As the long days of the summer draw to a sultry-hot close with August (unless, like us, you are based in Britain, where it has been a cruelly wet and windy month). As the air begins to carry the first crisp chill of the end of the summer and the beginnings of autumn, we can look to the successes we have had for our clients over the past 30 sweltry days.
Here’s an overview of some of the highlights we secured clients in August, which, despite it being what is known as “silly season” in the news media at this time of year, are (as ever) of especial quality:
In the Guardian, Catherine De Vries, Dean for International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University, writes that Europe’s far-right surge has a lesson for the Labour government, that it needs to fix the NHS to see off the threat of Farage and rightist populist parties. Her phenomenal op-ed discusses the exploitation of voter discontent with crumbling public services and shows what leftist parties can do to stop populist rhetoric undermining their electoral chances.
Over on media behemoth YouTube (a much under-tapped resource in PR, and a place where many eyeballs reside), Ludovic Phalippou, Professor of Financial Economics and the Academic Area Head of Finance, Accounting & Economics at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, appeared on Dinis Guarda’s coveted podcast (which boasts a whopping 178,000 subscribers), with, at the time of writing, the podcast having been viewed almost 50,000 times.
At a time when many might have been taking their calls from sun-loungers in exotic locales, a study from Durham University Business School explored “the experience of both women and men who work remotely, how they set boundaries and avoided conflict between work and personal lives,” in the Daily Mail.
August heat is not good news for everyone, and in a rapidly warming world, from the coast of the Med to California to Africa, it has meant drought and trouble. We helped showcase some of the ways “Africans fight hunger with home-grown innovations” in world-renowned Reuters.
It was a month of great syndication, with many pieces reaching audiences in the hundreds of thousands thanks to the worldwide news-sharing scheme. A piece on GMAC finding that tech and AI skills are fast becoming the most sought-after by employers, was originally published in the sector-leading Poets & Quants and then appeared on Yahoo!. This happened again with a study on U.S. employers expecting to hire far fewer business school graduates, and again with a Poets piece on graduates of a business analytics program earning over $120K reappearing on Yahoo!.
Research from Durham University Business School on the different habits of women and men was splashed up in the The Times, with a key message from Efpraxia Zamani, an associate professor at Durham, that: “There’s still a need for more shared responsibilities in the family home if we are to achieve true equality in both work and family life.”
Much like the sound of cricket balls being struck throughout a warm and windless August day, hit after hit after hit after hit came in the form of pieces in Times Higher Education this past month, on topics from how to optimise a business school’s AI-related offering to how HE institutions can become fairer and more inclusive. Other sports-based hits come in the form of “Playing the business game: how has sports risen in the business school curriculum?” in QS Insights.
Throughout August, we helped clients ask and answer all the right questions including, “Ask The Right Questions: Why You Should Enable Your Team To Challenge” in Forbes.
