Honda UK and Brazil Partner With Traackr To Launch The Honda Insight

What does a major car company do when launching a brand new model at a time when car sales are at an all time low and communications budgets are slashed?Honda UK decided to use this very gloomy environment to take its first steps into Social Media.

The result?

The best yield possible on their communication dollars.

Traackr Builds Honda's Top Influencer List
Honda UK and their forward-looking PR agency, Brazil, understood that the first step in any successful Social Media campaign is finding the right people to engage. Traackr's proprietary influencer search and qualification technology was used to uncover a targeted list of Top Influencers driving conversations around hybrid vehicles, alternative energy, the environment, and green technology.

Traackr not only uncovered unconventional and valuable influencers, but also gave Honda UK a clearer understanding of what types of conversations would impact their launch as well as where those conversations were taking place.

Traackr's technology also demonstrated that many clean energy online opinion leaders were actually based outside the UK, which led Honda and Brazil to develop a coordinated international PR effort to engage these individuals.

Honda UK, Brazil and Traackr Collaborate To Build Honda's Influencer Engagement Strategy
As part of its influencer report, Traackr tagged influencers by location and topics of interest, as well provided detailed information on what conversations each influencer was most interested in.

While Brazil led the development of a highly customized communication plan catering to specific influencers, Honda UK coordinated across countries, and continents, to make sure internationally-based influencers would be reached.

Data Backed Engagement Proved Highly Effective
As Brazil and Honda UK launched into the execution of their influencer engagement plan, Traackr provided weekly performance reports, allowing Brazil to instantly see the successes or failures of their approach.

Based on these reports, the engagement strategies were adjusted, re-executed, and re-measured on a regular basis.

Traackr's reports showed that mentions of the Honda Insight among the top influencers increased by 300% during the engagement campaign and estimated online coverage increased by 675%!

Insight Launches And Overtakes Prius As #1 Hybrid Car In The UK
The ultimate results of this campaign were wildly positive. Even with very little mass-market spending, the Insight launched as the top selling hybrid in the UK.

For more on the campaign results and find out what influencers said about Honda, read the full story here.

Dance like a rockstar

Air guitars at the ready, as a new viral campaign created by Brazil for swiftcover.com hits the web.

Fancy seeing yourself dancing like a rockstar? Try the new viral here.

Love your ISA

Brazil client Principality Building Society has just launched a new regular saver ISA. Its impressive 5 per cent interest rate helped score some great coverage on Love Money’s Love it or Loath it programme which you can see here

Building Bridges

Brazil scored its first coverage in China for client Pinsent Masons, the international law firm. Brazil led the PR for the announcement of the new Hong Kong Zhuhai-Macau Bridge - a 29km (18 mile) bridge which is expected to cost $5.47 billion. Construction of what will be the world's second largest bridge will commence at the end of this year and is expected to be completed in 2016. The announcement included the appointment of Pinsent Masons to lead a consortium of law firms to provide legal services for the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge project.

Brazil was responsible for gaining international media coverage, with a specific brief to generate articles in the international press and Asian and European construction journals. If you can read Mandarin please see the article on the bottom left of the page above.

Mud, mud, glorious mud...

A good hit for Honda this week – five minutes of primetime TV coverage at the top of Channel 5’s Fifth Gear. Former racing drivers Jason Plato and Tiff Needell battled it out on two Honda ATV’s, with Tiff taking the chequered flag by a whisker. Filmed on a bitingly cold day in a disused quarry in January – plenty of mud and water to contend with, but well worth the effort!


You can see the show here.

A bunch of bankers

There was a time when ‘merchant banker’ was used as rhyming slang for something rude - now it seems that all bankers have become a dirty word.

This week some of the UK’s biggest bankers were placed in the modern-day equivalent of the village stocks, with our elected representatives hurling rotten tomatoes at them on our behalf. Now, there would have been outrage had these bankers tried to bluff it and claim they’d done nothing wrong, but when they did apologise it was dismissed as the result of media-training by their PR spin doctors.

