As the famous chorus line goes in Joni Mitchell’s classic song, Big Yellow Taxi, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

It is a tune that Ed Sheeran could be forgiven for humming amid the ongoing debacle over his world tour.

After support act Macklemore was withdrawn from the bill for expressing pro-Palestinian views on stage, other artists steadily began to fall away, leaving the pop star with no support. Among those who deserted Sheeran was Finneas, the brother of pop star Billie Eilish, who said in a statement: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed.”

The departures came hours after Sheeran said he would not be drawn into a public debate over Gaza, and stressed he was not responsible for Macklemore being removed from the tour.

“Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine,” Sheeran said on Instagram.

“I would never let down the fans who had made plans, nor would I abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living.”

While doing something is usually better than nothing, in Sheeran’s case, this intervention simply made things worse. A closer look at his statement explains why.

“Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum,” he wrote. “I respect Macklemore’s strength of purpose to stand up and shout for what he believes.

“However, there is room for multiple approaches to the same end: Peace.

“I choose to use my fame and platform to be a place of safety and sanctuary, to maintain diplomacy and keep conversations open, not closed. If we only focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change. There are different approaches to being an advocate for change.”

Without getting into rights and wrongs of Middle East politics, and whether Sheeran should, as Macklemore urged, have taken a stance, what is clear from his statement is it lacked the heartfelt authenticity of the songs that have made him a worldwide star. And having grossed an estimated net worth of £370 million, his fans are clearly suspicious that his renowned way with words failed him at this significant conjecture in his career.

Notably, Sheeran’s Instagram account lost 150,000 followers in the aftermath, while Macklemore’s account soared by 750,000 followers. The rapper also pledged his $1m earnings from Sheeran’s tour to Palestinian aid organisations and challenged Sheeran’s promoter to match him. Faced with the prospect of implosion, both Sheeran and US stadium owner, billionaire Robert Kraft, have reportedly agreed to donate $2m each “to fight this humanitarian crisis”.

With his shambling, dishevelled appearance, and trademark low key checked shirts, Sheeran has never cultivated the image of a global superstar. It’s hard to imagine him on the cover of Men’s Health flashing his abs, a la Justin Bieber. He is also known for his philanthropy, donating his entire wardrobe to charity in 2014 and running a charity providing music lessons to under-18s in his home county of Suffolk.

Against this humble backdrop, his initial sorry/not sorry approach simply didn’t wash, and it remains to be seen whether his actions can speak louder than his previous words.

The first rule of crisis comms is that any intervention should aim for repairing reputation: sometimes that means apologising; on other occasions it means explaining the circumstances to achieve balance; often, it is both. But at the very least, it requires those in the thick of it to act with integrity, own up to any mistakes, demonstrate accountability, and outline clear corrective actions. Without taking these steps, reputation management can quickly backfire and destroy any remaining vestiges of trust.

Ed Sheeran’s Mr Nice Guy image is crumbling, and the damage is becoming serious. After more than a decade of dominating the music industry, time will tell if he can retain his appeal among all but his most ardent fans.

If you’d like to talk to BIG about how we can solve your reputational challenges, please get in touch.

Ben Palmer, Senior Account Manager at BIG Partnership, looks at how businesses in the north-east of Scotland can tell their stories to the right audience.

The energy sector in the UK supports roughly 1.48 million jobs, around 1 in every 25 people across the country. That’s 1.48 million people, 1.48 million families and 1.48 million stories. Each and every one of those individuals will have a tale to tell about their professional career.

Energy can be a hard story to sell to media, though headlines of the impacts of domestic and global politics on household bills are as commonplace as ever. Negative stories generate negative headlines and those types of stories don’t need to sell themselves to outlets in the same way that a corporation launching a new product might.

But there are important, often more positive stories than bills shooting up, that need airtime too: the technologies driving the energy transition, the research being undertaken that’s shaping the future of the sector, the work being done to ensure that the country’s energy transition is successful. Robert Gordon University’s latest report which warns that the north-east of Scotland risks losing thousands of high-value jobs and critical skills is one excellent example of that.

