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There’s a super-niche, super-successful corner of TMP Worldwide called Public Notices. Director, Brad Williams, was on hand to explain all.
Right, Brad. Public Notices – why are they important?
Think of where you live. Think of the public changes that can happen in your city, town, village, county – the ones that have an impact on your life. Planned roadworks, major new highways, speed limit changes, local elections, council tax changes, building modifications, new plans for housing estates etc etc. As a citizen, you need to know about these changes. And that’s what my team does (all things public notices). We help public bodies communicate this vital news.
Tell us about your clients
We work with: 100 public sector organisations, Local Authorities and Government Agencies, 15 county councils, seven London Boroughs, city councils, and bodies like the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Planning Inspectorate.
Plus, we’re the only public notices supplier for the Scottish Government and West Midlands Frameworks.
What’s the secret to success in public notices?
We’re the biggest in the business. It’s a truly nationwide offer.
We’re great relationship-builders – with clients, with media publishers, with each other. The relationships with our clients matter the most obviously. We know their pain: public notices are a legal requirement – they have to happen. And public sector budgets keep getting squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. But we see these demands as fertile territory for innovation.
This is an innovation business
Absolutely. Look at a typical public notice in a local newspaper and your first thought might not be innovation. But it’s there. With us, creative strategy, clever design and inventive negotiation power every solution. And it’s that innovation that allows us to cut our clients’ costs – often by double-digit percentages.
What kinds of volumes are we talking about?
We deliver over 300 notices per week. That’s why we have a 20-strong team working at full tilt. But speed never comes at the expense of quality. The local changes our notices communicate can be contentious, so we have to get everything right, every time.
If you had to invent a team motto, what would it be?
Well, as the SAS have already nicked ‘Who dares wins’, I’d have to go with ‘Above and beyond’.
Tell us about that & its link to public notices
One of our specialist areas is near impossible deadlines! Sometimes our client gets a request out of the blue and we pull out all the stops to get the notice live. Sometimes that’s after the official deadline so we need to call in some favours. Add that to last minute changes and additions, occasional technical issues at the client end, and you can see that the team is always on its toes.
They’re problem solvers extraordinaire.
