Fishburn Hedges

Fishburn Hedges is owned by Abbott Mead Vickers, the UK's largest advertising agency, which is in turn ultimately owned by the global communications group Omnicom.

Company Overview

Fishburn Hedges was established in 1991 as a corporate communications company. They specialise in public relations, advising companies on how best to communicate ideas and products to their target audience. ^[3] FH 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 the a similar prototype of the merger between journalism and PR promoted by Editorial Intelligence.

The company's list of clients is a who’s who of controversial clients. FH handle Shell's 'Global reputation management programme', the Bank of America's 'Media relations strategic counsel and public affairs internal communications', and 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 FH’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. more than £2.4m over two years (2001-3) from the account, but the agency, spot the (‘pretence of sincerity’?), says it is offering value for money.

But what do they do for the money? Here is what they say on their website:

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

Lets translate that a bit:

• 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 seemings independent founation or institute which has the ostensible function of 'education' or environmental advocacy.

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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

Forum for the Future is 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. (note Tetrapak run by one of the world’s wealthiest men make all those disposable cartons of milk you see lying in the streets). 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.

FH also run 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 Digital Learning Alliance (another front group) 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.

Fishburn Hedges also take a keen policing interest in activists campaigns if they prompt TV and radio programmes. 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 to planned corporate positioning.", 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.

Their game was to obscure awareness not to stop the fraud. Rather humorously the 'Corporate use of codes of ethics: 2004 survey' was put together by Fishburn Hedges and their survey shows "that responsibility for how corporate codes of ethics operate is increasingly being taken by directors and boards in Britain's biggest companies." How true, or is that just PR?

Staff

Staff listed on the company website are: ^[4]

• 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

Fishburn Hedges' clients include: ^{[5] [6]}

• 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

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