For those of us in the energy sector – and particularly those of us in this region, who are only too aware of the financial pressures facing the industry – there is a challenge to make such narratives attractive to media. How do you tell a story in a way that cuts through to the audience you actually want to reach?

In our case, the audience is often the Westminster government, whose Energy Profits Levy is widely blamed for the accelerated downturn in the North Sea oil and gas sector and consequently a lack of investment in renewables.

While it may be a story we’re familiar with, the tale of the so-called Windfall Tax is one dogged in numbers: a 78% tax rate, the end of which if brought forward could increase tax receipts from £32.9 billion to £48.6 billion, according to OEUK. It’s important stuff but as a journalist once said to a colleague: tell me what’s interesting, not what’s important.

For journalists, what they really want to hear about is the people behind the sector.

Of those 1.48 million, there will be engineers, offshore workers, supply chain personnel and communities that all have stories which are interesting. But how do you bring this to life?

Consider A Town Called Bruce, a campaign designed by my colleagues at BIG which told the story of a town called Bruce, 200 miles north-east of Aberdeen in the North Sea. It’s not a town, obviously, but rather Serica Energy’s Bruce platform, a collection of individual stories brought together on one structure which will be familiar to others across the basin.

Or look at how Dales Marine launched its recruitment drive for new apprentices earlier this year. Interviews with Energy Voice showcased the skills they have learned, their commitment to the sector and why they believe the apprenticeship puts them on a steady and successful career path. Comments directly from source to press without the corporate spin which journalists loathe.

The energy sector has a plethora of stories to tell, but in the wider mainstream news spectrum, it can often be overlooked. Geopolitics, crime and culture may all be ahead in the pecking order but even these serve as a reminder of what’s key to making them intriguing: people are at the forefront of the narrative in each.

If you work in the industry and want your story told, start with your people. Not the megawatts, not the tax rates, not the transition targets. The engineer who came offshore after 20 years in manufacturing. The apprentice who turned down a university place. The supply chain business keeping a community employed. Those are the stories media will take, and they’re the ones that reach the audiences that matter.

If you’d like to talk to BIG about how we can help to solve your business challenges, please get in touch.

Why everyone’s feed looks the same (and how to fix it)

You might have noticed over the past few years that brands are all starting to look a little, well, samey. Beauty packaging is stuck in the same Gen-Z bubblegum colour schemes and drinks brands are all cycling through the same CBD-strawberry-matcha mashups. But social media is where the copying is easiest to catch in the act. Open your own feed and you’ll find the same butter-yellow fonts, verbal hooks and Canva template carousels.

Why we’re all copying each other

That’s because we’ve shifted from original thinking to reverse-engineering. Having to keep up with rapid changes in channel algorithms has resulted in us all watching to see what works before running the same format through our own channels. We’re all chasing the same algorithmic wave before it breaks.

Trends are fresh one week, pastiche the next. The thing is, chasing changing platform playbooks isn’t a shortcut to relevance.

What makes a brand feel relevant

The UTA Culture Index report surveyed more than 10,000 brands to find out what makes a brand feel culturally relevant. Durability came out on top, cited by 85% of the general population as the single biggest driver of relevance. Community Engagement was second and Authenticity third. What didn’t make the top of the list: being everywhere, being the loudest, or being the fastest to hop on a trend.

The takeaway? Brands are burning momentum trying to win a competition consumers couldn’t care less about.

Meanwhile the room for any of it to land is shrinking. Ofcom’s 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report found that only 49% of UK social media users now actively share or comment (down from 61% the previous year). People are becoming spectators on platforms built for participation. Producing more content in the same visual language as everyone else isn’t cutting through that. It’s adding to a feed fewer people are actually engaging with.

Brands doing it differently

Some brands worked this out early. The fashion house JACQUEMUS built a recognisable social media identity on pioneering surreal, oversized product stunts as well as sharing the founder’s own unfiltered camera-roll shots of everyday beauty. While FFERN treats its seasonal perfume launches like short stories. Their analogue style content means when you view their posts, you feel like you’re sat under an ancient oak tree in dappled sunlight wrapped in scents of bergamot and lemon verbena, (seriously). Both brands are unmistakably original. Unmistakably human. Unmistakably authentic.

