The Chancellor’s Budget is on the calendar for most businesses, with the outcome more often than not affecting every business in some form.
This year’s was no different, and for a select few of Bottle’s B2B clients, it was a key media moment on the PR calendar. Here, we take a quick look at how each of the client teams performed on the day.
Emma Allsebrook, Publisher for Leaseplan comments, “Due to the nature of the business, the budget provides a prime opportunity to position Leaseplan as a leader within the automotive industry. As a team, we ensured we monitored pre-Budget headlines and worked closely with LeasePlan to draft comment on what we expected to see. This allowed us to be one of the first media agencies to react to George Osborne’s announcements on the fuel duty freeze, Capital Allowance and infrastructure. We issued a pre-Budget media briefing to announce LeasePlan’s availability to provide reactive comment on what these announcements would mean for the automotive and fleet industry and thanks to our solid media relations, we secured a post-Budget interview with one of the key titles in the automotive sector – Fleet News – and liaised with a journalist at the Daily Mail to provide pre-Budget comment.
“Whilst we prepared as much as possible, the Budget, as always, threw out a few surprises, but our speedy work and preparation meant we could react quickly to key fleet and automotive issues. Not only did LeasePlan spearhead the debate in the trade press by securing eight bites of coverage in this area, but we also secured two pieces of coverage in national press – including the Daily Mail and This is Money – on one of the most talked about topics of the day – the freeze on fuel duty.
“In addition, thanks to the fast work of our in-house data intelligence team, we were able to track LeasePlan’s performance and audience reaction to its live Budget stream against its competitors on social media. The company lead the discussion among its competitors from its owned channels, received the highest response from the media and other stakeholders in the hours following the Budget and outperformed its competitors in securing engagement from the widest range of media and commentators.”
Fiona McAra, Lead Publisher for RES, comments: “Following George Osborne’s pledge of £730 million for renewable energy auctions in his Budget, we used the opportunity to provide comment from RES. As a renewable energy developer across onshore and offshore wind, solar and energy storage, RES was well positioned to comment on what the pledge meant for the industry. We worked with the RES in house communications and public policy team to deliver a comment to a key trade title, WindPower Offshore, stating that the pledge was not value for money for UK consumers. The comment was online just hours after the Budget was delivered, positioning RES as a leading industry commentator.”
Camilla Brown, Lead Publisher for Brandwatch, comments, ““With Brandwatch being a social media analysis company, hijacking the news agenda is part and parcel of our work for them. We struck up a relationship with PR Week when we offered to monitor the social media reaction to the weekly PMQs, which naturally progressed into most of the political agenda. Thanks to the fast work of the Brandwatch inhouse team pulling the graphs and stats for us, we were able to provide PR Week real-time updates on how Twitter was reacting to the Budget announcements, resulting in two quality pieces of coverage on the same day. Smiles all round!”