Rail crash? You wait until they try to auction the 4G mobile phone spectrum

October 4, 2012

Business groups have launched  a scathing attack on the Government over the 4G spectrum auction and say it has revealed serious problems at the heart of public sector procurement. Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, expressed a typical view: “It is shocking that such a crucially important process has gone so seriously wrong. Businesses need a stable, reliable telecoms network and certainty in the provision of key infrastructure.” “Procurement mistakes increase risks for companies, threaten jobs and harm Britain’s reputation as a destination for inward investment,” added Adam Marshall, policy director of the British Chambers of Commerce.

Just joking. I’m sure Messrs Walker and Marshall will forgive me for quoting them out of context this once; after all, I’m investing them with seer-like prescience. Their cited words are real, but in fact relate to the very clear and present danger of the West Coast Main Line rail fiasco. The fallout from that will be a moon-cast shadow compared to what will happen if HMG manages to screw up the mobile phone spectrum in the same way it has screwed up our railway network.

As it happens, there has been some relatively good news on the 4G front recently. Maria Miller, the obscure former Grey advertising and PR executive recently catapulted to culture, media and sports secretary, has made a brisk start to her tenure by bringing forward the inexplicably delayed auction date of 4G spectrum to January and cutting through the legal wrangling among telecoms carriers which has deadlocked the introduction of the new, much faster, mobile phone standard to the UK.

But will her timely action be enough to avert a looming disaster? First, a little background. 4G is not some minor incremental improvement on the current standard, 3G. It can offer speeds of up to ten times that of the average current home broadband service. Data-hungry yoof, but more importantly business people and commuters, will love it. Miller herself observes that its introduction is “a key part of economic growth strategy” and will “boost the UK’s economy by around £2-3bn” (growth at last – the stuff that George Osborne’s political dreams are made of). America’s already got it, Apple’s got it, Germany’s got it, Korea’s got it. For God’s sake, Estonia’s got it. Britain, which prides itself on being at the heart of the digital revolution, has not. Why not? Because of years of government dithering over the auction structure. Gordon Brown made a bit of an idiot of himself by appearing to hand out the lucrative 3G spectrum to the telecoms carriers for a song. Successive administrations since have been determined not to make the same mistake twice, but seem uncertain how to prevent it.

Now events have caught up with them. The situation is complex, but distils down to a simple reality. Apple has launched its latest ‘must-have’ iPhone with a 4G capability that no one in the UK will be able to take advantage of in the near future. Well, almost no one. The exception: those who use EE, as of October 30th. Er, let me qualify that. No, not all users of Orange and T-Mobile, the brands which have had all their resources pooled into the Everything Everywhere receptacle (or EE, as it is now known – what a whoopee cushion of a brand name). EE itself has the exclusive iPhone 5 franchise, and only new subscribers, not old customers, will benefit from the 4G offering. Everyone else – that is, the vast majority of UK mobile phone users – will have to wait at least 8 months to subscribe.

It may well be objected that what gives the EE brand a timely ‘digital’ lift is actually brand suicide for the company’s premier and better known brand, Orange. But that’s one for UK chief executive Olaf Swantee and his strategy team to worry about. In the meantime, they can congratulate themselves on having – unlike their competitors – farmed existing spectrum to make space for the 4G platform. A merry Christmas is assured, thanks to the exclusivity of their iPhone 5 4G contract.

Once EE’s rivals, O2, Vodafone and Three, realised what Swantee was up to, cries of  ”Unfair” and “Unlevel Playing Field” were heard to rend the air. EE had played the ant in Aesop’s fable, and harvested its existing resources wisely, but the grasshoppers were beside themselves with rage that they would have to wait another six months to grab their share of the new spectrum via a dilatory government auction – and then some before the service could actually be implemented. What’s more, they were prepared to act decisively: they threatened to blunt EE’s leading edge with legal action. That might have been explicable in terms of competitive advantage and buying extra time to build the necessary 4G infrastructure. But as a prelude to launching the 4G standard in the UK, it would have created a public relations disaster. How do you explain to an iPhone-crazy public that access to much higher broadband speeds is being blocked by red-tape, selfish industry interest and legal chicanery?