How to chart your own course

So, for brands who want to break the cycle, what does that look like in practice?

1. Trust your team to move at the speed of the moment

Anyone who works in social will tell you the Achilles’ heel to their success is the approval chain. Because a reactive idea that needs three rounds of sign-off is no longer reactive by the time it’s live. Give your social team the trust and room to execute on fresh thinking, and back them once it’s out.

2. Treat social as a conversation, not a megaphone

Most brand accounts (and most accounts, full stop) are broadcasting into a feed of other accounts also broadcasting. Instead of screaming into the void, respond to your audience. Ask questions you truly mean. Manage your social accounts as they were originally intended to be: socially!

3. Step away from the feed to find ideas

Scrolling the same algorithmic loop for inspiration returns the same references everyone else is scrolling past too. A walk in nature, a visit to a gallery, or an afternoon at the cinema does more for original thinking than another hour of source material that’s already been recycled twice.

4. Go back to who you’re actually talking to

It’s easy to lose the thread of your customer’s needs under the pressure of filling out a content calendar. Talk to them. Find out what they really want from your products and services. Learn what they’re passionate about. Use this information to form the basis of your thinking. When you understand their pain points, you’ll be able to communicate to them in a way that’s authentic.

5. Find the people your audience already trusts, and work with them properly

Build long-lasting and genuine relationships with influencers and creators. Users are increasingly following individuals with real expertise in a space over brand accounts (for example, financial advice). A credible voice inside a community your brand wants to reach will do more than trying to pigeonhole content formats that don’t naturally align with your brand tone of voice.  

Trend cycles will keep churning, but in the fight to be heard online, it’s the brands that understand a marathon beats a sprint who win in the end.

To talk to BIG about how we can help to solve your social media challenges, get in touch at [email protected]

Why trust is the organic lever you can still control

Here’s a number that caught my eye when reviewing the BIG Partnership website performance back in April. Visits that arrive from ChatGPT view 1.64 pages per session. In comparison, organic search sends us 1.20, direct is 1.10, and social sits at 1.00. So, AI referrals may be the newest, smallest, most-hyped source of traffic we have, but crucially it is also the most engaged one we currently track.

That single number captures the shift I want to talk about. AI isn’t just changing how many people reach your website, it’s also changing who they are and how they behave when they get there. And it’s quietly rewriting the rules for how brands get found in the first place.

Search left home

For 20 years, search had one home. You optimised for Google (yes, and the others too, but let’s be real, it was mainly Google), you competed for a spot in the ten blue links, and if you did it well, people clicked through to your site. That world is changing.

Search now happens across a whole ecosystem of platforms. Data from SparkToro and Datos, published in early 2026, puts traditional search engines at roughly 81% of US search behaviour, with commerce platforms taking 10%, social networks 5%, AI tools 3% and 1% across other platforms. The percentages will keep moving. The direction of travel is the point: people discover brands through many front doors now, and a lot of those doors don’t lead to a click on your website.

Even inside that shrinking 81% of traditional search, the click is under pressure. Google increasingly answers the question on the results page through AI Overviews, so the user gets what they came for and never visits a site at all. Ahrefs research from early 2026 found the top-ranking page’s click-through rate is as much as 58% lower where an AI Overview appears.

So here’s the honest summary. There are more places to be found than ever, and fewer of them reward you with a visit. Clicks are no longer the currency. Being chosen by algorithms, AI chatbots and ultimately consumers, is.

Fewer visits, better visits

This is where that 1.64 comes back into play. If AI referrals were low-quality noise, they’d be easy to ignore. They’re the opposite. And we’re not the only ones seeing it: Adobe, drawing on more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, found in March 2026 that AI-referred shoppers viewed 13% more pages per visit than other traffic and spent almost 50% longer on site. Better still, they converted at a rate 42% higher than non-AI traffic.

When someone arrives from the likes of ChatGPT or Claude, an AI has already done the filtering. It’s read the question, weighed up the options and decided your brand was worth naming. The person clicking through isn’t window-shopping. They’ve been handed a recommendation, and they turn up warmer, more informed and further down the purchase journey than a cold searcher poking at ten blue links.

