Porter Novelli, the BBC and The Box

Jean Wyllie, MD, Porter Novelli UK

We are a company that prides ourselves on honesty and transparency, therefore when we make a mistake we want to put our hands up to it, do our best to make amends as quickly as possible and then to learn from it.

On Wednesday, Porter Novelli won the 2009 CorpComms Magazine award for Best Broadcast Campaign for our work with the Container Shipping Industry Service (CSIS), namely the BBC’s ‘The Box’ project. Unfortunately in the programme for the evening it was stated that Porter Novelli had pitched the idea of The Box to the BBC, this was not the case. It was the BBC that approached Porter Novelli with the idea following our initial outreach around the launch of CSIS, which had concentrated on humanising the container industry. We then worked closely with both parties to help make The Box happen.

It is understandable to assume that we must have made this claim in our award submission, this again was not the case. Over the course of today we have been in discussion with the BBC and CorpComms Magazine to both clarify and rectify the situation. Which we believed we had done, until we were alerted that in a previous post about the return of The Box to the UK we had stated that we had pitched the BBC with this idea. The writer of the post in question had not worked on the project and it was not previewed by any member of the team prior to posting. This is entirely the fault of our current approval process and is a massive oversight on our part. The post in question has since been updated with a correction and an apology to all concerned.

I would like to apologise again to the BBC  and in particular to everybody there, and at CSIS, who worked extremely hard for well over a year on the project. I would also like to add my assurance that we will be reviewing our approval process immediately, with a particular eye on our blog output and awards submissions, to ensure that this situation does not happen again.