Miller has therefore done well to defuse the legal wrangling by agreeing to bring forward the spectrum auction date 6 months to the end of January. But implementation of the 4G dream is still a long, long, way away for most of us punters – we’re talking at least the latter end of next year. In the meantime, all sorts of teething problems will need to be sorted out: poor signal distribution, patchy network coverage, a quite possibly incompetent auction process that leads to further legal action and, let’s not forget, potentially incompatible 4G phones.

“Wrong spectrum”. We’re going to be hearing a lot of that in the next 12 months, while the phone companies sort themselves out. If my mobile phone contract were coming up for renewal (which it is not), I would be very tempted to let it ride until at least the beginning of 2014 …

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The Sun recovers its moral purpose

August 24, 2012

It’s time to embark upon a subject of the gravest national importance: the question of who should be allowed to see images of Prince Harry cavorting in a Las Vegas hotel room without any clothes on.

Many may find these images both aesthetically distasteful and irrelevant to their otherwise busy lives. But, on occasions like this, we must put aside such petty prejudices and brace ourselves to a task of greater moment, even if every sinew in our bodies aches to avoid it.

I refer of course to the Public Interest, and the media’s inalienable right to uphold it. Most of you will by now be uncomfortably aware that uncensored images of the Prince in his altogether have been circulating freely on the internet, where they pose an unrestricted threat to the morals of our minors (should they be unlucky enough to encounter them). Why should a few children be so privileged? Surely it is the duty of all citizens to immerse themselves in such tackiness in order that the Public Good prevail?

That is why the  time has clearly arrived to brush aside both the feudal obfuscation of St James’s Palace and the limp-wristed admonitions of the Press Complaints Commission. And publish and be damned.

Many newspapers, it must be said, have shirked this onerous responsibility – no doubt cowed by the poisonous, anti-democratic miasma that has descended upon freedom of expression in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry.

Thank goodness, therefore, for The Sun which, uniquely among the press, has proved itself an uncompromised standard-bearer of all that is best in British life. It alone has had the courage to publish something not only in the public interest but, much more important to our sense of national values, something that interests the public.

It was – naturally – a tough decision to publish, and one not entered into lightly. News International lawyers will have argued against further sullying a reputation already mired by the perception that The Sun is a cynical purveyor of double-standards and hypocrisy.

Not so, of course. As no less a person than Elisabeth Murdoch has just pointed out in her MacTaggart Lecture, ”Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.” In the past, and under the misguided leadership of her brother James, it has to be admitted The Sun occasionally lost its moral compass in making an unprincipled grab for profits whenever the opportunity of a few extra newspaper sales beckoned.

But now, revitalised by a moral vigour flowing from the very top of the organisation that owns it, The Sun can proudly claim to have recovered its purpose in national life. As a muckraker.

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Doctors open second line of attack on fast-foods with call for punitive “fat taxes”

April 19, 2012

It may of course be a coincidence. But I suspect not, given the close timing. No sooner has Professor Terence Stephenson, speaking on behalf of 200,000 doctors, called for a ban on “junk food” brands sponsoring sports events than up pops another prominent medic, advocating blanket “fat taxes” on soft drinks and chocolates.

Will the next step, you might wonder sardonically, be for the medical profession to emulate Oliver Cromwell and call for the banning of mince pies?

The eminent health evangelist in question is Dr Mike Rayner, of Oxford University department of health. His argument follows a well-worn formula.

It starts with the unexceptionable premise. About one in four British adults is either overweight or obese. Something needs to be done about it because it’s costing the National Health Service £5bn, he tells us.

Then comes the health warning, coated in hysterical medi-rhetoric: “We are in the grip of an obesity epidemic.” (Remember the medical profession’s headless chicken performance over Bird Flu?)