Fewer visits that convert better isn’t a downgrade. For most of the clients we work with, it’s a better deal than the traffic it replaces. The question is how you earn those recommendations in the first place.

AI rewards trust, and trust is built through brand

Here’s the part that should change how you spend your marketing budget. When an AI system decides which sources to cite, amplify or summarise, it leans towards the signals of strong, consistent, well-established brands. It’s trying to answer four questions about you, whether you like it or not.

Who are you?

Can an AI recognise you as a distinct entity, and does it actually understand what you do and what you stand for? This is where a lot of sites fall down. If your own website can’t state plainly what you are, who you’re for and why you matter, in words real people use, you can’t expect a machine to work it out on your behalf.

Where are you?

What does your presence look like beyond your own website? This is the digital estate you can claim and control: your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn and other social profiles, Glassdoor, Trustpilot, the relevant industry directories and listings. Every one of these is a place you can put a consistent, accurate version of who you are, and every one gives an AI another reference point that says you’re a real, established organisation. Claiming and maintaining them is some of the most straightforward trust-building work you can do.

Who trusts you?

Are credible, independent sources talking about you? Third-party mentions, coverage and reviews you didn’t write are the proof a machine reads as other people taking you seriously. You can invite them and make them easy to leave, but you can’t manufacture them, and that’s exactly why they carry weight.

Does it all connect?

Is your identity consistent enough that the machine can join the dots with confidence? A machine is constantly cross-referencing the picture you paint on your website against your profiles, your listings and what others say about you, looking for a consistent, verifiable story. Different company descriptions, an old address here, a name variation there, a positioning that’s moved on everywhere except the places you forgot to update, and the whole thing gets harder to trust.

None of that is new. What’s new is that these trust signals now feed directly into machine-readable visibility. Brand is no longer only about how people feel. It’s about whether an algorithm can verify you well enough to put your name in front of someone.

That reframes trust from a soft objective into the most powerful organic lever we can still control. We can’t control Google’s algorithm or ChatGPT’s training data. We can control how trustworthy, consistent and well-attributed our brand looks to the systems doing the choosing.

Five ways to start building it

Here’s where I’d begin:

1. Put your people front and centre.

Audiences trust people more than logos, and so, increasingly, do the machines. When your employees share their expertise and their working lives, it signals an authenticity no campaign budget can manufacture. Pick three to five genuine voices, build proper author profiles for them, and give them a content brief rather than a script.

2. Make room for your customers.

No brand voice is as convincing as a customer who had no reason to be nice. User-generated content gives AI systems and search engines the third-party proof that your own copy can’t replicate. Invite it and make it easy for your customers to get involved.

3. Treat reviews and case studies as infrastructure.

They live exactly where your audience looks before they commit, and AI systems actively surface this kind of independently-attributed content. This isn’t a nice-to-have on a quiet quarter. It’s the proof that you deliver what you promise.

4. Put a name to everything you publish.

Nameless content earns no authority. Google’s E-E-A-T guidance and the AI systems that echo it reward content attributed to identifiable experts with real credentials. Add author bylines to every article, write proper bio pages that set out each person’s focus and credentials, and use Person schema so the machines can connect the author to the work.

5. Keep earning coverage.

Being talked about isn’t vanity. It’s how the machines confirm you exist. Press coverage and brand mentions create the off-site footprint that tells search and AI systems you’re a real, recognised organisation. This is the point where PR and SEO stop being separate budgets and start being the same job.

The lever worth pulling

We’ve written before on this blog about trust as the thing that makes choosing easier for people. Our Strategy Director, Paul Hadfield, recently tackled the question “Are you making your brand easy to trust?”, and I previously discussed the ever-growing case for combining SEO and PR. All of that still holds and the direction of change is continuing.

The brands that win the next few years won’t be the ones chasing every new platform or waiting for an algorithm update to rescue them. They’ll be the ones that stop treating search, PR, content and brand as separate budgets with separate goals, and start running them as one job with one aim: being a source worth trusting.

The digital world has changed. Trust is how you stay found in it.

