Fishburn Hedges

Fishburn Hedges is a corporate communications company (PR firm) now owned by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, the UK's largest advertising agency, which is, in turn, ultimately owned by the global communications group Omnicom. It has worked for some of the most controversial corporations, including Shell and British American Tobacco.

Origins of the company

Fishburn Hedges was established in 1991 as a corporate communications company specialising in public relations, advising companies on how best to communicate ideas and products to their target audience. Five founders of the company - Neil Hedges and chairman Dale Fishburn, together with Andrew Boys, John Williams and Charles Downing put up £150,000 to start up the company.

'The firm opened for business the day the Gulf War started and in the depths of the recession. But it made more than pounds 1 million profit last year and has picked up top clients such as Barclays, Rothschild and Eagle Star.' In 1996 Fishburn Hedges was taken over by Abbot Mead Vickers ad company for a reported fee of between £4 and 15 million.

The founders

John Williams, an independent consultant specialising in corporate marketing and reputation, was co-founder and its former Chairman, having started his career in consumer advertising with J. Walter Thompson. At Fishburn Hedges, he is said to have developed a particular interest in corporate social responsibility and also built a practice serving the not-for-profit sector. He worked for five years with Shell on their global stakeholder engagement programme.

He is currently Chairman of the governance and leadership think tank, Tomorrow's Company, a board member of Business in the Community and was, until recently, deputy Chair of ChildLine.

Williams is currently a Commissioner with the Charity Commission, as one of the five non-executive Commissioners responsible for the regulation of 190,000 charities in England and Wales.

Activities

FH representatives say that they draw ideas from all over the place:

Typically our client teams will mix career PR practitioners with consultants who have professional experience in that client’s field. Our consultants include former bankers, advertising planners, authors, civil servants, trade unionists, stock brokers, charity fund raisers and, of course, journalists.

The journalists are, of course, the greatest influence and one can see here a similar example of the merger between journalism and PR promoted by Editorial Intelligence. Perhaps coincidentally, Fishburn Hedges is one of the main backers of Editorial Intelligence, with chief executive Ron Finlay an adviser to the project.

The company's list of clients include some of the UK's and US's biggest controversial corporations. FH handles Shell's 'Global reputation management programme'; the Bank of America's 'Media relations strategic counsel and public affairs internal communications'; Barclay's 'Personal finance media relations programme and business banking media relations programme'; BT’s public relations programme with BT Retail; Serco; and IBM.

And what do they get for their money? According to Fishburn Hedges’s own website: ‘all PRs should take note that purple type on their CV, a thorough knowledge of East Enders and frequent pretence of sincerity goes a long way’.

PR Campaigns

Transport for London paid FH a massive £100,000 a month for advice on Ken Livingstone's congestion charge. The total fee amounted to more than £2.4m over two years (2001-03) Fishburn Hedges, says it is offering value for money.

The Fishburn Hedges website points to the following services it provides to clients:

• government relations and regulatory affairs to campaigning
• reactive crisis and issue management to planned corporate positioning
• corporate ethics to corporate community involvement

Judging by general industry practice this is likely to mean:

• use the subterranean skills of the lobbyist to schmooze politicians.
• try to convince us we want what their clients want and reframe the clients, perhaps by changing its name to something more innocent sounding.
• start a 'grass roots' organisation or perhaps a seamingly independent foundation or institute which has the ostensible function of 'education' or environmental advocacy.

This is what Fishburn Hedges themselves say they have done for their clients:

1. We have helped clients to win competition cases. For William Hill, we helped to persuade the competition authorities and the Trade & Industry Secretary to block the proposed merger of Ladbrokes with Coral. We worked with J Sainsbury during the “Rip off Britain” furore to ensure that it came out of the Competition Commission inquiry into the major supermarkets with a clean bill of health.
2. We have helped to reposition Powergen with government not only as a respected industry voice but also as leading the way on the environmental and social agenda
3. Our work for Unilever, one of the world’s largest food companies, has included communicating its approach to sustainable development to government, opinion formers, NGOs and the media. By working towards best practice, Unilever has added strength to its voice on all the major UK/EU policy issues facing food, farming and fisheries. The programme has included: working with Forum for the Future, the NGO led by Jonathon Porritt, which has advised on the development of Unilever’s Sustainable Agriculture Project.

