Think global, act like tourists…

I’ve been reading between the lines in PR Week again which, to be honest, I find rather more rewarding than reading the black inky bits.

‘Tracking software firm Blackbay turns to Inferno’ it tells me…a headline which, in itself, might’ve had the company in question dashing off to call the non-existent Bell Pottinger 24hr Crisis Line, but which in fact refers to a new client win by the Next Fifteen Group subsidiary.

The exciting news is that Inferno is to be Blackbay’s first PR agency (so the budget is likely to be smallish) and that Inferno will be running a B2B PR campaign across six European countries. This might prove to be something of a challenge. While its sibling agencies Text 100 and Bite have zillions of offices scattered around the globe, the Inferno network extends all the way to, umm, White City. It’s a hub without spokes; a big fat old legless spider of a network.

Still, I thought, they’ll be able to leverage the undoubtedly well-established European network of its brand new client. Scampering off to the Blackbay website I find out that it “delivers real-time mobile worker solutions that enable business process improvements to Supply Chain and Field Service mission-critical operations” or, if you’re a PR Week writer, it “allows delivery and repairmen to electronically track goods and their workload while out on the road”. Which is a description I like better.

Never mind all that, where on earth does it do all this great stuff from? London, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Milan, Oslo? Umm, not quite. London makes it…but then it’s Christchurch, Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore.

So, now I’m thinking that either (a) Inferno will be making extensive use of PR Newswire’s European press release distribution service, (b) Inferno associate director Suzy Sammons will be packing her suitcase for a whistle-stop tour of Europe with Blackbay execs or (c) Inferno is quickly cobbling together a network of European ‘partner’ agencies and telling the happy companies that they’ve each got £23.75 per month but "it’s a great opportunity to establish a relationship with a company that has ambitious plans for…blah, blah, blah."