Leinster vs Cardiff Blues: 31st October, 2009.

I have three tickets available for Magners League game between Leinster vs Cardiff Blues available for Saturday 31st October. Kick off 6.30pm. €60 for three tickets. That’s a reduction of 12.8% from the price I paid which included the booking fees of €8.85, but I have knocked these of the price, hence the reduction. Please email me at simon@republicpr.ie or call 0851 341 761.

Ryanair vs the BBC – PR Cat Fight

There was a fascinating episode of BBC1′s Panorama last Monday, which focused on the operations of Irish airline Ryanair. Most of the programme focused on the ruses Ryanair use in their dishonest marketing methods and how users are forced to pay so-called ‘optional’ charges. The usual stuff we here everywhere but with the new ones being introduced all the time it is important to keep abreast of them.

The highlight of the programme was a ding dong between the show’s presenter Vivian White and Ryanair’s big cheese, Micheal O’Leary, who White appears to have doorstepped outside Ryanair’s HQ due to O’Leary refusing to do an interview with the Beeb unless it was shown in full. This is a ridiculous demand and one that Ryanair must have know would be refused, as there are no independent TV companies in the world who would grant such a request, as this would be the equivalent of giving him editorial control.

Catherine O’Mahony discussed this issue much better than I ever could in her column in the Sunday Business Post last weekend, so I have copied her post in below as well as link to the original. At the bottom I have included the link to the full uncut interview with Michael O’Leary, which the BBC put on their website.

http://www.sbpost.ie/mediaandmarketing/media-world-45038.html

Media World

AUNTIE’S ANTICS CAUSE O’LEARY TO LOSE HIS COOL.
18 October 2009 By Catherine O’Mahony

Editing. The Oxford English Dictionary says this means either preparing written material for publication ‘‘by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it’’, or preparing and arranging material for a recording or broadcast.

So by definition, it involves manipulating material so that an article or programme can be easily understood.

Without editors, newspapers would be too heavy to lift. On TV, every news item would go on for several hours. Episodes of multi-location reality shows such as The Apprentice would be three days long.

Someone needs to explain this to Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary.

The airline boss appears to think it perfectly reasonable to insist that his contribution to a broadcast feature must run in full, untouched by an editor’s hand. This was, he declared unapologetically last week, what he asked of BBC’s Panorama programme because, he insisted, his input would otherwise be altered to suit Panorama’s agenda.

His request was declined and the programme went ahead. On the day the show was to run, O’Leary published 25 pages of e-mail correspondence with the BBC programme on the Ryanair website and issued a press release giving his side. He took issue with a claim made by a spokesman for BBC Panorama who had said: ‘‘We wanted to interview Michael O’Leary, but he wanted editorial control and that is something that no broadcaster would agree to.”

This was entirely false, Ryanair said.

‘‘Ryanair sought no editorial control over this interview. All Ryanair asked for was that the interview, of whatever length (to be decided by the BBC) would not be edited, censored or cut by the Panorama editors.”

But insisting that material remains uncut is a bid to exercise editorial control. It can’t be done with print media and it can’t be done on TV.

What if someone from the BBC refused to get on a Ryanair flight unless they could personally organise the seating plan?

Nonsense, right? This was a surprising gaffe from a company that usually follows a deft – if incendiary – line in public relations and marketing.

The e-mail correspondence shows that the BBC got a few things wrong in the course of its research (such as the issue of aircraft turnaround times), but surely Ryanair could have managed to defend itself on these issues? It’s not like it has anything to fear from controversy.

But instead of cooperating with the BBC programme, or even ignoring it, which would have at least kept the whole episode relatively low profile, O’Leary made maximum fuss.

At the last minute, Ryanair tried to turn the dispute to its own advantage by directly urging customers to watch the BBC show and promising to give away 100,000 free flights for every false claim made.

Anyone who did so will have seen a reasonably balanced, hardly groundbreaking, programme that gave Ryanair management a pretty fair hearing – going as far as to run a wholly unedited impromptu interview with O’Leary on its website.

Final score: BBC: 2 (for showing off its integrity and for winning extra ratings). O’Leary’s PR skills: nil.

(End of SBP article)

__________________________

Here is the full BBC interview with the Not-So-Great-Man in all it’s glory http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8297211.stm

Problems emerging Larionovo/Profile’s Sports City Dubai

People have been aware for some time that the gloss has well and truly come off the Dubai property market.

Well that is putting it mildly, just like Ireland (and possibly even worse) prices have crashed.  A great deal of developers are unable to finish their developments and property owners are losing their shirts and in some cases their life savings.

The problem with the overseas property industry is that it was and is unregulated, this is despite the fact that it deals with some of the largest financial transactions individuals will ever make. The situation is mad.  Let me put it this way: if you buy a €1 share in a listed company you are protected by the Financial Regulator because the company selling the share is regulated and has to abide by strict rules in relation to the selling of that share and the stock market; this means make any claims as to the potential of that the investment in that share i.e. they cannot claim it will rise in value. However, with an overseas property you can be spending €1 million on a property and you are left at the will of the gods. The person selling that property can make the wildest of claims e.g. 100% profit in 5 years, say the will guarantee the rent etc and they cannot be held accountable because the sector isn’t regulated. This is why the up most care is needed.

It is a terrible situation that the Irish government allowed to carry on right under their noses.  Whilst the sector is due to be regulated by the forthcoming NPSRA (National Property Services Regulatory Authority) this has already been delayed and is coming eight years too late.

The lack of regulation has led to a huge amount of miss-selling of investments and fraud within the sector. As usual the small investors are left to pick up the pieces and this has led to a great deal of worry for thousands of people who bought properties overseas.

There is an old story in the financial sector that says: during the American Gold Rush it wasn’t the gold speculators who rushed to California that got rich but it was the middlemen who got rich i.e. the traders that sold the speculators the picks and shovels. Indeed this is the period from whence Levi Strauss made his name selling his first jeans. It wasn’t even the people who manufactured the equipment but the middle men that sold it on. This is starting to mirror the overseas property sector with neither the builders, nor the purchaser making the money but the agents and brokers who acted as the middlemen. And it is these middle men that appear to have taken their profits up front, and in many cases ran off, leaving the small investors behind to bear brunt of problems as things have started to go wrong.

I have seen some of these problems first hand recently with case I’ve been working on relating to an Irish overseas property company called Kuvera.  I saw it again a last month when I attended a meeting that hundreds of Irish investors in Dubai attended in City West after which I wrote this post about the group that has been set up to take action on a number of developments sold by Irish agents Larionovo and Profile Developments http://www.republicpr.ie/2009/09/09/investors-in-larionovo-profile-group-sports-city-dubai/

Since then there has been progress and more investors are being requested to come forward. A website has been set up for those owners who are concerned about the project. Anyone wanting to join the Group and be part of any action taken in relation to the development, should download a membership form from the website and send it in with the joining fee of €200. Here is a link  http://concerneddubaisportscityinvestors.com/

This relates to the following Sports City Dubai developments:

- Bermuda views,
- Eagle Heights,
- Profile Residence,
- Stadium point.

A Committee has also been set up to represent the interests of the investors. They can be contacted via the form in the Contact Us section of the website.  A further meeting of the Group will take place on 3rd November at 7.30pm at the City West Hotel.

Ends