And finally, the seemingly inescapable logic of a solution: “We use taxes to discourage drinking and smoking. It raises lots of money for the Treasury and prevents people from dying too early. There is now lots of evidence that manipulating food prices could promote healthy eating.”

What prescription could be more reasonable than that – for the already over-burdened British taxpayer?

As it happens, Dr Rayner – unlike Professor Stephenson – does not disclose his attitude towards advertising these noisome products. But we can infer it from past performance, and the fact that he appears to be offering flanking support to Stephenson’s earlier attack on Government policy.

The medical profession’s enthusiastic adoption of “fat taxes” seems to owe its immediate intellectual provenance to a British Journal of Nutrition study – one of whose co-authors is Professor Susan Jebb, an eminent nutrition specialist who has been the government’s main adviser on obesity since 2007. The study specifically called for a 10% fat tax on sugary drinks and full fat milk, which would, it suggested, cut consumption and prompt a switch to healthier alternatives.

Like most of these things, the idea of “fat taxes” originated in the United States. But it has gained more traction over here following adoption, in limited measure and differing degrees, by Hungary, Denmark and France. The stringent French model is, it would seem, the one favoured by (for instance) the Royal College of Physicians: “Studies have shown that following these measures, the number of overweight children in France has dropped from 18.1% in 2000 to 15.5% in 2007,” it said, late last year

The RCP, like Rayner and other obesity experts, is increasingly frustrated by the Government’s preferred strategy of  behavioural “nudge”, which it considers woefully ineffectual.

It must be confessed this self-same Government has done itself no favours by – first of all –  abolishing one of the principal instruments of nudge, the COI; and, secondly, by plunging itself into an entirely self-generated “heated pasty tax” crisis.

If hot pasties are to be more heavily taxed, then why should the principle not be extended to other fattening foods?

The problem with this argument, logical though it seems in its own right, is the old one of quis custodiet custodes ipsos? Who, exactly, gets to decide what is harmful to our health, and therefore punitively taxable? A few pints of Coca-Cola a year is a very different matter to a systematic diet of junk-food. The medical profession thinks it knows the answer. But it does not. In cack-handedly dealing with one form of social evil it threatens to inflict on us another: bureaucratic authoritarianism. Officious red-tape, that is, to you and me; and of course to the business community, which ultimately pays all our wages. Even those of most doctors –  via the public exchequer.

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Admen watch out: health Bannism is back

April 16, 2012

It’s been a while since the medical profession got onto its high horse about banning the promotion of fast-food and soft-drinks brands.

But now, sensing the increasing vulnerability of the Coalition Government, it’s charging straight for the breach.

The militant assault comes from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, an umbrella organisation which can count on the (at least passive) support of 200,000 doctors. It’s being directed by the academy’s vice-president Professor Terence Stephenson, something of a zealot in these matters.

Specifically, Stephenson wants:

  • A ban on brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s sponsoring major sporting events such as the Olympics. Carling, sponsor of the Carling Cup, also comes in for some harsh words;
  • Prohibition on the use of celebrities or cartoon figures in promoting “unhealthy” food and drink to children;
  • A safe area around schools, free from fast-food outlets;
  • “Fat taxes”, as in Scandinavia, levied on such foods;
  • Much clearer labelling on the calories, salt, sugar and fat contained therein.

Same old, same old, you may say. And you would be right. This is the “Bannist Tendency” making a not-very veiled attack on the Government’s proclaimed policy of collaborating with industry via so-called “responsibility deals”, which emphasise self-regulatory restraint rather than expensive-to-police and often-ineffectual red-tape.

When I say “ineffectual”, I should qualify that. In the short term, the proposed bans might well have a debilitating effect on commerce without achieving concomitant success in combatting national obesity. Longer term the strategy is tried and tested, however. It amounts to demonising fast-food and soft drinks in the same way the medical profession has managed to demonise smoking. At this very moment health secretary Andrew Lansley, the arch-proponent of industry “responsibility deals”, is contemplating stripping the last vestiges of marketing support from the tobacco industry with a ban on branded packaging. That’s what, in a generation’s time perhaps, the medical profession would like to see happening to Big Food brands.

