Friends Reunited,
How to build a £170m brand from scratch.

Chris Ward was running marketing agency Beatwax when he discovered Friends Reunited. Beatwax took them on as a client and helped them towards creating the brand and media saturated success that won the agency the PR campaign of the year and this week resulted in the sale of the site to ITV for
upwards of £120m.

Here is the ten-point plan they followed inorder to help create a business phenomenon from PR alone.

1 The 1% inspiration - Recognise it’s a great idea.

‘Great idea, would be very interested in doing some PR for you’ I wrote to Steve Pankhurst on March 7th 2001. I had seen a small bit of publicity on Friends Reunited in The Net magazine and apart from telling Steve I’d found my sister’s school on the site 7 times I told him I thought it was an excellent idea. Steve replied an hour later that he was certainly interested and we arranged to meet.

A week later Steve turned up at our offices along with his business partner Jason Porter. I learnt the site had been going for about 6 months and a piece on the Steve Wright show on Radio 2 meant it had about 18,000 members but that set against around 45,000 schools, it was still a long way from reaching the ‘tipping point’ that would lead to its business success.

Steve and Jason proceeded to tell me all about their plans for the site and the other ideas that they wanted us to consider PR’ing also, including an online ordering site for kids party bags that Jason in particular was focussing on, he apparently had a garage full of balloons and plastic toys.

Steve and Jason were computer programmers who had decided to leave their job and build websites in partnership with people who had good ideas they believed in. Luckily, so it turned out, Friends Reunited was Steve’s wife Julie’s idea. They also told me there was a successful American version of the same idea, ’Class Mates’ that already had 15 million members.

Their business model for FR was completely unheard of at that time though. Charging ‘members’ £5 in order to use the subscription service of e-mailing each other. Even today it goes against the formula new internet based businesses are being built on. But this was a time when online advertising couldn’t sustain a complete business, unlike today but even so, would people pay £5?

A week later I sent off our proposal that said we would like to PR Friends Reunited but not the party bags site, that idea soon got forgotten (luck and timing play a huge part in success of this magnitude). In this case it wasn’t such a hard choice but recognising a great idea is the 1% inspiration you need to have. In a consumer world full of ‘stuff’ floating around the ether it is hard to identify the bits with value, either someone else’s or your own. At this stage you also have to trust your own instincts, it’s new so most people wont understand it or have a credible view.

Also, I had acted on seeing the original feature. I was always telling the team at Beatwax that our next clients were the things right in front of them that they were ‘fans’ of. Sometimes it’s hard to see what is right in front of your face when you are busy doing the day to day. But it’s important to take the time out to see what’s around you in the ether – like all new ideas.

2 Establish a genuine angle for people to talk about it.

This was 2001 and the dot com boom time, when every newspaper and TV programme was full of sharp suited young city boys talking about their great new internet ideas and their ‘exit strategy’ all in the same breadth. I didn’t believe that the public would want to pay £5 to people like this and so suggested we present the site as a husband and wife business based out of home to bypass this almost sordid business side of the web. Even though I was yet to meet Julie and realise how ‘normal’ she is and how unprepared she would be to appearing live on news programmes around the world, from the glamorous location of her front bedroom.

My proposal also said “To be truly successful the site needs to become a phenomenon for a period of time, for it to be discussed everywhere – causing the maximum amount of people to join, in the shortest space of time. For the critical mass to be reached and the site to become truly self-propelling’.

I’ve written plenty of proposals that I thought were good at the time that have not achieved as much success when implemented and I think that is down to me wanting an idea to be greater than it actually is in reality. Ultimately you cannot have success without a great idea.

So our PR angle was Steve and Julie at home running a website for your benefit, quite genuine and a great PR angle, the fact that the business was two businessmen and a handful of staff was irrelevant.

3 Don’t worry about the name – worry about the brand

We had numerous discussions about the Friends Reunited name and if it hadn’t been so successful so quickly I’m sure the site would be known by something else now. No one was over keen on the name but its success has confirmed what I already thought, that the name is mostly irrelevant.

I’m am generally not keen on descriptive names as it is much harder to create your own brand around that, as the description overrides any brand position in peoples minds. You also have no power as to how different people react to the description. Reuniting with old friends means so many different things to different people and we never ever got to grips with that, which is probably what actually made the ride more fun as we would be hit with completely different strong consumer reactions every day.

If you have the great idea then concern yourself with how that is implemented rather than its name. Friends Reunited does exactly what it says on the tin, no less and no more (of which see later). It was miracle work by Jason and Steve keeping the site alive during the massively busy times that enabled that to happen. And ultimately that is what underpinned its success and the creation of its strong brand. Friends Reunited is a business delivering what it says it will, rather than a cool name and marketing department created brand positioning, that suggests something, whilst delivering something else.

4 Know your market

Our market for Friends Reunited PR was the mainstream national media, who we wanted to talk positively about the site to their millions of readers. What was interesting here was that the journalists were also potential customers of the site and would not be simply writing about a new product for their readership.

Marketers are always talking about seeding ideas with opinion formers first (of which the national journalists were for us in this case) and if you can achieve that, then the word of mouth will grow from them out to the mainstream. These opinion formers are actually often the easiest people to
sell to though, as they like, and have to, look out for new ideas. Their job and social status is built on being in the know. Luckily for them they also actually don’t lose too much credibility by talking about ideas that don’t take off, they are recognised for their rare ‘successes’ than for their many failures to spot the next big thing.

My initial proposal to Steve, apart from also including thoughts that we should try and get a TV programme off the ground, said we should start immediately on running a regional press and radio campaign and try to get as many people onto the site before we presented it to these national opioning forming journalists. I felt they needed to see a ‘working’ version of the site, one where they could go on and recognise names on their school, rather than us just selling them a good idea that would only be successful if they wrote about it.