Both the first and second of these are classic lobbying campaigns, and the second also suggests ‘corporate positioning’. If we take the third in the list at face value and assume that Forum for the Future operates as described, this still leaves the conflict of interest represented by Fishburn Hedges retaining some of the worst corporate polluters as clients (such as Shell and Powergen).

However, Forum for the Future is actually a paradigmatic example of a front group and not actually an independent non-government organisation. In the circular world of PR the Forum is itself a client of FH, which in turn runs the forum's website for it. Tetra Pak the carton manufacturing company owned by the Rausing family also works with (or is a client of?) the Forum. The company is also a client of Fishburn Hedges The Forum's ”business partners" are largely drawn from the UK’s FTSE 250 and include major multi-nationals such as Unilever, BP, GlaxoSmithKline, ICI and Vodafone – all of whom are not known for their environmental sustainability.

Front Groups

Fishburn Hedges was the organizer of the tobacco industry front group Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment, or ARISE. The firm also operates a Front Group called the Pre-school Learning Alliance:

"As part of our work with the Pre-school Learning Alliance, we combined a major conference on early years education and childcare, addressed by the Education Secretary, with the presentation by pre-school children of a cake to the PM at Number Ten as it was his birthday."

The VP of the Alliance is Graham McMillan — Director of Fishburn Hedges. The whole project is largely an effort to offset the government's plans to offer free access to that which the Learning Alliance's 'partners' want to sell.

Monitoring activists

Fishburn Hedges also takes a keen policing interest in activist campaigns if they prompt TV and radio coverage. When a customer (Steve Pardoe) exposed on his website that BT Cellnet ‘had been making unauthorised debits from thousands of people's bank and credit card accounts, then cynically fobbing off their victims,’ the campaign grew to attract mainstream media attention and so Fishburn helped out with some of that ‘reactive crisis and issue management’, including:

BT Cellnet and their PR firm, Fishburn Hedges, visited this site on 16. February, the day before transmission, and later in the week. Fishburn Hedges' visit was presumably to gauge the extent and detail of media exposure of Cellnet's fraud.

The 'Corporate use of codes of ethics: 2004 survey' was put together by Fishburn Hedges and it reportedly shows ‘that responsibility for how corporate codes of ethics operate is increasingly being taken by directors and boards in Britain's biggest companies.’ Given the Fishburn Hedges approach, it is difficult to know if this is true or the result of a ‘pretence of sincerity’

Staff

Staff listed on the company website are:

• Andrew Marshall
• Andrew Reid
• Andy Berry
• Chris Reed
• Clare Looker
• Daniel Mines
• Elizabeth Bickham
• Fiona Thorne
• Lucy Burns
• Marc Moninski
• Morgan Bone
• Neil Hedges
• Nick Wright
• Philippa Dale-Thomas
• Rachel Jones
• Ron Finlay
• Sarah Croom-Johnson
• Simon Burton
• Simon Matthews
• Suzanne Morris

Clients

2007

Amway | ASDA | Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries | Bank of America | Barclays | British Library | British Marine Federation | Barrow Cadbury Trust | Carbon Trust | National Express | National Treatment Agency | Powergen | Pre-school Learning Alliance | Royal College of Nursing | Scottish Widows | Shell International | South Bank Centre | Transport for London | TetraPak | Unilever

2008

ABPI | Atos Origin | Aviva | Capital One | CITB Construction Skills | Digital UK | ERSA | EEDA | Job Centre Plus | JPMorgan | Laing O’Rourke | Norwich Union | Pension Protection Fund | Sainsbury’s | Starbucks | Tetra Pak | Virgin Trains | West Midlands Passenger Transport Authority / West Midlands Metropolitan Authorities

In 2008, Fishburn Hedges was reported to be a member of GFC/Net

External Resources

• Fishburn Hedges UK Clients and Staff 30.11.03 to 3.05.04
• Fishburn Hedges UK Staff and clients, 1 June 2005 to 30 Nov 2005