Reducing the amount of salt, fat and sugar in our diet is of course a commendable aim, and it is right that the medical profession – of all special interest groups – should embrace it. But is it also right to equate the variable impact of HSSFs on our health with the addictive and truly pernicious effects of smoking? There is a matter of degree here, which does not seem to be adequately reflected in the uncompromising messianic fervour of the medical profession. Or, rather, some of the zealots who seem to have hijacked it.

Stephenson himself is a case in point. He may be an eminent paediatrician, but he also harbours some eccentric views. Among them, that second hand smoke (from tobacco) is a significant contributor to cot-deaths. He is also someone who clearly lives in a bubble blissfully sequestered from the inconvenient realities of commercial life. Here he is on the subject of football sponsorship:

“For adults, beer is a source of calories. I like going to a football match and drinking beer, but it’s the high-profile sponsorship that means that every time we mention this trophy, we mention in the same words Carling Cup.” So, let’s ban it, eh? Personally, I’m all the way with Stephenson on renaming it the “English Football League”. Period. But I do wonder where all the extra money is going to come from if we prohibit the likes of Carling, Coca-Cola and (heavy heart, here) McDonald’s from investing in sports events.

Surely, a little more personal responsibility exercised over how many HSSFs we ingest at any one time, not to mention how much exercise we take, are more salutary – and certainly less puritanical – solutions to the national obesity problem?

And, if we’re going to consider banning any advertising at all, what about reviewing the wall of money Big Pharma spends on targeting the medical profession?

Now there’s an unhealthy relationship.

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Has Francis ‘Jerrycan’ Maude committed an even bigger blunder with “Son of COI”?

April 2, 2012

Cabinet Office minister Francis “Jerrycan” Maude’s legendary communications skills were on full display last week, with a gaffe that caused the Government its worst wobble since the election.

Let’s hope this is not an omen. Maude is, among other responsibilities, the minister in charge of direct government communications. Meaning: he has been the prime mover behind the dissolution of the Central Office of Information, which officially closed on March 29th, and the fashioning of its hypoglycaemic successor, the Government Communications Centre.

It’s too early to write off “Son of COI” as another one of Maude’s blunders – yet. Only time, and ramped-up expenditure in anticipation of the next general election, will give a definitive answer on that. Nevertheless, it is clear the new organisation will face formidable challenges right from the start.

No one, including COI insiders, can take serious exception to Maude’s fundamental critique of the 66-year old institution: that it was spending far too much (not least on itself) and needed to be cut down to size.

What has incensed critics is the savage severity of the resultant pruning, and the furtive ideological makeover accompanying it.

Let’s take a helicopter view of what has happened.

The new GCC team will be expected to carry out all the essential tasks of its predecessor at the COI. That is to say, it will coordinate Whitehall departmental campaigns from the centre, evaluate them, foster cooperation between these departments, media plan and buy for them and monitor the media results.

The COI once boasted a team of over 700 to accomplish these tasks; even towards the end, and after savage cuts, it could still muster a headcount of 400. The GCC, by contrast, currently has a full complement heading towards 150.

That figure, small though it is, does not fully reflect the painful new reality. Nearly half of the new team is made up of already existing communications (ie PR) staff  extracted from the departments of state. They are not (it almost goes without saying) marcoms experts and would not have formed a part of the COI’s remit. So the marcoms element of the team is lean indeed.

Moving on, the integration of comms and marcoms might seem no bad idea. And in principle it is not. Many would argue that PR people have grasped the potential – and limitations – of digital media, particularly the so-called social graph, far better than those working in traditional brand management.

That should not blind us to the dangers, however. Particularly those inherent in a merger where comms has come out top.

