{"id":114952,"date":"2018-05-16T10:36:58","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T10:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=114952"},"modified":"2018-05-16T10:36:58","modified_gmt":"2018-05-16T10:36:58","slug":"the-uks-top-pr-blog-pr-examples-has-a-new-owner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/the-uks-top-pr-blog-pr-examples-has-a-new-owner\/","title":{"rendered":"The UK\u2019s Top PR Blog, PR Examples, has a new owner"},"content":{"rendered":"

PR Examples<\/a> was created in 2011 by Rich Leigh, and will be familiar to the industry for listing the best examples of creative PR stunts, campaigns and events. It has also topped the Top 10 UK PR Blogs<\/a> several times and was recently a finalist at the Vuelio Blog Awards<\/a> 2017.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In January, Rich sold PR Examples to James Herring, who is the co-founder of top PR agency Taylor Herring<\/a>. We caught up with James to talk about the agency, which you can read here<\/a>, as well as Taylor Herring\u2019s acquisition of the top blog in the UK. He told us about the blog\u2019s rebrand, the problem with car and perfume ads and how he sees PR Examples evolving.<\/p>\n

What drew you to PR Examples?<\/strong><\/span>
\nI\u2019ve always been a fan of PR Examples, in fact a week or so before it went live, I launched a Tumblr site, called Stunt of the Day, which did kind of the same job. Rich Leigh, who has become a pal of mine, called me up and said, \u2018You won\u2019t believe it but I\u2019m literally on the brink of launching PR Examples!\u2019<\/p>\n

We both had a keen, geeky, likeminded interest in collecting up great brand work and curating it somewhere. A place where anyone working in comms can dip in to see how different brands are using creativity to land a message or solve a client problem. Rich got in touch at the back end of last year and said, \u2018I think it\u2019s time for me to move on\u2019 \u2013 his agency has been going from success to success \u2013 and for us it was a bit of a no brainer really.<\/p>\n

Big credit to Rich for building the foundations of a resource that\u2019s well-used by agencies and in-house teams.<\/p>\n

How was the rebrand gone?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>The rebrand seems to have gone down well; we modified the logo and some parts of the site \u2013 mostly we focused on making it fully responsive so it would work as well on mobile as it does on desktop.<\/p>\n

We also paid some attention to the newsletter and had a growth spurt in the newsletter subscribers; we\u2019re now approaching 7,000 which is encouraging. Plus, we have around 60,000 unique readers a month.<\/p>\n

Not everyone in the industry is going to be interested in the type of content that\u2019s on PR Examples, so if you work in City PR it\u2019s probably not for you and if you work in Internal Comms you probably have other challenges. We know we\u2019re not for everyone but it\u2019s a fun project.<\/p>\n

As an agency, we\u2019ve always started the morning by saying, \u2018Who\u2019s seen something good?\u2019 and in our morning paper review, we\u2019ve always been spotting work, campaigns and ideas that might inspire and fuel what we do. It wasn\u2019t too much of a stretch to turn that into a quick 200-word blog to share with our readers.<\/p>\n

\"PR<\/p>\n

In terms of the content and contributors, have you changed anything?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>Rich is still one of our contributors, though he hasn\u2019t actually been very active of late so I need to name and shame him for that! There are three or four people at Taylor Herring who are regularly blogging at the moment. We change the team working on it from time to time, but we\u2019re also talking to other agencies to get them involved as well: W Communications have put two people forward, as have Frank and Premier.<\/p>\n

The end goal would be to have a regular team from a broad range of disciplines and sectors who were regularly contributing. Our next challenge is to index the work so people can easily find stuff. So, if you work in retail and you want to see what creative campaigns supermarkets have done of late, it would be easy for you to find them.<\/p>\n

We came up with a groanworthy word for this the other day \u2013 a \u2018Newseum\u2019 of great creative campaigns.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the thing that makes the work that appears on PR Examples different to what you may see on other trade sites is that it has cut through into through the news cycle or generated good engagement on social.<\/p>\n

So, it\u2019s definitely not about beautiful car adverts, which \u2013 along with perfume ads \u2013 are the worst kind of advertising there is in my opinion.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>OK this is a generalisation but there\u2019s no innovation in car and perfume ads. They live in a weird, vapid, self-obsessed world that is of no interest to anyone but themselves.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re interested in campaigns that have cut through into the news cycle and have got people talking. We\u2019re looking for something that\u2019s different or surprising.<\/p>\n

Have you got an example?<\/strong><\/span>
\nOne of the Chinese National Parks put a shop halfway up a climbing wall on a mountain, which someone from the agency spotted in Metro and asked, \u2018Do you think it\u2019s a PR stunt?\u2019 And it was! And, even better, no one had spotted it for that. The story had a mountain, rock climbers and a shed bolted to the cliff face where you can purchase bottle of water or energy bar. A lovely creative idea and that\u2019s what the site\u2019s about. Celebrating cool ideas.<\/p>\n

\"Chinese<\/p>\n

With other agencies contributing, will you ever get to a point where you stop them writing about themselves, if it\u2019s too advertorial?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>I think people are generally self-aware on that kind of content. No one feels comfortable blowing their own trumpet. We\u2019re interested in the inside story \u2013 how you came to the idea, the barriers and challenges. That\u2019s what would make it different. We, at Taylor Herring, need to work out how we\u2019re going to do that too. We have to resist the temptation to talk about ourselves too much but I think we\u2019ve managed to tread the right side of the line so far.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d actively welcome agencies or in-house teams to write a first-person, inside track account of what the campaign was like to work on.<\/p>\n

Is PR Examples driving business to Taylor Herring? Is it making money like your other site The Poke?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s not been built to drive business to Taylor Herring \u2013 in fact the link is hard to find. It\u2019s buried at the bottom of the FAQ page. The discipline of scouring the internet every day to find creative work is very valuable to us and our daily work. Analysing and scrutinising those kind of projects gives you a good insight into what does and doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Our video production company, St Mark\u2019s Studio<\/a>, has become the temporary sponsor of the site because we\u2019re hoping other agencies, in-house teams and brands might need some help creating low cost entertaining video content. Which is what St Marks is set up to do.<\/p>\n

We originally took on PR Examples because we thought it might be a good fun thing to do and we are in the business of being fascinated by creative comms.<\/p>\n

Currently St Mark\u2019s is sitting in that sponsor slot. However, there are enough service providers in the industry that could potentially step up and help us meet the running costs. It would be nice to think our newsletter could have a sponsor and we could work with companies on native content editorial, things like that.<\/p>\n

PR Examples, at this scale and with its number of page impressions, is quite easy to manage.<\/p>\n

We decided we\u2019re not going to try and monetise it for the first 12 months, we\u2019re just trying to make it good.<\/p>\n

If people like it, we might be more ambitious.<\/p>\n

Final Word?<\/span>
\n<\/strong>We are actively looking for new contributors \u2013 so interested parties should get in touch<\/a>. They can blog as little or often as they want to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Reach-the-right-influencers-with-the-Vuelio-media-database\"
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