irish jersey with his name on the back.  Thanks Tom. Thanks The Church. And most of all, Thanks Arthur!

To Arthur!

Milky Tea Blog

Every now and again at Bespoke HQ come across a blog or a website or a visuals which grabs you by the eyeballs and makes you pause for a moment and take a closer look. Milky Tea has just launched a new blog which we love. Clean, relevant, informative and easy on the eye.  Their website is a beautiful piece of work.

Congratulations to Milky Tea.  We like ours with a nice bit of chocolate at about 3pm in the afternoon.

1.6m tune into Late Late: That’s Lots!

Wow! 1.6m people tuned in to Ryan Tubridy’s first Late Late Show last Friday. I was one of them and really enjoyed it for the first time in a long time. That is a serious amount of people in a county the size of Ireland. Esp, with 30,000 odd at Electric Picnic (not that all of them would have been kicking back on a couch on a Friday night). Still. Unlikely that it will keep up anything close to those numbers, but it should continue to attract viewers and may even steal Irish viewers from Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, depending on who he gets on the show every week.

Interesting times and we at Bespoke are looking forward to seeing where they go from here after the blistering pace of the first show which featured about 73 guests, including An Taoiseach, Brian Cowen TD, Brian McFadden, Sharon Corr, David Gray, Cheri Blair, Saoirse Ronán, Gillian and Niall Quinn and Joan Collins. That’s about 3 Jonathan Ross shows.

Should be interesting though. Good to have more choice on a Friday night.  And Ryan, if you’re reading this, keep it up!

Rugby Stars of The Future

Bespoke HQ loves this photo of Munster players Ronan O’Gara, Tomás O’Leary (good to see him back) and Doug Howlett who took time out from pre-season training to give a few tips to rugby stars of the future at the Centra Munster Rugby Summer Camp at Colaiste Stiofan Naofa in Cork on Tuesday this week.

While Centra is a client, we love this pic for loads of reasons, not least the sheer sense of fun that comes across from both kids and players. Not sure what this particular move is called or what it says about the future of Irish rugby, but the kid with the ball sure seems to have lots of support, not that he looks like he’s planning to off load it any time soon!
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The Centra camps have been running throughout Leinster, Munster and Connacht giving rugby stars of the future a chance to improve their skills over the holidays.

Great Blogsites: Dubliner Cheese

We’re not cheesy at Bespoke Communications (OK, maybe sometimes), but we sure love cheese (we’ll save this detail for a future blog post). And we love Dubliner Cheese’s blogsite (and no, they are not a client) which we recently came across. Clean, relevant and, designed on the Wordpress platform, rich in content and regularly updated which makes it easy to interact with which is the essential bit. Not sure how much we want to talk about our love of cheese, but if we do, this is where we will go.

Great recipes ideas for snacks, lunch and dinner, celebrity recipes from new TV3 Xposé presenter, Sean Musanje, Lucy Kennedy and Michael Hayes, future guest editors and lots more besides, this is a visually appealing, easy to navigate, well thought out blog site. So, well done Dubliner Cheese.

On that note, we’re not that innocent at Bespoke HQ, but we absolutely love Innocent’s blogsite. Could this be any better?  No. They get so much so right, so not surprising that the site is so great.  Take a moment to enjoy here.

Inspired Series: VI of TBC

It’s true that money’s too tight to mention, but there is no shortage great campaigns currently up and running of all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you find inspirational campaigns in the most unlikely of places and at Bespoke HQ we absolutely love what Irish Rail has done to celebrate the DART’s 25 year anniversary.  These are celebrations which could have easily been ignored both by the organisers and by the public, but much to their credit they have produced a programme of activity which they can really be proud of.  One which has commuters at its very core.

With art and poetry competitions, poetry and other readings on DART carriages and in stations, live gigs (from to acts like Kittser, Gerry Fish, etc. we might add), specially commissioned paintings by Rasher and Graham Knuttel and all sorts of performances at stations along the DART line (it’s still a beautiful trip along the south Dublin coastline once the sea comes into view between Sydney Parade and Booterstown), even Twenty Major has been moved to comment on the DART’s first 25 years in his own unique way.

