Pegasus post

Office update

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After a few weeks of hard graft, from a few select individuals (most notably Carol), the office refurb is almost complete, with just the swanky reception to go. It’s all just in time, since we have five new members of staff joining tout suite. The main office has doubled in size and we’ve added three new meeting rooms – one of which is the new creative area. The creative TV was wired up today and we eagerly await the upgrade to Sky Sports….

We do like to be beside the seaside….

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We’ve always known it, but now it’s official. When it comes to a career in communications, you won’t find too many better places to work than here.

News has reached us that we’ve come second in the annual Holmes Report ‘Best UK Consultancy to Work For’ survey. With more than 40 top firms taking part and a top ten featuring some great consultancies, it’s no surprise that we are all feeling pretty chuffed.

We also happen to be recruiting at all levels, so go on, drop us a line. You know you want to.

The Magnificent Seven

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Following on from the eight awards we won last year – including a hat-trick of OTC Campaign of the Year titles - we’ve started the year with a flourish, gaining seven nominations at the year’s first two ceremonies.

At the OTC Marketing Awards, campaigns for Covonia and Nasacort will battle it out for Best OTC PR Campaign for a Medicine, while our launch of the weight management product, APPEsat competes in the Non Medicine category. At the Fresh Awards, we have four nominations – Media Relations Campaign,  Consumer Campaign, Stunt and Team of the Year.

Let’s hope we get to update this post with some even better news when the results are in.

New Year, New Office

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Following another decent year of growth and the arrival of a few new recruits, we’ve taken the plunge and decided the time is right to extend the office. After losing our neighbours to the recession, it became apparent we were free to unleash the sledgehammers and knock through to the adjoining offices, effectively doubling our space. Two new meeting rooms, a brainstorming area, new business ‘war room’ and swanky new reception should all be in place by the end of Feb. We’ll keep you posted.

Health mapping – the future for tracking infectious diseases?

Posted by Stuart in Health news, Social media No comments»

No one quite knows how the latest flu scare will pan out, but experts have been in agreement for some time that the next flu pandemic could cost the lives of 700,000 Britons. Cases of measles are on the up and despite high profile campaigns, our teenagers are still happy to take their chances with STIs. When it comes to tackling infectious diseases, early detection can make the difference between life and death. Over the last few years academic institutions, health organisations and technology companies have looked to the Internet to provide a real time solution to identifying and mapping health threats.

Last year, Larry Brilliant of Google.org set out his vision in an interview with former Telegraph science editor, Roger Highfield, describing the Internet as a “sentinel that will be able to warn the world of the next pandemic”. The best example of this in action is Healthmap.org – a Google.org backed project. Launched in 2006, it crawls websites, news feeds and blogs looking for keywords, before collating and mapping the data online – and hopefully highlighting outbreaks well before people see them on the ground. The site tracks 24,000 sources an hour, over 75 infectious diseases and receives 30,000 hits per month. There is no doubting the impact such a global system could have – in fact in the 2008 interview, Brilliant went as far as to say that “Had we been there at that very moment of the birth of HIV/Aids, we would have been able to prevent this horrible pandemic.” By way of back up to such a claim, Brilliant noted that the site had identified an outbreak of Sars six weeks before the WHO. The outbreak went on to kill 700 people.  

Another – albeit smaller and simpler – example of real time mapping in action is Whoissick.org. Again, started in 2006, this US site was inspired by Craigslist and HousingMaps. It still appears to be in the experimental stages, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless. The site aims to track local outbreaks of more common illnesses by encouraging individuals to upload their symptoms such as runny noses, coughs or vomiting alongside their location, which again is mapped onto Google. This site is less about spotting pandemics and more about identifying those occasions when there’s ‘a bug going around’. It’s a nice idea, but we are not sure how far it can go when it relies on people that are already feeling pretty poor to take the time to upload the information. Perhaps if local health professionals were to upload numbers of incidents on a regular basis, it might create a more reliable and steady source of data.  

Mapping the spread of infectious diseases is an area that is likely to grow, although with Healthmap.org offering the global solution, it’s fair to assume future projects will concentrate on more local ones. If, as is widely predicted, the UK is to be hit by a flu pandemic in the next few years, perhaps our own UK-specific tracker might serve a number of functions. As well as providing real time information and acting as a ‘risk barometer’ at a time of crisis, an online focal point of this nature could be the perfect channel through which to educate the public and media on the facts about flu and more importantly, the required public response. After all, we will all have our own part to play in containing such an outbreak.

PR Week Top 150 – Pegasus up 21 places

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