AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM KEN HICKSON
THE HICKSON TEAM – A COMMUNICATION FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH – IS BACK.
Established in Singapore in October 2017 – where Ken Hickson first started his communications consulting work 34 years ago to the month for Singapore Airlines – THE HICKSON TEAM is focussing on being the best editorial content provider for business and for media.
Not a PR business per se, as the Team is keen to supplement and support PR/Communications practitioners (corporate and consultants) by giving them what they are often lacking in time and talent to provide themselves.
We have a team of writers with expertise and experience in every sector imaginable.
We say we cover the Asia Pacific, but really the world is our oyster!
We start with a strong focus on what makes up the acronym TEAM – Travel, Education, Arts and Media – but already we find ourselves being asked to produce and curate content for other important sectors, including e-commerce, property, pharmaceutical, animal welfare, hospitality and the food industry.
We will continue to produce the two online magazines we are well-known for: The Avenue for Creative Arts and ABC Carbon Express (now in tenth year).
You will continue to find The Avenue content here – www.fifthavenue.asia – along with all past issues and additional articles since we started in early 2015.
ABC Carbon Express will continue as a “mostly monthly mail-out” and most of its past content is accessible on one of our other sites: www.abccarbon.express.
Where appropriate, content produced by HICKSON and co. for a diverse range of organisations, could well find its way into one or both of our own media outlets.
We are also finding ourselves as contributors to a wide range of other online, print, broadcast and social media.
In recent years we have had articles appearing in all sorts of media, including Eco-Business, Blue and Green Tomorrow, ANZA Magazine, Access Asia, Gaia Discovery, Foreign Investors on India, Journal of Communication Management, Social Space, Petroleum Review, Ana Shell Media, e2 Singapore, CEI Asia, among others.
We are also extremely active in and through dozens of groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Expect more. With our depth of media experience in-house and on-tap, we have already offered – or been asked – to provide content for a number of magazines.
As content providers, our work doesn’t start and end with the written word. This year – and previously – we have worked with video producers, photographers, artists, designers and producers. We expect more to come.
A few months ago, it was announced on this site, that “By popular demand – or at least from one or two requests! – Ken Hickson has started to provide a service to the arts, artists, writers, arts organisations, publishers, galleries and arts events.”
What started then has now morphed into THE HICKSON TEAM. A creative content agency. Based in Singapore but serving the region and the world. A collective of creative expertise.
We are in the process of getting ourselves established with our own brand identity, our own website, emails, business cards etc. We are registered as a business entity in Singapore as THE HICKSON TEAM PTE LTD, with a registered office in Tanglin Mall and a bank account with UOB.
We haven’t forsaken our interest and commitment to sustainability and its four E’s: Environment, Energy, Economy and Ethics, as set out in the book “Race for Sustainability” and as practiced by the Singapore-based consultancy Sustain Ability Showcase Asia (SASA), which started seven years ago.
That continues under Ken Hickson’s chairmanship and management, but expect to see some developments there and the influx of even more “energetic and effective expertise”. The website www.sustain-ability-showcase.com continues to showcase its work, its output and its people.
Email: ken@fifthavenue.asia
A LITTLE BIT OF HICKSON HISTORY:
While Ken Hickson’s communications industry career began in Wellington, New Zealand in 1962, as a cadet journalist with the afternoon metropolitan daily newspaper, the Evening Post, he has worked in, and with, all sections of the media since.
Besides the country’s capital city, he has been based in Hamilton, Auckland and Christchurch, reporting for radio and television, editing magazines and contributing a collection of newspaper titles.
He also made his mark in public relations in Wellington, working for the CORSO-Freedom from Hunger Campaign and in Hamilton for the Waikato Public Relations Foundation.
In Auckland, he worked in house for Air New Zealand, he ran the PR department for one of the country’s largest advertising agencies, and then set up his own consultancy – his clients included the Australian Tourist Commission, Trans Australia Airlines (TAA) and Kaiser Stuhl (wine) – before he joined forces with a PR veteran to form Cleal and Hickson.
In Christchurch, it was mostly media. At TVNZ, he worked in news and current affairs, as well as enjoyed three years on the Science Express programme, which included a month-long assignment reporting on research in the Antarctic. He somehow managed to find time in Christchurch to be the founding editor of two magazines – Topic Air and Villa – and produce two books, “Flight 901 to Erebus” and “The Future South”.
His first Singapore sojourn started in October 1983 and lasted until the end of 2000. After his important public affairs work for Singapore Airlines, he established a PR consultancy in mid 1986 with Ian Batey to take on an international contract for the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board.
That became Hickson Public Relations and garnered a team of local and foreign talent to manage work for clients like BMW, DHL, Canon Sime Darby, Jardine Matheson and Cold Storage. It wasn’t long before its influence spread throughout Asia Pacific, through establishing and managing a network of independent agencies in 15 countries.
In mid 1996, the world’s largest independent PR firm, Fleishman Hillard, swooped on the ten-year-old Hickson PR to acquire the business. Ken agreed to stay on to manage the business until the end of 2000, helping FH expand its client base and presence from one to ten offices throughout Asia Pacific.
During his ten years in Queensland, Australia – from end 2000 to October 2010 – Ken lectured in communication studies at the University of Sunshine Coast, where he was made Associate Professor Adjunct and started Australia’s first undergraduate course on “International Communication”.
He undertook assignments for a couple of Brisbane-based consultancies, then established ABC Carbon in mid 2007 as an advisory firm, before he started work on his encyclopaedic work “The ABC of Carbon” (published 2009) and abc carbon express, which began as a weekly e-newsletter in March 2008.
His sustainability showcase started in Brisbane in 2010 when the Minister of Climate Change and Sustainability for the Queensland Government, Kate Jones, asked him to bring together a collection of firms, organisations and individuals involved in the “sustainability sector” for a one-day exhibition and forum at Parliament House.
Around the same time, he worked with the University of Sydney’s Workplace Research Centre and the National University of Singapore’s Office of Environmental Sustainability to stage the first National Sustainability Conference in Singapore in July 2010. He was one of the keynote speakers and his book “The ABC of Carbon” was provided to all delegates.
Two months later, in September 2010, he established the sustainability consultancy SASA in Singapore and returned to his favourite tropical city full-time by the end of October.
The rest is history!
18 October 2017
kenhickson@sustain-ability-showcase.com