Challenge:

• With a plethora of commentators to choose from Lansons wanted to push travelsupermarket.com’s Bob Atkinson to the front of the pack for media interviews around the British Airways cabin crew strike.

Solution:

• There are a lot of able voices in this space. To become a first-call commentator Bob needed to be known for the key journalist-friendly attributes of flexibility, subject knowledge, on-air personality, breadth and specifics so that he could be relied upon to deliver a good sound bite for any audience.
• We worked with the client to ensure that Bob had something new and different from the pack to say, relevant to the audience and maintaining the corporate messaging.
• This required lateral thinking and a close analysis of the daily media to predict the likely next direction of the story over the course of the news cycle.

Implementation:

• Preparation is everything. Before Bob was placed as a live commentator Lansons Live first trained him in media skills, then undertook a contact program so that he was known to broadcast journalists ahead of the story breaking.
• Once the story was live it was a matter of contacting journalists with outlet-specific messages relevant to their particular audiences and getting Bob to the most appropriate location relevant to the story.
  

Outcome:

• With 22 national items of coverage on the BA story alone, travelsupermarket.com’s yearly broadcast target was achieved in the first four months of the year and Bob Atkinson is firmly established as a go-to guy for reactive comment about the British Airways story as well as other breaking travel news stories.