To speak to our digital team about how we can help you to solve your SEO challenges, get in touch at [email protected].

Paid Search was previously a separate discipline from paid social, with no look in on the fun creatives, just all about the data. All we needed was keywords, ad copy and insights. Now, Google has more ad formats with creative becoming as much a necessity in your search strategy, as your paid social one. 

We have to move with the times, and as PPC managers, we have to recommend shifting budget into these new platforms like Performance Max and Demand Gen (based on data and strategy, of course), but also to avoid being left behind in the market and not facing enough customers. 

We recommend the campaign, it goes live. But often enough, no one is stopping to ask the most important question – do the assets exist to support the campaign type? 

That gap is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Performance Max now takes up to 15 images and videos. Demand Gen needs its own images, dedicated headlines and video. These aren’t formats you can turn on with the ad copy and keyword lists that used to be enough. Paid search has become a small content operation running inside every campaign and increasingly, the strategy is switched on before that content operation exists. 

The cost of launching anyway is a growing concern. Leave asset supply to Google’s defaults and you get generic, stock-like output filled by AI improvisation. Recent data suggests PMAX asset groups rated ‘Excellent’ for ad strength convert 18 to 25% more than those rated ‘Good’, and that rating depends entirely on the assets you supply. 

Creative is continually treated as a tick box to paid search campaigns, rather than a condition of them. Alongside paid social, addressing the asset needs and churn across paid media could take up more than one person’s full working week.

The strategy gets agreed, the platforms get switched on and the assets get chased afterward. By then, the campaigns already live and potentially underperforming. 

The fix isn’t more budget. It’s sequencing and prioritising. Our recommendations include: 

Design once, create a template. Something you can resize and recombine across ad placements, incorporating brand layouts, colour treatments and copy frameworks, ready before the next format shift lands, not built in response to it.  
Get design in the room at briefing stage, alongside the strategy recommendation, not after it’s approved. Scope the assets needed and the cost in the same conversation as the format decision.  
Plan it in. Build creative into the design team’s regular planning cadence, so a new campaign format is a known input, not an unplanned request landing on someone’s desk mid-sprint.  
Use platform reports to keep pace. Google recommends replacing low-rated assets every two to three weeks, refreshing images every four to six weeks and video every six to eight weeks. That cadence needs to be built into the plan from the start, not discovered once performance has already dipped. 

Recommending a format because the data supports it is good Paid Search strategy. Recommending it without the assets to back it up isn’t a resourcing oversight, it’s a strategy that hasn’t finished being built. Creative and paid search must move at the same pace, or the strategy is only half-made when it goes live. 

If you need help with your paid search strategy, drop BIG’s team of digital specialists a line at [email protected] to chat about how we can solve your challenges.

Getting there isn’t a mystical process. It’s a discipline.

What I’m looking for.

A core idea isn’t a tagline. It isn’t a tone of voice or a visual direction. It’s the single thought that makes everything else make sense. The test I use is simple: can I write it in one sentence? Not a sentence that *explains* the idea. A sentence that *is* the idea.

Guinness didn’t say “we should do something around the pour time.” The found an insight that they transformed into a brilliant core idea. Waiting is proof of worth. “Good things come to those who wait”. This ownable thought can transfer downstream to all collateral.

When I’m working through a brief, I’m looking for the tension. What does the audience believe that the brand can usefully challenge, confirm, or reframe? That tension is usually where the idea lives. The gap between what people think and what the brand can genuinely say.

The other thing I’m looking for is ownability. If any competitor could say it, it isn’t the idea. It’s a direction. Directions are useful starting points, but they’re not what you build a campaign on.

The one-sentence test

Once I think I’ve found something, I say it out loud to someone outside the room. This is non-negotiable. If they get it immediately, without context, without me explaining what I mean, then I probably have an idea. If they need the backstory, I don’t.

The one-sentence test is brutal, which is exactly why it works. Most briefs produce directions, not ideas.

“We want to feel more premium.”

“We want to be seen as the human choice in a category full of corporate brands.”

These are starting points.

They become ideas when you find the specific, surprising, ownable expression of them.