Significant in this respect is the Government’s decision to appoint Jenny Grey as permanent executive director (CEO) of the GCC, in January. By all accounts, Grey is a popular and competent executive, but she has zero experience of traditional private sector marcoms. Previously she was director of policy and communications for No 10 and the Cabinet Office (responsibilities she retains as part of her new role). Before joining the civil service in 2008 she worked for the Audit Commission, Cancer Research and the NHS. Her career began in agency PR.

In appointing Grey, the Government went back on its previous commitment to pick a marketer from the private sector. Grey is no doubt a popular ‘insider’ choice. Clearly, she is well liked in the Cabinet Office. And the departments of state are unlikely to have objected either, inasmuch as one of their own – a civil servant – will now be running the co-ordinating shop.

But the decision does leave you wondering who will be qualified to do business with the outside world: private sector contractors – marcoms agencies prime among them.

The answer to this question might, in other circumstances, have been Grey’s deputy, Wendy Proctor. Proctor had plenty of ad agency experience before she became client services director at the Department of Health. But in her new role as deputy director, Cabinet Office shared communications service, she will have her work cut out managing the undermanned “shared delivery” pooling system that ministers to the needs of the 7 government department “hubs” set up as part of the administrative reform programme.

These “hubs” are themselves experimental and rather controversial. It remains to be seen how well they will work in aggregating and filtering departmental work.

So the GCC will be a much smaller, more inward-looking creature than its predecessor. It will have a very steep learning curve. Its mindset will be that of the comms department and, indeed, of government ministers. It will favour short, sharp, “messages”, designed to curry favour with the Daily Mail and opinion polls over long-term strategic programmes whose true value may not become apparent until well after the next general election.

Even it were interested in some new equivalent of DrinkDrive or Change4Life, where nowadays would it find the resources to properly evaluate such programmes?

Marcoms, once the COI fairytale princess, has ended up being Cinderella at the GCC.

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Advertising industry sheds crocodile tears over Steve Hilton’s departure

March 6, 2012

Few in the ad industry will lament the departure of Steve “Yoda” Hilton, David Cameron’s director of strategy. Indeed, such is the relief that he is going, some would willingly pack the diminutive “blue-sky” thinker’s bags, as he contemplates a year’s ‘sabbatical’ with his family in California. Politically speaking, California is the sunny side of Siberia.

Why good riddance? Well, the word that best sums up Hilton’s relationship with the ad industry is “renegade”.

Although Hilton’s association with Cameron and the Tory party predates the 1992 election campaign, most of his subsequent years were spent in the service of advertising, the career that actually earned him a living. Hilton quickly hooked up with Maurice Saatchi, who professed to see in young Steve a kind of son: “No one reminds me as much of me when young as Steve”, he is reputed to have said. And the admiration was mutual. Steve dutifully followed Maurice from Saatchi & Saatchi to breakaway M&C Saatchi as a kind of intellectual bag-carrier. Hilton’s ability to think “out of the box” or perhaps more accurately, “to get out of his box”, soon became apparent with his contribution to the 1997 election campaign. The “Demon Eyes” poster was certainly visually arresting and highly memorable, but trying to make the then-saintly Tony Blair into the Devil Incarnate probably did more to win votes for Labour than for the party originating it. This episode would seem to underline an abiding truth about Hilton’s career: that high intelligence and original thinking are no guarantee of common sense.

Never mind. After 13 years of hard Labour, which saw the 2002 ban on cigarette advertising followed in 2007 by severe TV restrictions on foods high in fat, salt and sugar, and much muttering about out-of-control drinks advertising, the ad industry seemed to have every reason to pop the corks when it emerged that one of their own was to become the man officially in charge of David Cameron’s brain.

How wrong they all were. Had they done their homework more carefully they would have found our man wasn’t the pragmatic trimmer everyone hoped he might be. A Steve Hilton blog post from as early as 2004, entitled “Will sexual marketing be the next consumer backlash?”, espoused some rather unfashionable, untraditionalist opinions on the matter of “the relentless drive by big businesses to sexualise small children, ageing them prematurely in the process”, while denouncing the “sexual predators of the advertising industry” for good measure.

