Award-winning PR from a Leeds agency that already works across the North East. Honest about the distance, good on the phone, and in Newcastle whenever the story needs us.
I will be upfront: we are a Leeds agency, not a Newcastle one. Our office is an hour and forty minutes up the A1, or a little over an hour on the train from Leeds to Central. If you need someone who can be in your office by nine every morning, there are good agencies in the Toon who can do that and I would rather you hired one of them.
What we can offer is different. Prohibition is one of the larger independent PR agencies in the North, with 25 people, a video unit and a crisis team, and we have worked with businesses in Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham and Teesside for years. Some of them chose us precisely because we are not part of the local circuit. The North East is a small world and clients sometimes want their agency outside it.
The problem most North East businesses bring us
It is usually one of two things. Either a firm is growing faster than its reputation, so it is winning work on the strength of the founders and losing pitches to national names that are no better, just better known. Or something has gone wrong and the local press has noticed.
Both are PR problems and both get solved the same way: work out what you are actually for, find the journalists and trade titles that matter to your buyers, and give them something worth writing about. The national press comes later, if at all. Most of our B2B clients never need it.
PR services for Newcastle businesses
We work with North East clients on the full range: media relations across the regional and trade press, from The Journal and Chronicle Live through to Insider Media, Bdaily and the sector titles your buyers read; crisis and issues management; social media and content; and video, which we shoot ourselves. If you want to be in the FT or on BBC Look North we will tell you honestly whether the story is there yet.
North East names we have worked with include Northumbria University, Durham University, Fentimans, Montane, Bannatyne, Kavli, HYCO and Tom Walker & Sons. That list covers higher education, drinks, outdoor kit, leisure, food manufacturing and engineering, which is most of what the region sells.
Why a Leeds agency, and why us
Prohibition has been going since 2012. We are a team of around 25 in Leeds city centre, two minutes from the station, and we are on PRWeek UK’s Top 150 Consultancies list for the fifth year running. PRIDE has named us Outstanding PR Agency three times. I mention that once because it answers the obvious question about whether we are any good, and then I would rather talk about the work.
The work is a mix of B2B and consumer. Recent campaigns include the launch of Big Zuu’s Drip drinks brand, ongoing consumer PR for Astonish cleaning products, and the communications around Freeths’ win in Mr Bates v The Post Office, which is about as high-stakes as media relations gets. We have run PR for Microsoft, Kurt Geiger, Primula and a long list of regional firms you will not have heard of because their PR was about trade press and buyers, not fame.
Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, the two directors, have been in PR for more than 45 years between them and still sit in client meetings. Both co-host the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast, which is where a lot of our thinking gets tested in public.
Brands That Trust Us
How it works
We keep the first month simple, because the fastest way to lose a new client is to spend it in workshops.
- Week one: a call or a visit. We want to know what you sell, who buys it, and what a good result would look like in twelve months. Bring the awkward questions.
- Week two: we come back with a plan, a budget and the three or four stories we think will land. If we do not think PR will work for you, we say so and suggest what might.
- Weeks three to six: the first stories go out. Trade press first, because that is where buyers are, then regional and national where the story earns it.
- Monthly: a one-page report on coverage, share of voice and website traffic that came from it. No AVEs. We stopped using those years ago.
Questions Newcastle clients ask us
Do we need to come to Leeds?
No. Most of our client relationships run on video calls, a shared Slack channel and a monthly in-person meeting. For Newcastle clients that meeting is usually at your place or a café near Central. We do get people down to Leeds for the occasional brainstorm because the change of scene helps, and the office has a bar.
What does PR cost?
Retainers start at around £3,750 a month and go up from there depending on the results you are after and the outputs it takes to get them. Projects and crisis work are priced separately. We will give you a proper number after the first call, not a range designed to get you in the room.
Do you know the North East press?
Yes. We pitch The Journal, Chronicle Live, Bdaily, Insider North East, North East Times and the regional broadcast desks regularly, and we know which of them will run a business story and which will not. We also know the trade press for your sector, which for most B2B firms matters far more than the local paper.
Why not just hire a Newcastle agency?
You might. Persuasion, Guerilla, Harvey and Hugo and others do good work. Hire us if you want a bigger team, video and crisis capability in-house, and an agency that can take you national when the time comes. Hire them if you want someone on the doorstep. Both are fair choices.
Our Latest Work
Talk to us
If you are a North East business that has outgrown the reputation it started with, book a 30-minute call with Chris Norton. No deck, no pitch team, just a conversation about whether PR is the right lever and what it would take.
Call 0113 430 4160, email info@prohibitionpr.co.uk or use the contact page.
No deck, no pitch team. A straight conversation about whether PR is the right lever for your business.