Building territories from a single idea

Once the core idea is in place, the real creative work starts: how does this idea express itself across different contexts, audiences, and ambitions?

This is where I use territories. Not to have three different ideas, but to explore three different ways into the same idea. The distinction matters. If your territories feel like separate campaigns, you haven’t found the idea yet. You’ve found three briefs.

I think about territories along a few different axes depending on what the brief is asking.

If the question is about creative ambition, I’ll work through evolution, mid-ground, and revolution. Evolution refines what exists. Mid-ground keeps the equity but changes the expression. Revolution starts from the brief, not from what already exists. All three are built on the same idea; they just ask for different levels of change.

If the question is about audience, I’ll use territories to explore how the same idea lands differently for different people. The same thought expressed for a Gen Z audience looks completely different from the same thought expressed for someone in their forties with a family and a mortgage. The idea doesn’t change. The execution does.

If the question is about tone, the territories let me show a client what their brand could sound like if it went premium, or playful, or educational. Same idea, three different personalities.

Why this matters

The brief never ends at the idea. But nothing good starts without one.

When the core idea is clear, every subsequent decision gets easier. Creative teams know what they’re building towards. Account teams can hold the idea in client conversations. The work stays coherent across formats, channels, and time because it’s all pulling from the same source.

When the idea is absent, or vague, the opposite happens. Teams pull in different directions. Clients sense the incoherence even when they can’t name it. The work gets good at the edges but hollow in the middle.

Getting to a core idea takes longer than most people expect and less time than most people fear. It takes one good question, asked honestly, about what only this brand can say to this audience at this moment.

Everything else is execution.

Independent, integrated communications agency BIG Partnership has appointed a new leadership team in Aberdeen as it pursues its next phase of growth. 

Shona Hendry, Richard Crighton and Pam Wilson have each been promoted to Associate Director and bring more than four decades of combined experience at BIG to head up the Aberdeen office.  

Allan Barr, CEO of BIG Partnership, said: “Shona, Richard and Pam have each played a significant part in building what BIG is today. These appointments recognise that contribution and give us the senior depth to take on more ambitious work for our clients.  

“Aberdeen is important to our growth story and having experienced leadership in the north east of Scotland puts us in a strong position as we target clients in the energy and wider business sectors as the region diversifies.” 

The appointments reflect BIG’s focus on keeping senior people involved throughout client relationships, with experienced leaders available to provide strategic counsel from day one and throughout a project’s life. 

The agency works with clients across the energy, public affairs, consumer and corporate communications sectors, helping organisations address commercial and reputational challenges and delivering work judged on outcomes rather than activity. 

When I tell people I work in emergency response and crisis communications, their first question is almost always, “What does that mean?”.

At its heart, emergency response is about preparation. It’s about having a crisis response plan tailored to your organisation for what could be the worst day in your company’s history. It’s about putting your people first and foremost and it’s about identifying risks before they become a crisis.

While emergency response is often associated with the oil and gas industry, it can apply to almost every organisation. Any business with employees, customers, stakeholders or assets has the potential to face an incident that can result in reputational damage should it not be handled appropriately.

BIG Partnership’s Emergency Response team offers a comprehensive process-driven crisis management and emergency response service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

With the bulk of the oil and gas industry based in the north east of Scotland, many of our clients are energy companies, but we also work with a range of other sectors, including aviation and maritime, construction, manufacturing and the public sector. Regardless of the industry, the aim is to help organisations respond quickly, communicate effectively and make informed decisions while under pressure.

Central to all emergency response is communication. In today’s world, news travels faster than ever thanks to mobile technology, social media and 24-hour news channels, all of which allow information (both factual and inaccurate) to spread rapidly around the globe. How we respond to emergencies, and the speed of that response, has had to adapt accordingly.

Being prepared has never been more important and having robust emergency response procedures and crisis management structures in place is key. Companies which communicate quickly, accurately and consistently have more chance of reducing the risk of misinformation and speculation.

Our role is to work alongside our clients and their wider emergency response teams to ensure the efficient and effective flow of information. We prepare holding statements and press releases, manage media relations, develop key messages and respond to enquiries.