Ring a bell? “The Bailey Report”, says one insider, “Appears to have taken its brief directly from Steve Hilton’s old blog.” Too right, and laudable though the principles informing Reg Bailey’s report are, what a nightmare they have proved to implement. The regulators have gone into puritanical overdrive, with a zeal reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Practically any female flesh exposed in a public place (ie, on posters) is now regarded as a potential contaminant of young minds – as the recent case of the Advertising Standards Authority versus Marks & Spencer only too vividly reminded us.

However, the Bailey Report and its aftermath are a mooncast shadow when compared with Hilton’s other bequest to the ad industry. Fairly or not, Hilton’s blue-sky thinking is blamed for the ultimate destruction of the Central Office of Information. For which read a £540m-a-year ad industry gravy-train.

Pinning the blame on a single person for what may yet turn out to be a government-wide communications disaster zone might seem a little harsh. After all, there are plenty of available villains – if that’s what they are – from Francis Maude to half the cabinet office. And yet the suspicion lingers that Hilton somehow gave Maude the intellectual confidence to take an axe to the venerable institution in the first place, with his bizarre proposal for a spare and minimalist Ad Council to displace the heavily bureaucratic COI.

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Let’s Raisa stirrup-cup to David Cameron’s poor personal judgement

March 5, 2012

The time has come to fess up to my role in Horsegate. I have ridden a horse since 2010, and more than several times too. It would be a surprise if I hadn’t, you see, because I own one.

Well, two …er, three now I come to think of it, but that was an accident that last one. Yes, I know, inexcusable isn’t it? Also, I’ve ridden to hounds – but long, long ago. Just after the 2005 Hunting Act came in, actually. Not of course that any fox was involved, just a smelly old rag impregnated with urine. Oh, and no more than two dogs …

Did I mention my connection with the Metropolitan Police? Another lapse on my part. It’s all my farrier’s fault really. Until recently, he worked full time for the Met, and he used to shoe Raisa, the police horse that has caused poor Mr Cameron so much trouble with his increasingly defective memory. A bit of a beast, apparently. No end of trouble to shoe, ever since that unfortunate stint with the Riot Squad which made her virtually unrideable. You couldn’t even clench a shoe-iron without the mare rearing uncontrollably.

No, let’s get a grip. I made that last bit up. Just like Mr Cameron’s advisers – starting with the late, unlamented Andy Coulson –  who have constructed a tissue of half-truths and lies around Dave’s not-very-secret interest in horses, the company he kept with race-horse trainer Charlie Brooks and with Brooks’, er, dear wife, the ever lovely Rebekah.

Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!

And for what purpose? Ex-plod horse Raisa, now sadly deceased, is of course Cameron’s worst political nightmare incarnate. What could more emblematically sum up Flame-haired Medusa, News International, Andy Coulson, phone-hacking, Rupert Murdoch, police corruption, political favouritism and poor personal judgement in just one word?

Yet, in a way, that’s not the worst of it.

Never mind that Charlie Brooks took the near-useless nag on at personal cost and out of compassion, to save her from the knacker’s yard. To the uninitiated – that is, to most of Cameron’s voters, urban-dwellers who may never have encountered a real horse in their lives – it looks like yet more upper-class horse-trading.

Never mind that most horse-owners (in my experience at any rate) appear to live in an economic twilight zone where they can barely afford to keep themselves, let alone what’s in the yard – the horse in this country is an inescapable symbol of poshness and privilege.

And poshness and privilege being unforgivable electoral sins, Dave and his Lord Snooty chum George Osborne have, not without cause, a deep psephological neurosis about them.

Remember that undertaking Cameron made to hold a free vote on fox-hunting in this parliament? No, he can’t either. Another lamentable example of his fading memory.

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Will the last unindicted Sun journalist please turn out the lights?

February 11, 2012

A News International spokesman tells us Sun editor Dominic Mohan is “not resigning” in the wake of 5 more high-profile arrests of his senior colleagues.

