Monthly Archives: August 2011

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August 12, 2011

Three awards and five stars for the OGH in Guernsey

Earlier this year the Orchard team was involved in a marketing campaign for one of Guernsey”s best hotels, the Old Government House Hotel. Consultant Emma Anderson and account executive Catherine Le Prevost led the project.

The brief:

Orchard began working with the Old Government House Hotel & Spa in February 2011 following their record breaking win at the Guernsey Awards for Achievement. The OGH was the only business ever to scoop three awards, winning Guernsey Business of the Year, Best Large Business and the Excellence in Training Award.


Orchard PR was approached to maximise the impact of this achievement and to keep up the momentum generated by the awards with PR activity, events and greater profile in the Channel Islands’ media targeting corporate bookers, business customers and holiday makers.


The hotel was also keen to promote their services to islanders with The Governor’s Restaurant and Brasserie a particular focus.


August 5, 2011

Why we don’t like AVEs…

Public relations is not about numbers, or space or monetary value. It is about impact. The idea that a PR campaign can be assessed and measured through something as crude as getting a ruler out and establishing exactly how much space in a newspaper you have won for a client is naïve and ultimately holding back the PR industry from demonstrating what can actually be achieved through the use of good public relations.


The PR industry itself (well, most of it anyway) doesn’t value AVE’s, and recent news shows major players  making this explicit. Ogilvy, for example, are ditching the method altogether with their Australian MD Kieran Moore describing AVE”s as ‘more about justification than determining actual effectiveness’.


So we think it is a good time for us to be helping businesses re-evaluate how they measure the success of their PR activity.