about their brand, we feel we’re in the best position to make that process work.” It makes sense, according to Vijh, since dealing with
press is no longer the be-all-and-end-all that it used to be: “The way we think about content, PR almost becomes the third thing on the agenda,” he says. “First you’re talking about community messaging, and [then] influencers and then, maybe, how does media fit around that.” Ten or twelve years ago, Vijh says, it was about the journalists you knew and nervously picking up the phone to them in the hope it wasn’t slammed down. “People in our team have never experienced that before in their lives,” he laughs. “It is weird, I guess, how the tactics we use have had to change, but then also how all our clients see the world differently in terms of PR versus the general, rounded comms situation.”
WINED AND DINED It isn’t just the importance of PR that has changed, but also the nature of it. The stories of press-attended alcohol-fuelled misdeeds during the 1980s and 90s are legion, which Barrett succinctly characterises as ‘swashbuckling’ behaviour: “There wasn’t much process and hardly any science. It was about stunts and making noise. It was a different era.” Aside from the offal Doom 2 stunt, was it more fun? “Yeah,” says Barrett, before hesitating. “In a way it was. It was a lot more social. A lot of PR was about taking people out, there’d be wine on the table and we’d probably be going through the afternoon. We’d get coverage and everybody would be happy. That’s just not how it works now.” Full disclosure: we are in a restaurant, going through
the afternoon. There will be coverage. (Alas, no wine.) “I think on the whole things are better in that we
cover a lot more ground and we get more done. There are so many more opportunities, and therefore clients want you to go through all those opportunities. There’s social, there’s online. There’s print, television, there’s radio, and that means that you’ve got to be working on multiple platforms, different time zones - with different content for all of those. So yeah, it is harder, the plates spin faster. But it’s also rewarding because, if you get that right, it has a big impact and there’s a real sense of pride.”
TEAM BUILDING In line with the nature of the industry, the team at Bastion has also changed a great deal. It’s not just that
September 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 21
the likes of Ciaran Brennan, Christina Esrkine, Simon Byron and Mark Ward have all moved on and made way for a much more diverse team that is more technical its methods and less likely to have to work through a midweek hangover, it’s that Barrett himself has had to adapt. By his own admission he has become more attuned to survival, partly at having to keep the business going through difficult times, specifically when the industry faced recession towards the end of the 1990s, then again in 2001 when the company lost almost half its business in the space of two weeks. With a large team to sustain, the company was quickly burning through its cash reserves. “That was hard,” recalls Barrett. “We we’re trying to find business at a time when no one was spending. I think now we’d do things differently” Coincidentally 2001 was when Simon Byron decided
to move on, although not he says because of any issue Bastion was facing. “I just needed a different challenge.” Even so, “It was awful. I cried when I left.”
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