The celebrations have really captured the public imagination and brought life (and commuters) into those carriages. Worthy celebrations by a transport service that sometimes doesn’t get a look in.  Well done to all involved.

IKEA Freebies: We likes!

There isn’t an child, adult or domestic pet in the country that is not aware that IKEA is opening its doors to an expecting public tomorrow, Monday 27th July.

You have to hand it to them at lots of levels - design, price, general brand development and marketing. But the thing that really impressed us here at Bespoke Communications - in particularly because they just didn’t need to do it due to mass interest in the opening - was the fantastic stunt of placing FREE IKEA furniture in Dublin City Centra on Wednesday last. So, unsuspecting and very satisfied members of the public were able to walk away with free lamps, chairs, bchests of drawers and sofas.  Excellent. 

More of that please IKEA.  In fact, a nice sofa, table and chairs outside Bespoke’s offices on 12 Camden Row any time next week would be greatly appreciated.

Does a Facebook ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’?

We are big fans of Facebook here at Bespoke HQ. Love it and use it a lot.  But we have started to wonder about the number of invitations being pushed around Facebook for various events and launches and the impact these really have. With anything from 10 - 50 invitations being received in a given week (depending on the number and nature of your friends and groups, of course), we wonder if there is now so much communication on Facebook that much is ignored?  Or to put it another way, is it in danger of becoming a noisy and cluttered environment? 

More importantly when people reply ‘Yes’ to event invitations, do they mean it? Do people actually say ‘No’ if they

'Yes' by Natalie Dee

can’t or don’t want to attend or do they automatically default to ‘Yes’ to make organisers feel better without ever really planning to attend? 

In our last post we spoke about online marketing activity which seeks to make up numbers to assist some post-campaign evaluation criteria and Facebook increasingly seems to be perhaps falling victim to the numbers game. Efforts to acquire as many friends or fans as possible merely by making a request, rather than doing or offering anything to earn these friendships, may now be just making it more difficult for groups to genuinely connect with Facebook members.  The exception being groups and movements based on social activism.

Back in the traditional days, when we emailed and posted invitations, we generally applied a 1:3 rule of thumb where 1 guest would attend for every 3 invitations issued, assuming you had a well thought through and targeted invite list. Now, it is very difficult to know if a Facebook ‘Yes’ is a genuine ‘Yes’. 

We will of course continue to put this to the test, but the same old principle would also seem to apply: great ideas, well executed, will engage people more than anything short of this.  We’ve got to keep our standards high. Now more than ever.

Online PR: More than a numbers game

At Bespoke Communications, we’re doing a lot of work at the moment on measuring online PR programmes and exploring ambitious but realistic measures for all sorts of campaigns. So what’s a positive or ’successful’ number of consumers engaging with a PR campaign online?  200? 2,000? 10,000?

Strikes me at this early stage that it is not so much about how many, but more about who and how?  Brands seeking to build numbers for the sake of ticking a traditional evaluation box need to tread carefully.  Successful online PR is, by neccessity (that ‘R’ in PR again), about building relationships and if consumers feel they are just making up the numbers for inclusion in the campaign evaluation, they’ll reject you outright and rightly so. Seth Godin has written about this.

We have noticed some commentators (dare I say detractors) from the more traditional end of the spectrum reject the value of campaigns that “only deliver” 2,000 Facebook fans of a few hundred followers on Twitter. This is just shortsighted and completely misunderstands the potential strength and value of these relationships.

So, if 1,500 people pay to see a live gig in The Olympia or Vicar Street or any other venue throughout the country, is that to be rejected as insignificant? Hardly. Do those people care?  You bet.  Small in number but massive in impact and influence. That’s the key thing.

We are entering an interesting phase in taking a closer look at our campaigns, not just at the numbers, but also at the relationships. So, what about the relationships between our national print titles and their readers? Are they strong?  Are they relationships? Is there much interaction or exchange between publisher and reader?

Interesting questions, all of which will be put to the test in the next 2 - 3 years.  Everything is up for grabs right now and relationships will be more important than ever, whichever side of the fence you sit on.