by Rebecca Broomfield, Director of Consumer
With Bonfire Night around the corner, I’ve been thinking about what makes a great celebration. It’s never just the fireworks, and it’s never just the bonfire. It’s both.
The fireworks are the hero moment, planned to the second, built for impact. The bonfire is what people gather around before and after. It’s lit early, nurtured all night, and still glowing when everyone heads home.
A brilliant PR programme works the same way. The bonfire is your press office, always on, always fed, keeping your brand warm in the media, in culture and, increasingly, in the answers AI tools give. The fireworks are your campaign moments: crafted, choreographed and designed to make people stop and look. Plenty of brands are good at one. The brands that win have both and know exactly what each is for.
A strong press office doesn’t depend on a big idea or a launch date. It burns because someone keeps feeding it: product placement, expert commentary, data, and a steady presence that meets the media where the natural opportunity sits.
That steady burn does three jobs:
It also does something less glamorous but more valuable – it makes sure your brand is remembered. In most categories, people rarely buy on schedule and the window can be short and unpredictable. The bonfire keeps you in their head, ready for when it matters.
A press office is, by its nature, a balancing act. It follows where the media’s interest is, then finds the overlap with what the brand wants to say. Product placement, expert commentary and deals are the bedrock, but your brand often turns up alongside others. That coverage is valuable, but it’s rarely distinctive and almost never yours alone.
It’s also media-first. It can stretch into social and other channels, but it isn’t built to drive cohesion across the whole marketing mix.
Between the steady burn and the big display sits the thing that gives a press office it’s power: reactive PR. Media relations around product and commentary form the heart of the fire. Reactive is what happens when you throw fresh fuel on it. It flares with a cloud of sparks, people turn around, and the brand gets to show its personality, not just its expertise.
When Harry Kane lost his voice mid-World Cup celebration, our team turned it into a campaign for Jakemans within hours: a limited-edition pack created for the moment, a BBC North TV feature, national radio, 27 pieces of online press and a 93% brand recall score. That’s a bonfire flaring so brightly it starts to look like a firework! Which leads us nicely onto…
Nobody improvises a fireworks display. Every rocket is chosen, timed and placed for the people watching.
That’s what a great campaign moment does. It starts from the audience and the commercial objective, not the new agenda. It’s built to be owned, so you aren’t sharing the space with competitors. And it’s designed to work across the whole marketing mix (media relations, social, eCRM and GEO), all telling the same story at the same time.
Beko’s Back to School campaign is a good example. Our research with 1,000 parents found that 74% call back-to-school the most challenging time of year, and 65% of those in a school WhatsApp group say they’d forget events without it. The campaign built on those insights landed 250 pieces of coverage, including The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star.
On Thursday night, the fireworks will bring the “oooh” moment, and the bonfire will keep the crowd warm throughout the evening. Is your PR programme doing the same?
At Speed, our press office teams use our proprietary tool, Pulse AI, to scan news and social in real time, so we can act on the right moments within hours, not days. And our campaigns create the moments that put fire in your brand communications. Want to find out more about adding some firepower to your PR? Reach me at rebecca.broomfield@speedcomms.com.