But did we really expect tears from some of the most powerful businessmen in finance? And it is important to remember that no matter how devastating this whole mess is, even if some of them are semi-privatised, UK banks are still businesses.

The point of this spectacle and subsequent public furore was finding someone to blame, or moreover someone to pay for their actions and make it all better. But that’s not going to happen and the best we can hope for is a renewed sense of caution amongst us the public, because to be honest I fully expect the financial geniuses to come up with another sub-prime style money-maker in a couple of years.

And if you want to allocate blame, credit consumers have to share responsibility: anyone who ignored their parents’ sagely advice to save, and instead collected credit cards like football stickers; anyone who honestly thought that, even though they had previously defaulted on their loans, ‘this time’ they’d be able to afford a much more expensive sub-prime mortgage; and anyone who thought that getting a home loan bigger than the actual value of the property they were buying was a great idea.

We can’t blame the bankers alone, because whatever you think of their pay packets and their actions in hindsight, it would be foolish to think that these four bankers and their like purposely set out to wreck their institutions and the financial system.

Sub-prime was pioneered by a handful of lenders who saw that higher risk borrowers were not being served by mainstream lenders who were still smarting from the 1980s property crash. Sub-prime was regularly termed ‘dirty’ business by those in the trade and viewed with disdain by the big banks and building societies.

Until they saw the profits and the growing customer demand.

The real growth in sub-prime was fuelled by high street names and merchant banks jumping on the bandwagon like those poor souls who send thirty quid off to an advert promising a grand a week income for working three hours a day. Most of these Johnny-come-latelys were blinded by pound signs and relaxed their traditional risk aversion, partly because it was new territory they were trying to understand, but also because they were delivering increased profits to their shareholders.

Why didn’t the regulator spot the problem? As a mortgage broker friend of mine once said, ‘if the civil servants at the FSA really understood the industry, they’d be earning four times as much working for a bank’. And if the banks themselves did not really appreciate the scope and complexity of the risk, what chance did the pencil-pushers have?

The financial crisis comes down to a fundamental question of philosophy and approach to risk that is present in every business. In one camp you have those institutions who thought they understood and could manage the risk; a belief that was borne out for a while by their increased profits. In the other camp were those lenders who took a conscious decision to keep out of sub-prime and the associated wholesale markets, although you can bet your life they were under a lot pressure to change tack and follow the money.

What needs to happen now within our financial institutions is a change of culture and a shift away from the all-consuming desire for profit that drives the development of ever more complex products that are designed to give consumers the money they demand whilst shifting the risk on to somebody else’s balance sheet.

We need a return to a financial services culture where customers are put first and common-sense and sustainability is prized over super-profits and instant cash gratification. And that culture has to be promoted from the CEO right down to the front-line staff and the consumers we are communicating with. This culture still exists amongst some institutions, such as the Principality Building Society.

Take as another example a friend of mine who is high up in the comms department of a major bank, and who for the last six or seven years had been saying that sub-prime wasn’t sustainable, to which I would usually reply ‘keep on saying that mate, and one day you’ll be proved right.

Well he was proved right. And guess what? The bank he works for has been virtually untouched by these super bad debts.

So before you dig out another bag of rotting veg, remember that for a business to be successful it does not have to be run by a complete bunch of bankers.

Brazil Leads the New World Order

Best selling author Adjiedj Bakas will be hitting TV and radio programmes this January courtesy of Brazil. His new book, The Future of Finance, predicts how the world will change following the current recession, including a new world order which is challenged by emerging countries such as is being launched in the UK on 16 January 2009. Dutchman Bakas is an adviser to multi-nationals and political leaders across the world, and in The Future of Finance he sets out his vision of the world’s financial markets.

The Future of Finance is already one of the most popular selling books in The Netherlands, and is one of the first books to be requested by Barack Obama’s team in preparation for the new presidential term.

Brazil has been tasked with all communications work for the promotion of this new book, covering English language business media.