Well, thank goodness for that. Someone has to be there to switch off the lights, and there now seem precious few editorial staff of any standing who aren’t on bail, or facing the threat of arrest.

The climate of fear at The Sun is, it would seem, being deliberately intensified by the police, in the hope of breaking NI’s culture of omerta and persuading more witnesses to squeal on each other. What other interpretation can be placed on police commander Sue Akers’ decision to organise the two waves of arrests, a week apart, as high-drama “dawn raids”, timed to coincide with Sunday newspaper interest? Whatever these men may or may not have done, they are not gun-runners, drug-traffickers or international terrorists. So why the heavy-handed police choreography, if not to a) impress the public that the police are at last getting tough on corruption and to b) create maximum distress among the people at NI?

As the web of alleged corruption spreads to more police officers, the army and the ministry of defence, it has emerged that Rupert Murdoch will be making a special pilgrimage to The Sun offices to personally reassure its staff he will not be doing unto them what he earlier did to their colleagues at the News of the World.

Maybe not, for now. But one thing I suspect we won’t be hearing much of from here on is Son of NoW, the Sun on Sunday. The Sun is a broken brand.

The latest wave of arrests will also put pressure on other parts of The Sun’s ultimate owner, News Corp. It could turn the screw on a Federal investigation into alleged racketeering. And, nearer home, it will surely rekindle calls for an investigation into News Corp being a fit and proper holder of a TV licence. Should BSkyB’s share price be seriously depressed as a result, you can be sure that – for all their stalwart support of James Murdoch up to now – the board will have no compunction in firing him as chairman.

UPDATE 18/2/12: First, some humble pie. “One thing we won’t be hearing much of from here on is the Son of NoW, the Sun on Sunday”. Er, no. Rupert Murdoch has just given his personal assurance that the launch will go ahead “very soon”. Industry experts believe this means some time in April, possibly the 29th.

However, what may play well with demoralised Sun staffers is not guaranteed to be a publishing success. Particularly if more distracting scandal damages the Sun brand in the meantime. And who, given the unbridled brief of the MSC to cleanse the Augean Stables at News International, can say it will not?

Labour MP Chris Bryant, who has been leading the anti-hacking campaign in parliament, neatly expresses the commercial paradoxof an SoS launch: ”He (Murdoch) is meant still to be ‘draining the swamp’ and yet the swamp is meant to produce another newspaper.”

As it happens, Murdoch seems to have lost his sureness of touch in the realm of newspaper launches. His foray into the London freesheet market, with thelondonpaper, certainly did financial damage to Associated Newspapers, owner of London Lite and (at that time) the paid-for Evening Standard. But News International lost heavily on the project and eventually had to close it down.

The SoS will be launching into a rapidly declining market. Ad revenue was down over 17% last year (end of January) and – even stripping out the now-folded News of the World – the underlying slide was 11%. Readers are deserting too. And their contribution, in the form of circulation revenue, is even more vital to mass-market tabloids than advertising. The only way in, it would seem, is a price-war. That may well damage the SoS’ prime adversary, the Sunday Mirror. But whether it will create a financially viable Sun on Sunday is a moot point.

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Is now the moment when The Sun brand begins to set?

January 29, 2012

Arrested: four senior Sun hacks, plus an allegedly bent copper.

Is this the moment that damage to The Sun brand becomes systemic and unstoppable?

Not if News Corp, which ultimately owns the title, has calculated correctly. After all, the information that led to the arrests – carried out as part of the Operation Elveden investigation into police corruption – was volunteered by the company itself. It’s a gesture clearly designed to demonstrate that the House of Murdoch is now whiter than white, thanks to the “fearless” probing of its so-called Management and Standards Committee (driving force, former Telegraph editor-in-chief Will Lewis).

Sacrificing the prospects of 4 more Sun employees superficially looks like a shrewd way of cauterizing existing brand damage. But on one condition only: that no more evidence of criminal behaviour comes to light. And who, in the circumstances, is going to guarantee that?

