Travel and Leisure PR consultant Gloucestershire-based copywriter

Silver Ball PR’s favourite musician is Cheltenham-born Jake Hall.  He is an old family friend and an incredibly talented musician.  He has been tipped for great things and some people even describe him as the next Jamie Cullum.  View his latest video diary here…

The Silver Ball team is delighted to have won GOLD at the prestigious CIPR awards for our work which we have done with celebrity hairdresser Stuart Holmes.

Read the case study below:

Introduction

Celebrity hairdresser Stuart Holmes brought in Silver Ball PR to devise a strategy to help his Cheltenham salon achieve its core business objectives:

• Increase the number of new clients
• Improve awareness of the salon’s location
• Build relationships with local businesses
• Improve awareness of the Stuart Holmes brand nationally and in the trade.

The Hair Holiday Strategy

The management at The Stuart Holmes Hair and Beauty Spa were very clear in what they wanted to achieve. They wanted more than just regional coverage. They have always been proactive with the local media but they have found it difficult to achieve national coverage.

Silver Ball PR created a strategy to help Stuart Holmes forge strong relations with beauty and travel journalists. As well as stimulating wide ranging national coverage, Silver Ball PR wanted to position the salon in the industry press as a place of innovation.

Silver Ball PR created The Hair Holiday concept to capture the interest of the national, specialist and trade media. It was pitched as the opposite number to a traditional spa break.

We sourced two top Cheltenham hotels to partner with. They were a Mr and Mrs Smith hotel, Number 32, and the trendy townhouse hotel, The George. We negotiated rates with both properties and created a two-day package including accommodation and treatments.

A website dedicated to The Hair Holiday was created by Silver Ball PR. This proved a key part in marketing the package to the consumer and gave us somewhere to direct our Facebook and Twitter followers to. (www.stuartholmeshairholiday.co.uk)

Silver Ball PR sold in the concept to national travel journalists by positioning the break as a spa break with a difference. Highlighting Stuart’s celebrity clients sparked great interest.

The Hair Holiday concept was sold in to specialist wedding magazines as a great hen party idea or bridal treat.

To the trade media, we used the concept to demonstrate how The Stuart Holmes Hair and Beauty Spa is forward thinking and creative in its product offering and marketing. No one else in the industry was offering such a package.

Hair Holidays were offered to seven titles asa high value competition prize, worth more than £400 per person.

Creativity

The Hair Holiday is a unique concept created by Silver Ball PR. It is the ‘new’ type of spa break. We carried out intensive research and found no other spas offering packages focussing on hair.

The Hair Holiday was created predominately as a PR tool. It captured the imagination of national journalists who previously may not have been interested in writing about a regional hair salon.It provided a tangible getaway for travel writers to feature and an innovative experience that attracted the attention of beauty writers.What was predominately a PR tool, the Hair Holiday is now a package regularly sold by the salon.

Evaluation and Measurement.

The Hair Holiday concept resulted in nine press trips. Hosted by Silver Ball PR, they included a complimentary night at The George Hotel. Press trips were aligned with the key objectives and were only aimed at national media.

The Hair Holiday generated 17 pieces of on and offline coverage with more features still waiting to be published. Coverage included a full-page lead in The Sunday Telegraph, a half page in new! magazine and extensive coverage on The Times Online.Seven competitions were placed in titles including Hello! and My Weekly.

The advertising value equivalent of this campaign was excessive, coming in at £201,495.

Cost-Effectiveness.

This low-budget campaign was a cost-effective way of increasing the salon’s exposure in its target media. It did not require a heavy investment, costs were kept to a minimum and Silver Ball PR ensured partnerships with other businesses were used as effectively as possible.

Final results against objectives.

The management team used the nine press trips for forge strong relations with the journalists. Many of who have since written about other Stuart Holmes stories as well as the Hair Holiday.

The Hair Holiday concept generated more than 17 pieces of on and offline coverage. Further coverage is still expected in The SPA Traveller, Cosmopolitan and The Sun.

The Hair Holiday resulted in successful partnerships being established with two local hotels that now regularly recommend the salon to guests. On the Hair Holiday journalists were also treated to dinner at The Daffodil Restaurant on a complimentary basis. Sending national journalists to dine at the restaurant helped forge relationships with the owners and as a result, additional opportunities have arisen such as being invited to do fashion shows at the restaurant and market directly to their database.

The trade press has shown real interest in the Hair Holidays with Catriona Innes from Salon Business describing it as ‘one of the most unique’ marketing campaigns she has ever seen.It has brought the salon to editors’ attention and Stuart Holmes is now regularly asked to comment on stories and feature as an industry thought-leader.

New client numbers have gone up in the past six months and existing clients are rebooking more often. The PR campaign stimulated enough additional demand to warrant the opening of one more beauty room and the employment of one more stylist. Stuart Holmes was also named as Salon of The Year in the prestigious British Hairdressing Awards beating the likes of Sir Trevor Sorbie and Michael Van Clarke. This success has been partly attributed to their strong PR campaign.

