Brunswick Group

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Brunswick offices, Lincolns Inn Fields, central London

Brunswick Group is an international PR firm, with almost a third of the FTSE 100 top firms as clients, they are the biggest financial communications consultancy in the UK. They paid more than £5,000 to the Labour Party for 'tickets for dinners' in 1999-2000 and gave £9,000 in August 2001. The company also donated the services of an employee to the Government to help work on the Financial Services and Markets Bill - legislation which will regulate business in the City and which would provide invaluable information to Brunswick s clients.

The Brunswick Group was founded in 1987. They advise on media and investor relations, mergers and acquisitions, competition and regulatory issues, crisis management, international communications and corporate campaigns. Although Brunswick are reluctant to advertise client details, they represent firms including British Airways, BT, EMI, Marks & Spencer (dropped recently) Marconi (ditto), Safeway, Casenove (City Stockbrokers), Blue Circle (fought off Lafarge takeover - cost �27m for all advisors) Standard Life (�1m+ fighting off demutualization), Newcastle United, Malcolm Glazer, MK Dons, Railtrack (before administration) and HBoS and range from some of the world's biggest companies, retained on an international mandate, to small and unquoted businesses. Also running the PR for London's bid to host the Olympics in 2012. They have offices in London, New York, Germany and Johannesburg.

Founder Alan Parker (son of former British Rail chairman Sir Peter Parker) owns 88% of Brunswick's Channel Islands holding company, Wynnstay, giving him control of the agency and a stake in the company worth an estimated �114m. Parker's personal assets are thought to be around �6m. In 2001, Parker recruited Bill Clinton's former aide, James Rubin, to Brunswick's political affairs unit. Rubin reportedly left in April 2004, according to the Observer:

Former state department spokesman James Rubin, pictured, was hired in a blaze of publicity by top financial PR firm Bruns-wick some time ago. That gave founder Alan Parker the right to brag that he had bagged one half of the world's most glamourous media couples (Rubin is married to London-based CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour).
Now rumour has it that Rubin has quietly quit, although not many people at Brunswick's Holborn HQ will have noticed. 'He was in the office about as often as Johnny Vegas is in the gym,' says a Brunswick insider. [1]

Later the firm's arts events subsidiary was joined by the former partner of Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications and wife of Gordon Brown, Sarah Macaulay. Sarah Macaulay is 'the fashionably reserved co-founder of Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications'. She marketed Emily's List, the campaign to increase the number of women MPs.

Previous names

The Brunswick Group has been through many differeing names and identities. The aim of this is presumably to hide financial information and to keep it offshore. Records available at companies House show that Brunswick itself used to be called Lincoln Research Ltd. Its name was changed to Brunswick Public Relations Limited on 6 March 1997.

Other companies in the group or of which Alan Parker or John Andrew Fenwick are Directors have also gone through seemingly confusing name changes.

Parker's directorships

(last five years) Binston (liquidated)

Source: Companies House 363s Annual Return for Brunswick Public Relations Limited, 18 June 1997.

Subsidiaries

Projects

Staff

Brunswick employs over 320 staff, including 40 partners. They advise on media and investor relations, mergers and acquisitions, competition and regulatory issues, crisis management, international communications and corporate campaigns.

Business activities in the company's language:

  • Ongoing IR & PR: maintaining and increasing trust and understanding among investors, analysts and media commentators
  • Financial calendar: we will ensure your results announcements are correctly positioned and managed
  • IPOs & financings: launching companies in the public markets and creating the communications infrastructure for a new level of corporate disclosure
  • Crisis & litigation: defending a company's integrity, business practices and assets, and developing an effective path to weather the storm
  • Corporate transactions: maximising support for transactions, including M&A
  • Restructurings: ensuring that communications maximizes a company's future viability
  • Regulatory & public affairs: utilising communications to encourage support from regulatory agencies and governmental opinion formers
  • At 1st of May 2005 Brunswick Group started a trade union like support campaign for EICTA's project Patents4Innovation

