Frequently Asked Questions

Most of our PR retainers include media monitoring and relations.

A dedicated press office acts as your ‘eyes and ears’ to ensure you ​are able to respond quickly to media opportunities (and issues) as they arise​.

By monitoring online and traditional media on a daily basis, in addition to being on ‘direct dial’ with most financial journalists, BlueChip is able to place your brand or spokesperson in the media reactively. ​

Working proactively with clients, BlueChip applies understanding of the media landscape and insights into your business to develop a calendar of opportunities with which to engage media on a monthly basis. ​

Activities may include media one-on-ones, rolling out ‘evergreen’ topics, spokesperson profiling, engaging third party advocates to endorse your brand or product, product review programs or research. ​

A clear and specific brief helps set objectives and expectations for the relationship between businesses and their communication partners.

A good brief helps you select the right partner, and get the most from the relationship once an appointment is made.

Your investment in this process upfront - correctly identifying objectives and desired outcomes – should translate to communication strategy and action that complements other business activity and does so within timeframe, guidelines and budget.

The following elements could be considered as part of a brief:

• Objectives for the campaign or project. These should be specific, measurable, actionable, time bound and achievable given your current challenges. Specify the key activities you would like to see and volume of activity anticipated (i.e. media relations, writing, event management, issues management, media monitoring etc).
• Company background and brief history, including a) vision, mission, strategy and short term operational targets, b) an explanation of the marketing environment, including other planned activity, c) an overview of your company's products and services, d) stakeholders and audiences, e) competitors.
• A summary of your understanding of the key communication challenges facing the company and the outcome/s you would like to see.
• Other challenges, issues and sensitive information to consider. 
• Timeline: What is the expected length of the campaign? Detail upcoming key milestones/goals.
• Clarify whether you are looking for a project-based or retainer-based relationship and for how long.
• Performance and accountability expectations. Identify how you would like to measure success and what you expect the agency relationship to look like and deliver.
• Provide a budget range with an upper and lower limit so your agency has something to refer to when developing tactics.
• NDA: Ask any potential communication providers to sign a non-disclosure agreement before providing a full brief.

Creative collaboration is an excellent way to develop ideas that ​will resonate with a target audience and have the desired impact. An 'ideation session' is a workshop with relevant internal stakeholders and key external parties (such as your advertising agency, market research or analytics agency, brand ambassador, or a partnering business).

More than simply brainstorming, these structured two to four hour sessions can be used to determine a research hypothesis, a single stunt or an entire campaign.

By working alongside a client and their agency partners, the best brains from a variety of PR and marketing disciplines help ​to create great ideas.

Sessions benefit from having a range of people attend, with a minimum of eight and maximum of twenty participants.

At BlueChip, we help our clients be more prepared and confident in interactions with media and journalists by providing media training for company spokespeople.

The purpose of media training is to:

• Educate attendees about how the media works and empower spokespeople to make the media an effective tool to convey messages to identified stakeholders​
• Assess each participant’s skills and experience, and develop those skills to a level commensurate with their responsibilities in terms of media contact ​
• Review and refine business messages to meet media ​and prospective clients’ needs​
• Training on delivering these key messages in a media interview environment​
• Provide spokespeople with an opportunity to test the key messages in rigorous, realistic media scenarios​
• Practice, feedback and critique of key message delivery​
• Develop a spokesperson matrix identifying key spokespeople and areas of expertise

Run over a full or half day by a trained facilitator, BlueChip workshops use techniques to determine goals, get under the skin of the audience, articulate messages and develop appropriate strategies for a client's quarterly or annual marketing plans. The workshops elicit the best results when key decision makers are involved and are attended by eight to twelve participants. ​

These sessions are highly valued by our clients for their ability to bring the senior team on a journey and refine their value proposition or messages to market.

BlueChip content strategies are typically thought leadership-driven, and delivered both on and off-line.​

Our experience is that integrated campaigns, led by high quality content, outperform traditional marketing in increasingly sophisticated and segmented markets.​

Crafted to support your marketing and media strategy, effective content has to be attention-worthy - forming a stand-alone body of work that “earns” the attention of those who matter most to your business.​

Content examples​:

• White papers​
• Q&As​
• Thought leadership-led email marketing
• Opinion pieces ​
• Presentations​
• Websites​
• Blogs, & social media content (eg tweets, status updates) ​
• Article submissions​
• Scripting​
• Content for online communities​
• Conference speeches, industry presentations, public addresses