We absolutely love the new Yeo Valley advert. Being country girls, we think it is a classic and will go down in history as one of the greatest ads ever made!  Anyway, that is just our opinion. Watch it for yourself….

Today the BBC announced the redundancy of the Deputy Director General, Mark Byford. His post is being abolished as part of BBC spending cuts. It is also thought that Mark Thompson, the Director General will leave in 2012 once the new license fee review is settled.

It seems a shame to be cutting out the people that have made the BBC so successful. Byford started as a ‘Temporary Holiday Relief Assistant’ when he was 20 and worked his way up the company. He is now an award-winning journalist and one colleague described him as “the best director-general the BBC never had”.

Many people will now attack Byford for the £1 million pay-out or his £3.7 million pension pot. Unlike many of the city bankers, however, who receive similar amounts, Byford will now concentrate full time on charitable projects.

But what does this say about the BBC and where it is going? Who would even want to take over a job that is under such heavy scrutiny?

Perhaps removing the fundamental executives at the BBC and cutting back on high-flying employees will leave the BBC a poor competitor in the media arena. Or maybe this is exactly what it needs, a radical restructure of the biggest broadcasting corporation in the world.

This Friday, The Daffodil is holding every chocolate lovers perfect afternoon.

If, like me, you dream in Galaxy Bars and Curly Wurlys then this is the event for you. As part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Willie Harcourt-Cooze is creating a three course cacao based menu for The Daffodil. This real life Willy Wonka (star of the Channel 4 documentary) is using his very own Venezuelan cacao to create dishes like Porchini and Chocolate Risotto  plus Venison, spiced red cabbage and chocolate gravy.

Willie’s mantra is to try and make chocolate an essential ingredient in cooking rather than just a treat…which we are definitely not complaining about!

He is also taking to the Cheltenham Literature Festival stage with Masterchef winner Thomasina Miers and Levi Roots as part of the Real Food Event so that we can indulge our brain as well as our stomach.

Where better to appreciate this lovely food than the sumptuous surroundings of The Daffodil. In the wise words of Lucy Van Pelt in Peanuts:

‘All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt’

Let the countdown to Friday lunch time commence!!

Art or just an incredible waste of time??

The latest commission in the annual Unilever series has just been unveiled at the   Tate Modern art gallery in London. The exhibition has been created by a Chinese artist, Ai Wei Wei, the same artist behind the bird’s nest stadium in the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

The ‘Turbine Hall’ gallery has been filled with 100 million hand painted, traditionally made, porcelain sunflower seeds. That’s 150 tonnes of seeds over an area of 1000 sq/m, 8 inches deep.

The public are invited to walk over, touch and listen to the seeds. Like the giant crack (or ‘subterranean chasm’ as Doris Salcedo described it), however, it is difficult to devise a clear purpose to the exhibition.

According to a BBC news piece, the point of the art work is to symbolise human kindness and compassion. Ai Wei Wei lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution where poverty and repression were rife. Local people kept sunflower seeds in their pockets to eat and pass around.  The number of seeds also reflects the immensity of the Chinese population, (100 million is only 10% of the people in China) and the power of Chinese production for the West.

Although I can understand all of those points and the amount of seeds is definitely a pause for thought, is it not an incredible waste of time? I’m not sure I would want to spend day in day out painting exactly the same pattern on 100 million porcelain seeds. Why not just use real seeds?

Perhaps I am missing the point. Maybe if I visited I would be in awe at the scale of the exhibition and the intricate attention to detail. The traditional techniques used to create the seeds in contrast with the ultra modern gallery definitely lead us to think about how one of the world’s oldest continuing civilisations is now a modern, influential world economic power.

Quite honestly I was very excited when I heard that ITV’s morning schedule was getting a facelift. It was much needed. GMTV never did it for me so I was delighted to think that Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley were taking over the helm. They made the One Show on BBC. Like many other viewers, I think we were all hoping for a similar revolution for the ITV primetime spot.

In reflection, this hasn’t happened. I made the switch from BBC Breakfast on Monday however found myself getting increasingly frustrated with ITV’s substandard weather and local news bulletins. I thought that this was no true reflection on the new duo so stuck with them.

Today, I turned off DayBreak for the final time though. The last straw for me was when Chiles pretended to go in for a snog with one of their sports reporters.

ITV and Chiles alike needs to ditch the Keith Chegwin style humour. The dated feel of ITV morning programming is seeping through into the new show and sadly it is showing. DayBreak isn’t a completely new beast. It is simply just them trying to remould the old. The change hasnt gone far enough for me and I will remain a loyal BBC Breakfast viewer. This is sad as I once used to really rate Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley.  I hope they don’t suffer the same career demise as Natasha Kaplinsky did when she left the Beeb.

We were delighted to support the first ever FourSquarestival which took place in Cheltenham. Check out the video of the day itself….

Yesterday weather presenter Tomasz Schafernaker gave one of his colleagues the middle finger while live on air. Just a few months ago he was reduced to hysterics by an unfortunately rude mispronunciation when giving a BBC Radio 4 forecast. We love to hear about this type of gaff in the SB offices!  It proves than even journalists are human….