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Tuesday 5 March 2019

BBC Appoints New TV Licensing PR Harlots


The BBC has confirmed the appointment of six PR agencies to preach the gospel according to TV Licensing on a regional basis.

As you'll quickly realise, for all some of the agency names are very different the faces behind them certainly are not.

The lucky winners of this latest BBC turdfest are:
  • FleishmanHilliard Fishburn for the London and the South East region: FleishmanHilliard Fishburn was formed as a result of the merger of Fishburn Hedges, which held the previous London and the South East contract, and FleishmanHilliard. Given that they're in the PR business, you'd think they'd recognise what a ridiculous name FleishmanHilliard Fishburn is.
  • Smarts Communicate for the Scotland region: Smarts retains its existing contract.
  • MCE for the Northern Ireland region: MCE rode in like a white knight on a steed to pick up the broken pieces after the previous contract holder, Stakeholder Group, went bust.
  • SpottyDog Communications for the Midlands and East Anglia region: The previous contract holder was Clark Associates.
  • Aberfield for the Northern England region: The previous contract holder was Finn Communications.
  • Equinox for Wales and the South West region: The previous contract holder was Grayling.
The BBC said it was looking for agencies that understood the issues facing TV Licensing and could communicate with audiences efficiently and effectively. Clearly it doesn't think that former contract holders Clark Associates, Finn and Grayling can achieve those objectives.

As we have previously observed, TV Licensing PR harlots need the ability to cast even the most negative of TV Licensing stories in a positive light, so a flair for creative writing is essential. Over the years we have seen some very creative writing by TV Licensing's PR agencies.

The new agencies will begin work from 1st April and the contract terms are for three years with the possibility of up to two 12-month extensions, up to a maximum of five years in total. Each contract is thought to have a value of £2.5m over its lifetime.


Sian Healey, head of policy and communications for TV Licensing at the BBC, said: "This was a hard-fought procurement and the winning bidders were chosen on the basis of value for money and excellent quality for the licence fee payer. The work of the agencies shows a positive return on investment in licence sales as a direct result of their activity.

"The agencies play an important role in supporting TV Licensing by communicating when a licence is needed and ways to pay, including an extensive community relations campaign working with almost 500 organisations, to provide help and support to the public."

Let the TV Licensing turd polishing commence!

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8 comments:

Fred Bear said...

The first thing they'll have to communicate is why the greedy BBC has decided to pick the pockets of the over 75s in order to fill the trough for BBC top managers and ludicrously overpaid presenters.

Anonymous said...

Someone is definitely crapping their pants with the rate people are cancelling, knowing that it's legal not to have one and funding a bias company that only works on its own interest

Anonymous said...

Its not a new thing, the government subsidised the over 75's licences for years and now don't... This was revenue they didn't have to chase, it was just an invoice that was paid, but with people now living longer that's a huge amount for the BBC to lose/ recover along with people cancelling

Anonymous said...

They will rteally rgret it if they try to extend TV Licence requirement for ALL streaming, including Netflix, Amazon and especially YouTube where those of us with a YouTube channel will kick off for needig a TV Licence to publish and watch online our own videos, and the Twitch gamers streaming their footage. I predict a riot.

Bogging for a want. said...

The only way that the BBC can justify any licence fee is to give the people of the UK something back for the money that they demand, at the moment we get nothing but a couple of forth rate sterile television channels and a biased news channel, all well marinated in political correctness, hidden agendas and deceit, none of it is worth paying for.
If they gave the public online access to their large archive of television, music, sport and historical broadcasts that would/may give the licence fee some validity but even that wouldn't warrant the one hundred and fifty odd pound price tag that they demand, it would need to be a lot lower to compete with other streaming services.
The BBC need to stop strong arming the public and come up with something that mutually benefits both the corporation and the public if it wants to survive but the mentality that exists at the BBC currently is one of greed and smugness. So its doomed to fail and to be fair, it deserves to in its current state.

Fred Bear said...

I see Nath has asked for the BBC's latest Performance Packs for their TV Licensing activities:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/monthly_performance_pack_3#incoming-1324618

After their previous fiasco over redacting the results from a simil;ar previous enquiry, you can bet the BBC will be very sure to delete anything that shows how badly the TV Licence system is doing.

Fred Bear said...

People in the LLF community might want to look at this discussion from about 2 months ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/aei5jf/tv_licensing_in_scotland_i_just_had_a_visit/

It contains some good advice about dealing with BBC clown-goons on the doorstep.

Fred Bear said...

There's an anti-licence fee petition going at the moment:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/231342

The interesting thing is the map which shows where the resistance to the BBC TV Tax is strongest. It looks like Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford are leading the way with Redcar not so far behind