Clients

In July 2002 the Wall Street Journal reported that Martha Stewart had hired the Brunswick Group to massage her image in the wake of allegations that she profited from insider trading. [4]

In March 2004, the controversy over the exaggeration of the oil and gas reserves of Shell Oil resulted in the resignation of the then chairman, Philip Watts, and Walter van de Vijver, who was responsible for exploration and production. In an attempt to manage the crisis Shell hired the Brunswick Group to help it manage the crisis. "Brunswick has recently come on board, but we don't really say much more about what they do," Corrigan told PR Week. [5]

Controversies

'Even the most energetic reporters know that they have to be somewhat deferential in the presence of a powerful publicist. No one on a national beat can afford to be on the wrong side of [those who]..represent a third of the most quotable sources in the countryin the more liberal British media, reporters are less deferential to anyone; but even so the same principle holds truethe most important corporate spin doctors include Alan Parker, creator of Brunswick Des Wilson of BAA' (David Michie 1998: 10)

Parker was awarded the IPR's president's medal and made an honourary fellow in 2002. His peers described him and his company in the following terms:

"Alan Parker is our industry's most distinguished practitioner. He has reinvented financial communications and has made Brunswick the pre-eminent business of its time. This award recognises that remarkable record. I am delighted to welcome him as an honorary fellow of the IPR."

Alan Parker is currently on the Board of Governors for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Holland Park School and a Demos trustee. Previous employment: worked at the PR firm Broadstreet, learning the trade from the top City PR man Brian Basham. More than 100 clients, including ICI, Glaxo, Barclays.

Parker was described as 'the most powerful PR man in City, and the City is where PR men exercise more power than anywhere else'. He is said to have owned over 90% of Brunswick, which he founded in 1987, and is worth many many millions (one estimate in 1998 put his stake in Brunswick at �30m stg = almost (50m). Given the boom years that PR has enjoyed in the last decade it is likely that his personal wealth is much greater. In 2002 his stake in the company was worth an estimated �114m! Feb 2004 - Limited Liability Partnership - registered in Delaware.

Brunswick is one of 5 key financial PR agencies (others include Financial Dynamics, Lowe Bell, Citigate Dewe Rogerson and Maitland Consultancy) who handle over 80% of FTSE 100 clients.

Brunswick is perhaps the most secretive and invisible of all the leading City / financial PR firms in the UK. It only recently published a website, and doesn't reveal who they work for. It is known in the PR world that they have a blue-chip client list that is the envy of most other agencies. They do not advertise - business comes by referral and reputation,

What do such important city spin doctors do? As one revealed:

I could give you the whole anodyne spiel about the work we do for our clients - financial calendar stuffbut it's not really what they pay us for. Nine months of the year we take their retainer and give them back precisely sweet FA. What they are doing is taking out insurance. Because when the shit does hit the fan they know that we'll fix the media for them. We'll get the right stories in the right papers and we can do more to get their shareholders on side than anyone else

So what do they do for the retainers (when the shit is hitting the fan)? They develop cosy relationships with journalists (many City PR's are ex-financial journalists); the offer exclusive access to clients for friendly journalists; they can deny access to other clients of a reporter produces negative copy; they conduct research on their clients competitors and supply this to the press; they have also been known to pass price sensitive information to journalists.

March & September are busy times for City PR firms, known as results season, when listed companies must report their financial position to the Stock Exchange. City PR devotes much effort to perfecting the corporate message in financial statements. This is known as investor relations, a discipline hailed as the unsung villains of the Enron collapse, such was their role in misleading investors about the financial health of the corporation. As one ex-Brunswick employee confessed:

'Everyone hates their jobs during results seasonthere are a lot of extremely pissed off people who want out. But where else is there to go? At Brunswick you are encouraged to believe you are working for the best agency in town. You know there are plenty of others in the wings waiting to take your place'

on top of this hothouse atmosphere

City spin doctors at Brunswick PR have thoughtfully inaugurated a regular "debating" evening for internees, I mean staff. As they already work 15 hour days there is no obligation to attend these long and pointless evenings. Or is there. "It is something of a three-line whip," twitches my uncomfortable source. Bad luck chaps. Latest hot topic: "Is there a future for newspapers?"