The way an organisation prepares for and responds during an incident says a lot about its culture, its leadership and how it values its people. The industry-recognised PEAR model – People, Environment, Assets and finally Reputation – reflects this by putting people at the heart of every incident. Considering the wellbeing of those affected by an incident should always be the priority in any response, shaping all decisions and subsequent communications.

Beyond the immediate incident, we also support the Business Support Team/Corporate Management Team, helping them to ‘see round corners,’ offering advice and support where it is most needed, helping senior teams address the wider business implications of an ongoing event, such as reputation management, forecasting emerging issues and ensuring communications align with business priorities.

Any incident or crisis requires organisations to deal with a range of stakeholders; as well as the media, there are employees, families, emergency services, government, investors, regulators, shareholders, customers and suppliers to consider. Each requires accurate and appropriate information delivered in a timely fashion, often under intense public scrutiny.

Working in emergency response requires the ability to remain calm under pressure, think strategically, make decisions quickly and work collaboratively. In the most serious incidents where there may be injuries or loss of life, professionalism, empathy and excellent communication skills are key.

At BIG, we pride ourselves on providing the highest quality of service combining practical incident experience with rigorous training which allows us to provide our clients with a safe pair of hands. Emergency response is not just about managing a crisis once it has happened. It’s about preparing for it before it does happen because when it does, every minute counts.

Developers are scaling renewable projects faster than governments can set the targets that justify them. Communities, meanwhile, are increasingly alert to the opportunities and impacts that major infrastructure brings. But amid this acceleration, one challenge continues to grow in complexity: stakeholder engagement.

From offshore wind and grid infrastructure to hydrogen and carbon capture projects, successful delivery no longer depends solely on engineering or finance. It depends on trust.

As someone working in stakeholder engagement within the energy sector, I’ve seen first-hand how expectations have changed. Communities, local authorities, supply chain partners, environmental groups and political stakeholders all want to be involved earlier, informed more clearly and listened to more meaningfully. Simply issuing project updates or holding a consultation event is no longer enough.

One of the biggest challenges is balancing urgency with transparency. Renewable projects are under pressure to move quickly to meet climate targets, energy demands and funding timelines, yet communities feel projects are happening to them rather than with them. If engagement is rushed or overly technical, trust can quickly erode, and rebuilding it is far more difficult than establishing it from the start.

While it may seem developers should engage communities as soon as a project receives internal approval, this is not always practical. In the early stages, key details such as project design, environmental assessments, grid connections and construction timelines may still be evolving. Engaging too soon can leave developers unable to answer important questions or make firm commitments. That creates uncertainty and risks setting expectations they can’t meet.

The challenge is finding the right balance: engaging early enough to build trust while ensuring sufficient information is available to support meaningful conversations. A phased engagement strategy, where developers are transparent about what is known, what is still being assessed and when further information will be available, can help manage expectations and maintain credibility.

Another challenge is countering misinformation and competing narratives. Social media has transformed how projects are discussed publicly, allowing concerns about visual impact, environmental issues or economic benefits to spread rapidly.

In many cases, silence from developers creates a vacuum that others are happy to fill. Proactive communication is therefore more important than ever. Working with local authorities, community groups and trusted organisations can help ensure information reaches residents through channels they already trust.

Identifying community ambassadors who understand the project’s benefits, monitoring social media discussions and developing tailored FAQs can help address concerns before they escalate. Presentations, project websites and local partnerships also help correct misinformation.

Even when there is little new information to share, regular communication reassures communities that they are being kept informed and helps prevent speculation.

There is also the challenge of translating complexity into clarity. Renewable energy projects involve technical language, policy frameworks and lengthy development timelines that can be difficult for non-specialist audiences to engage with. Stakeholders want information they can understand, relate to and respond to confidently.

Developers should work closely with communications teams to create clear, concise messaging, particularly for consultation materials. Sufficient time should be allocated to developing materials including visuals that explain complex details, such as cable routes, building heights and local impacts, in a way that is easy to understand.

At the same time, developers are managing multiple audiences with different priorities. Investors focus on delivery and risk, communities on local impacts and benefits, political stakeholders on jobs and economic growth, and environmental groups on biodiversity and sustainability. Effective engagement requires a strategy that speaks credibly to each audience while maintaining a consistent message.