Because these four are not the first Sun staff to be arrested. Remember Sun district editor Jamie Pyatt, who was assisting police with their inquiries last November, and has now been bailed until next March? The suspicion must linger that more arrests – inextricably linking The Sun to the culture of criminal deception imbuing other parts of NI – are on the way. And how might that play with advertiser sentiment?

When perception will actually catch up with reality is, of course, anyone’s guess. One of the remarkable aspects of this marathon phone-hacking (computer-hacking and police bribery) scandal is how long everyone at News Corp rival Trinity Mirror – from CEO Sly Bailey down to Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace and, indeed, The Mirror’s most famous alumnus of all, Piers Morgan – has been able to cling to the increasingly threadbare “Three Wise Monkeys” defence strategy. Only the other week, Bailey was telling the Leveson Inquiry that she had never launched an inquiry into potential journalistic abuses ”because she had never been given any evidence of it“. Of course she hasn’t. Which turkey ever votes for Christmas?

UPDATE 30/1/12: Nick Davies, the man who has done more than anyone else to break open this scandal, clearly sees the arrest of senior Sun editorial executives as a pivotal moment. In his Guardian piece today, he suggests that News Corp has now lost control of its own database, and therefore the ability to obstruct further disclosures. With potentially terrifying consequences for a lot of senior people in the Murdoch news organisation. See ‘Mysteries of Data Pool 3 give Rupert Murdoch a whole new headache‘.

Leave a Comment » | Advertising, Issues, Legal, Media, Politics, Public relations | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by stuartsmithsblog

Willie Walsh uses BA brand power to put a spoke in ‘Boris Island’ airport hub project

January 19, 2012

British Airways may not be the brand it was when the Saatchi brothers landed Manhattan at Heathrow nearly 30 year ago. But, as national flag carrier, it still packs a punch: it’s still the largest UK airline based on fleet size, number of international flights and international destinations.

What’s more, as a founder member of International Airlines Group, BA has with Iberia created the world’s third largest airline service by revenue and the second largest service in Europe.

So when its chief steward (or perhaps that should be pilot), IAG chief executive Willie Walsh, says he doesn’t like something, the politicians have to listen whether they like it or not.

And right now, their ears will be ringing, because Wee Willie is beside himself with rage. Not only has he been denied ‘his’ precious third runway at Heathrow – more or less BA’s individual fiefdom and a world brand in its own right. But to add insult to injury, he has also been dragged into – as he sees it – the Government’s hare-brained scheme to build a mega-airport in the Thames Estuary.

Over his dead body. In a move reminiscent of Fool’s Mate in Chess, Walsh seems to have played a blinder on the politicians.

David Cameron, his Transport Secretary and Mayor of London Boris Johnson (who originally espoused the idea) have seemingly done little else over the past few days beyond eulogising the £50bn hub project at “Boris Island” and the transformative effect it will have on the British economy.

Er, no. Walsh crash-landed their airy delusions with a simple, crushing declaration. He’s not moving from Heathrow:

“I don’t think it can be financed. If I throw my weight behind it, people will expect me to be part of the solution financing it and I won’t. The only way you’d make it financially successful is say you’re going to build it and, as part of that, you’re going to close Heathrow. If you leave Heathrow open and you build this new airport, we’re going to stay at Heathrow.”

According to Walsh, these socio-economic engineering projects cause staggering disruption for precious little return, financial or otherwise. The new hub at Montreal didn’t work when they tried it; nor did the one at Kuala Lumpur.

If BA – which holds most of the Heathrow slots, not to mention exclusive rights to state-of-the art Terminal 5 – is not moving to Boris Island, none of its rivals will be either, for fear of losing what slots they have. Or so he reckons. And who is to call his bluff?

Manhattan may once have landed at Heathrow, but Heathrow will definitely not be landing at Thames Estuary Airport. Ah, the power of a global brand flexing its muscles.

Leave a Comment » | Brands, Issues, Politics, Transport | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by stuartsmithsblog

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