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On April 20th, The Holmes Report, a leading public relations industry publication, announced that Ogilvy PR had earned its Large Agency of the Year Award for 2008.

“It is quite an honor, especially considering how challenging 2008 was, not just for public relations, but for industries, businesses and organizations worldwide,” said Marcia Silverman, Global CEO Ogilvy PR. In naming Ogilvy PR, editor and publisher Paul Holmes cited us for a “strong and harmonious management team” and for “driving a series of innovations,” especially in social media.

We’re pleased at the recognition, of course. But we know this honor is not for Ogilvy PR alone, but also: our clients, who support and trust us as we build relationships to achieve results; our partners, who add immense value to our efforts; and our colleagues, past and present, whose hard work built the agency. 

Please visit www.ogilvypr.com for the full story from The Holmes Report. And know, as you read it, that you made this honor possible. 

Ogilvy PR will be officially recognized as The Holmes Report’s Large Agency of the Year at the Sabre Awards dinner on May 12th at Cipriani in New York City.

I had the pleasure of filming an interview with ex-dragons den, current investor at large – Richard Farleigh. A man who has made his millions through taking risks in the post-dot-com-fallout and has worked with hundred of companies to drive business success.

This video was filmed as part of the wider work we are doing at Ogilvy for IBM’sFuture Focus programme, looking at how businesses can work smarter by utilizing advances in technology and communications.

Smart technology is a funny one, some of the simple things that we as the “young digerati” take for granted are the very systems and practices that will become the future of business communications. Talking with a friend who is far more clued up on the subject (@gemmapercy for more info), it dawned on me that so much of the tech that forms the discourse around “cloud” computing and “viruslisation” is not tales of future technology, but present technology. Facilities such as Google Docs, delicious and Amazon’s S3 storage are already changing the way we work.

Far more of our everyday data is being stored in “the cloud” rather than on our hard disks, from our databases, contacts and bookmarks to our personal data such as photos and increasingly video. As Russel M Davies points out in his article on Amazon S3 in this June’s issue of Wired UK – I too would rather trust Google with my contacts than my own ability to sit on my assortment of handheld media centres (the less fortunate of which glare at me every time I open my desk drawer). It is more or less a weekly occurrence that I get invited to a facebook group of one of my clumsier chums who has sat on / dropped / digested in drunken stupor their phone and now require me to send them my number. Which proves a number of things a) my friends are stupid, b) there are many people that I am very glad now have no ability to call me (not that they ever had reason to before hand) and c) that we may all be better of outsourcing our personal lives to the likes of Google or Amazon.

See this week’s PRWeek for the full article and quoted comments from OPR’s MD of EAME Ash Coleman-Smith, click here.

In tune with the economy, PRWeek decided to run this survey and it is a great moment for them to have raised the issue of how recenssionary pressures are challenging some of the green assumptions about consumer habits. We should all be thinking about where we stand on our clients position on this and how they should be positioing their green credentials. I think the message is that ‘greenwashing’ will still be spotted by increasingly cyncial consumer and business audiences.  I agree with the tone of the PRWeek piece which is that environmental campaigns are moving down the agenda against given economic pressures.

PRWeek’s exclusively commissioned and just published reearch was carried out with Populus and they surveyed 1,999 adults in the UK. PRWeek said: “It showed that 81 percent of respondents paid more attention to cost/value than to environmental credentials. Asked about how concerned they were and whether they were more concerned now than 12 months ago, respondents were evenly split: 49 per cent were no more or less concerned and 50 per cent were more concerned. The findings suggest communicators need to focus on value when crafting their environmental messages”. The research goes on to show that small easy green steps are still interesting to consumers “94 percent of respondents said they would take green steps such as buying energy saving lightbulbs” (PRWeek).

Finally, as PRWeek point out in their feature, there are some brands who have led on a green/environmental positioning such as Green and Black’s, Innocent Smoothies, the entire organic sector etc who are currently paying the price. Maybe now is the time for marketing teams and their agencies to be developing creative and clever strategies for how they re-ignite consumer interest/purchase driven by ‘green’ preferences.