Fishburn Hedges

27.05.2010

Fishburn Hedges last night beat off competition from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to land a Sabre Award for its work with BBC TV Licensing.

Account lead Joanna Richards said: “We’re delighted. This award is testament not only to a hard-working team at FH but also the efforts of our partner agencies and a very good working relationship with our colleagues across the TV Licensing consortium.

“When you consider the challenges facing TV Licensing in getting positive messages across, especially in the current economic climate, this award underlines the success of the campaigns.”

The award, for best public sector campaign in the EMEA region, recognised FH’s success in putting TV Licensing on a positive footing in 2009 following a period of intense media scrutiny, through a broad programme of media and stakeholder relations.

The media results included delivering over 2,200 items of proactive media coverage across 2009/10 for an ambitious range of stories from simple public information about free over 75 TV Licences, to more creative packages around the 40th anniversary of the birth of colour TV. The proportion of proactive coverage increased from 42% of all articles mentioning TV Licensing in 2008/09 to 69% in 2009/10.

A major development was the establishment of an online community manager, set up to quickly respond to customer queries or concerns via blogs and forums, which reached over 40,000 people via Twitter alone during 2009/10. At the same time, FH worked with over 50 national and 600 local stakeholder organisations to communicate messages about payment, concessions and the law to a wide range of hard-to-reach audiences.

Fishburn Hedges manages the press office for TV Licensing and coordinates a network of regional agencies on both the media and stakeholder relations activities, working with Smarts in Scotland, Stakeholder in Northern Ireland, Brahm in Northern England, Quadrant in Wales and West and Clarke Associates in the Midlands.