This is where strategic PR and communications support becomes essential. Agencies with experience engaging different stakeholder groups can help tailor communications effectively. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works.

Stakeholder engagement is not simply a box-ticking exercise. It means building relationships, creating understanding and maintaining confidence throughout a project’s lifecycle. A strong communications strategy helps developers engage earlier, communicate more clearly and respond proactively to emerging issues.

As a PR and communications agency working across the energy and infrastructure sectors, we support clients by developing engagement strategies that are proactive, transparent and audience led. From community consultation programmes and media relations to digital engagement, messaging development and crisis communications, we help organisations communicate with clarity and credibility.

The energy transition will only succeed if people feel part of it. Renewable energy projects succeed when developers maintain clear and transparent communication with stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement must sit at the heart of project delivery, not on the sidelines.

Britain has its seventh Prime Minister in ten years, and this one is arriving without a general election or a leadership contest. Nominations opened on 9 July for the race to succeed Keir Starmer as Labour leader. Andy Burnham was the only declared candidate.

He was confirmed as Labour leader on 17 July, unopposed, and takes office as Prime Minister today following his audience with the King.

Westminster is calling this a coronation. For anyone with a stake in government policy or funding decisions, it’s better understood as a change of management with almost no notice period.

How we got here

Starmer announced his resignation on 22 June, four days after Burnham won his seat as MP for Makerfield, having won a by-election engineered specifically to get him there. Sitting MP Josh Simons stood down in May so the then-Mayor of Greater Manchester could re-enter Parliament and mount a challenge. Wes Streeting, the one MP with the profile to make this a genuine contest, endorsed Burnham within hours and stood aside. That single decision shaped the timetable more than anything in the party’s rulebook.

Starmer stayed on until the process concluded. His net approval rating had fallen to around -46% by November 2025, and Labour’s losses in the May 2026 local elections triggered a run of resignations, including Streeting on 14 May and Defence Secretary John Healey on 11 June. Burnham, positioned to Starmer’s left and backed by a decade running Greater Manchester, absorbed that discontent faster than anyone else could organise against it.

What a coronation actually changes

A contested leadership race ordinarily forces a candidate to defend their positions in public, under pressure, for weeks. The coronation skips all of that. Burnham walks into Downing Street without ever having had to defend a manifesto, a fiscal plan or a foreign policy position against a Labour rival. That matters for anyone trying to plan around him, because a contest is usually where you find out what a Prime Minister actually believes once the questions get hard. This time, there was no dress rehearsal. The positions on record are the ones Burnham developed as a regional mayor, without a departmental Cabinet to run, a Treasury to negotiate with or a backbench to manage. All three land on day one.

What this means in practice

A reshuffle is coming, and it reaches further than the top job. New leaders bring new advisers and, usually, a reshaped Cabinet. Relationships built around a specific minister or department should be treated as provisional until appointments are confirmed.

The runway before recess is short. Anything meant to land on a new minister’s desk in their first fortnight, congratulations, requests for meetings, briefing material, is worth having ready now.

Burnham has pledged to stay within the current spending and borrowing plans, which should reassure anyone braced for a sharp fiscal shift. But his “Manchesterism”, a devolution-and-private-investment approach to growth, changes the tone even where the numbers don’t move. Expect a different pitch on regional investment, planning and business engagement from a government running the same fiscal rules.

Greater Manchester relationships carry new weight. A decade running that combined authority means Burnham arrives fluent in regional investment and transport policy and already known to the people who deliver it. Organisations with a footprint in the North West now have a more direct line into Downing Street than they had a month ago.

Scotland is not a bystander. A new UK government reshapes the Barnett conversation and the tone of UK-Scottish Government relations, whatever the devolution settlement says on paper. Holyrood-facing work should treat this as part of the same story, not a separate one.

What you should do next

Review which of your government contacts are reshuffle risks and have any correspondence for a new minister ready to send the moment appointments are confirmed.

If you’d like to talk through what this means for your organisation specifically and how we can assist, BIG Partnership’s public affairs team is happy to help.