Why my staff are the best PR folk in London.
I need to send out a big thank you to the team from Borkowski who handled the PS3 launch at Virgin Megastores so brilliantly.
The team turned up at Oxford Street on Wednesday at 11am to get things underway and worked through to midnight, then turned up on Thursday morning at 5.30am and worked right through to 2am on Friday morning, making sure that everything was right, that the press got the stories and pictures they needed and that everyone was happy.
Basically they worked like Trojans, sorting out all the interviews and photo calls, contacting the press, manning the doors, putting up branding, running across town to the Piccadilly store to man a PA midway through Thursday, liaising with the crowd, directing the press to Virgin Megastores and Sony reps, making sure the first guy in the queue got together with GMTV for an interview as soon as he had his shiny new PS3 in his hands and supporting all the launches at Virgin Megastores across the country, plus a hell of a lot more.
You can see from all the press in the last few days that they did an exemplary job – all the photo calls ran like clockwork, even when Sony threw in a generous surprise, giving away 46-inch flat-screen Sony Bravia TVs worth £2,000 to the first 100 people in the queue and an ´excellent amount of coverage was generated. The fact that Virgin’s events manager was on holiday puts the Borkowski team’s collective efforts on behalf of the client into sharp relief – their blood, sweat and tears went into PS3’s Virgin launch!
Sony said they gave away the TVs “to repay the patience and loyalty of all the people who have waited the extra few months for the European launch” of the PS3. For the same virtues, all I can offer my team right now, given that they’re still in the office making sure the media have all the information they need for Saturday’s papers, is a huge shout of “Thanks!”
The PR business can be a tough game, but with a team like this, even the most complicated launch can turn out to be a triumph.