Financial journalism

Related to this

It looks like marshmallows around the camp fire in Lincoln's Inn Field for the Daily Telegraph's City office. Staff have been three-line whipped for a bit of weekend bonding on 18 November at what looks suspiciously like the offices of Brunswick, the PR agency.
A mysterious memo to staff from Neil Collins, the City editor, explains: "It's an away day to discuss the future of the City Pages. Although attendance is not compulsory those of a paranoid disposition will regret not being there and the rest of us might have a good time (although some work will be done). There will be no counselling. At this stage I do not intend to answer press inquiries. . .
A wise move. While they would not confirm it, the navel gaze is apparently being run by Professional Presentations, a human resources consultancy based in Brunswick's offices and run by Lucy Parker, sister of the PR agency's Alan Parker.


Not beloved by all financial journalists

The phones were out of order at Brunswick - the PR company that is to the City what lint is to pockets (annoying and hard to get rid of) - for most of yesterday. Net productivity in the City soared as a result. (If anyone at Cable & Wireless fancies making pounds 50 in return for cutting them off again, give me a call.)
Sir Peter Davis, the Sainsbury chairman, was banished from BBC screens and airwaves last week after a row with his "over-protective" - the BBC's words, not mine - PR minders. Brunswick, the PR company for Sainsbury, was insisting that all the TV stations carry a "pooled" interview with Davis because of his busy schedule rather than speak to him individually. This is a recent trend, my mole at the Beeb tells me, and simply not on. Similar offers will likewise be rejected unless there is a compelling reason. Pooled reports are reserved normally for interviews with members of the Royal Family or the Gulf War - events by comparison with which Sainsbury's results rather pale into insignificance.

Exiting its Marks & Spencer post together with Roger Holmes and Luc Vandevelde was Brunswick, the PR agency which perhaps had good reason to feel aggrieved after it helped Marks & Spencer fight off Philip Green's last threatened takeover. To add spice, Tulchan Communications, which is run by ex-Brunswick senior partner Andrew Grant, was handed the account instead.

Astroturf

A Football Association arbitration panel meets on Monday to adjudicate on whether Wimbledon can relocate to Milton Keynes and the struggle between fans and chairman is becoming increasingly bitter and personal.

Charles Koppel, who has proposed the plan, faces the threat of legal action from Merton's council leader Andrew Judge after Koppel allegedly said Judge only wanted Wimbledon back in the borough because his girlfriend was a fan.

Judge strongly denied this and said he wants the club to return to Plough Lane because it is their home. He also pointed to a council survey which found 86% of residents in favour of a return to Merton. The club then responded with a press release from the residents' association of Haydons Bridge, the location of the former ground at Plough Lane, at a meeting of which Koppel's comments were allegedly made. That said the comments about Judge were taken out of context even though they were made in a taped conversation. The Residents' Association's listed contact is Sandra Clegg, an employee of Brunswick, the PR company Wimbledon is paying �200,000 a year to help engineer the move to Milton Keynes.

Brunswick PR in 2002 leaked damaging information on rivals to its new client John Duffield - who then ditched them!

Contact details

16 Lincoln's Inn Fields
London WC2A 3ED
UK
Phone: 44 20 7404 5959
Fax: 44 20 7831 2823
Web: http://www.brunswickgroup.com

External links

Notes

^ Media diary, 'Parker feels the rub as star signing quits', Observer Business Pages, Pg. 7, April 25, 2004.

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