From bacon to beer (though definitely not at the same time!) here’s some stories we’ve been telling this week…

1. “All of a sudden it was okay to care”:  a morning with Midge Ure

Most mornings we’re happy enough to chomp our porridge to the sounds of the Good Morning Wales team or Splott boy John Humphrys over on Radio 4, but on Tuesday we shared our start to the day with a man with a special story.  Midge Ure (he’s the one on the right i.e. not Bob the Gob) told the tale behind Band Aid to over 100 movers and shakers at the M4 Business Network event at Celtic Manor.  “All of a sudden it was okay to care” was one of his soundbites about the movement which sold millions of singles, saved countless lives and somehow managed to organise a simultaneous concert on both sides of the Atlantic relying on a telex machine for communication.

2. Bringing good beer to the people of South Wales

The craft ale market has taken the country by storm over the last 5 years, and one man who knows his beers is Sean Murphy, one of the directors of Knife & Fork Food and co-owner of Vale of Glamorgan Brewery. Buying the brewery in July of last year proved to have an endless list of benefits for the four Knife & Fork pubs across Cardiff and the Vale, and we wanted to explore this unique vertical business model a bit more. We pitched a feature to Wales Online from Sean discussing the relationship between his two businesses, which went live this week. Cheers!

3. Putting Roland’s name on it

This week we worked with our client Roland DG to show engraving professionals the huge range of innovative engraving machinery that UK’s leading manufacturer of wide-format digital inkjet printers supply. We strategically targeted Awards and Imaging Magazine, in which we secured a full page feature on the endless creative possibilities that the engraving industry can provide professionals – ensuring that we positioned Roland DG as the perfect partner to support profit-driven business ventures.

4. Hanging with the hacks at the Welsh Media Awards

On Friday, some of our team took in the glitz and glamour of the Welsh Media Awards at Mercure Hotel in Cardiff. Wales’ most famous broadcasting son, Huw Edwards, was handing out the hardware to highflyers across the nation’s print, online and broadcast media. Good food, good company, and a chance to get dolled up – it was all right up our street.  Our highlight of the night though was legendary broadcaster Vincent Kane’s incredibly inspiring speech before presenting the Journalist of the Year Award. Congratulations to all the winners!

5. Column inches to Cardiff City Stadium – supporting Youth Entrepreneurship in Wales

We’re sure you know that Tuesday was International Women’s Day. To mark it, we organised a full page feature in the Western Mail authored by Nikki Giant – a Role Model for our client Big Ideas Wales. Nikki discussed how enterprise and economic growth in Wales is increasingly being driven by young women, and how she personally is helping to tackle gender inequality within Wales.

And that’s not all from Youth Enterprise this week… so many famous entrepreneurs honed their skills at school, and last Wednesday, Big Ideas Wales looked to harness that spirit at the Global Entrepreneurship Challenge at Cardiff City Stadium. The intensive 24 hour business challenge tasked over 100 college students from around Wales to come within a disruptive business idea for the creative industries, and saw local entrepreneurs motivate and educate them along the way. Deputy Minister Ken Skates opened the event, and fresh off his ESTnet success, Steve Dimmick of doopoll delivered the inspiring concluding remarks. Congrats to the worthy winners – Coleg Cambria Yale in Wrexham!

And in other news…

We’ve been feeling all warm and fuzzy at Working Word HQ after we spotted this story about an unlikely friendship between a South American Magellanic penguin and a 71-year-old Brazillian fisherman.

Joao Pereira de Souza found the tiny penguin starving and covered in oil back in 2011. He nursed him back to health and named the little fella Dindim before releasing him back into the wild. Now little Dindim travels 5000 miles each year to return to the island and visit his rescuer. If that’s not a feel-good story to end the week on, we don’t know what is!

Working Word is a PR, digital and brand agency based in Cardiff and London, telling transformative stories for clients all across the UK.