I had no doubt that the national media would write about the site. It was just a case of how much they would write and how much positive spin they would put on it.

5 The 99% perspiration – that makes it work

David and Laura at Beatwax were the ones that perspired 24 hours a day to enable Steve in particular, to do as much local media as possible in the shortest timescale, sending him to recording studios nationwide. The numbers on the site were rising by around 700 a day by this stage and soon the site was discussed with Sean Dodson at Media Guardian. He loved it and
wanted to support Steve and Julie with their ‘cottage industry’ and run a major piece. We went with it and that was the real start point.

Sean’s piece appeared and other journalists picked up on it and visited the site. They enjoyed it to, they found people they knew and what better reason to get in touch with your old school mates than to casually drop into conversation that you are a journalist on a national paper, TV or radio programme?

From then on it was PR management. Journalists wanted to write about it and wanted unique angles in order to justify it to their editors. We would get a hint through the site of the sort of stuff that the site was doing; creating new relationships, causing divorces, people were criticising their old teachers, families were being reunited, babies being born, marriages taking place. This was all before the media got hold of the same stories, therefore we could put ourselves in a position to deal with each matter and sell in ‘exclusives’ on each subject to different media.

The site went from 18,000 members to 100,000 to 500,000 to 1 million incredibly quickly. 2,3,4, and eventually up to 12 million members followed. It gained hundreds of pieces of national media coverage, numerous front pages, it appeared on every news programme.
Steve and Jason were working 24 / 7 to keep the site alive and Julie was appearing on national television programmes in-between feeding her daughter Amber. Meanwhile at Beatwax, David and Laura were dealing with hundreds of media requests everyday

6 Don’t do everything you are offered

During that period interest in Steve and Julie soared and requests for them, outside discussing reunions, began to be received. A conscious decision was made that the site was a service and that its success shouldn’t mean that Steve and Julie views on anything were suddenly more important than anyone else’s. The site was about the public reuniting not about its own success.

So we turned down everything that Steve and Julie were invited to do, OK magazine, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, cookery shows, chat shows etc.
There were also numerous proposals for promotions with major brands, keen to be associated with the site. Steve was very good at maintaining the sites purity and although short-term gain was offered it would have soiled the purity of what the site did.

There were also the more oddball approaches from people wanting to do pop singles (it was brilliant!!), board games and musicals. All politely turned down.
7 Or everything you think of As the site grew, so obviously did the ideas that everyone had that could be added to the services. We were asked to consider PR’ing things such as voice messaging between members,
an FR lottery, valentines etc People had all sorts of ideas.

Much of this stuff took a lot of time away from the focus of the site and I’m sure the business slowed slightly because of it. In a more precarious position it could have had a general negative effect on business. Again though, you are looking for the great idea. When you’ve got a readymade audience it’s easy to think that a lot of new ideas are better than they actually are.
Using the site for genealogy was an idea of Steve’s at that time, that not everyone acknowledged at first was as good as it was. So much was it, that the prolonged success of the site owes a lot to people looking up their past as much as reuniting with school friends.

8 Work with the right people for you

Steve said that when he first turned up at Beatwax he knew we were right for him because ‘we went to Chris’s office and it was a complete tip. He was late, nobody knew what they were doing and there were crates of Stella Artois lying around. Other agencies wore suits and ties and gave us the corporate line but Chris spoke our language and was on the same wavelength as us’.

We were right for Friends Reunited. Not only in that hopefully, we had good ideas and were prepared to put in the hard work this required but also that our approach mirrored that of the positioning of Friends Reunited. I’m sure the whole campaign wouldn’t have worked so well if we had had a corporate approach to a ‘cottage industry’. Everyone who wrote about Friends Reunited, enjoyed the site as consumers in their own right but also felt they were helping the cause.

It’s important that whoever is talking about you, does so in the right tone of voice.

9 Enjoy it

To be this successful you need to enjoy what you are doing. In the first place so you put the hours in, when others would have gone home but secondly so you acquire the knowledge that will enable you to develop and spot ideas that others wont ever notice because they are not so immersed in the business as you are. If the recent sale price could ever be justified through work it would have to be through the 24 hours a day for 7 days a week Steve and Jason worked for about 2-3 months simply trying to keep the site alive to cope with the demand. Time I’m sure they wouldn’t have spent if they didn’t
enjoy the business.

Through all this, the growth of the business never felt unusual or unachievable. Obviously it was enjoyable and I have learnt a lot by being involved. But if you get the basic structure right – an excellent new idea – a strong PR angle that is genuine to the business, then you put yourself in
the strongest situation.

For me the most enjoyable times were seeing a PR plan work to its optimum and the impact that the site was having on society as a whole. Although we won the PR campaign of the year I believe a lot of people in the industry thought it was handed to us on a plate. Hopefully this shows that ultimately nothing, however good an idea it is, sells itself.

10 Learn from the experience

My favourite position in a business is the clean sheet of white paper you have at the beginning where your ideas and dreams can really run wild. I think Friends Reunited is the only business that grew bigger than anyone’s dreams could ever have imagined. We happened to have followed the points above and success came the site’s way. There’s no reason, particularly now the web is able to provide the structure to support success, that anyone following the same points can’t have equal success.

To be involved in something that has changed peoples lives (including the founders), in most cases for the positive, has been enormously rewarding and this ten-point plan is what I take away for when we ever want to try and repeat the process.

In 2005 Chris founded The PlayGroup, which creates and inspires new ideas for business, people and the arts.
www.theplaygrouphq.co.uk


Chris Ward ©
07932 746 591
chris@ThePlayGroupHQ.co.uk
45 Ravenscourt Road, London, W6