MIPIM Blog, Day 4: Final day before saying au revoir

A lunch for Birmingham’s MIPIM contingent at the Restaurant Mandala on the beach was oversubscribed.
CBRE’s Ashley Hancox emerged from a ten hour “power nap” especially – he went to his hotel on Wednesday night for 40 winks and failed to wake up until Thursday morning. Must be the Lee Evans-look-alike’s new job, as regional head [...]

MIPIM Blog, Day 3

My day started on a serious note, with a heavyweight European Investment Briefing from the boys at CB Richard Ellis.
The very polished Nick Axford, head of the firm’s EMEA research team, said there is cause for optimism, as the investment market is picking up.
Apparently, retail property is being highly sought after across Europe, with shopping [...]

MIPIM Blog: Brum’s great and good descend on Cannes

The plane to Nice yesterday morning was packed with lots of male, middle-aged men. For a minute I thought I was on the wrong flight:  a try-before-you-buy timeshare trip, or a Saga golfing holiday charter perhaps.
But no, as Gary Taylor of Argent helpfully pointed out, here on BMI Baby Flight WW6529 was the great and good [...]

A PR own goal by Marketing Birmingham?

Last week’s announcement that Marketing Birmingham had appointed Leeds-based PR agency Hatch Communications to deliver a campaign for its ‘visitbirmingham.com’ marketing initiative was met with bewilderment from Brum’s PR and marketing fraternity.
Marketing Birmingham, which is charged with promoting the city as a visitor destination, hired Hatch to carry out a 12-month campaign to maximise its [...]

How to protect your reputation in a recession

As the recession continues to ravage the fortunes of businesses everywhere, libel actions are becoming a worryingly common occurrence.