Steve Harris tells miners to lift their image

ADVERTISING exec Steve Harris has a blunt message for Australia's mining industry leaders: lift your poor image and low profile.

ADVERTISING executive Steve Harris has a blunt message for the nation's mining industry leaders: lift your poor image and low profile or get used to being attacked by governments and milked for more tax revenue.

Mr Harris will tell a three-day conference run by the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies in Perth early next month that the industry has failed to communicate with the public about the role it plays in creating employment and ploughing its profits back into communities.

The head of Perth advertising firm the Brand Agency will tell the 2012 AMEC Convention, which is sponsored by The Australian, that mining companies are well down the list of respected brands in Australia because, in part, they have failed to promote themselves effectively.

Rio Tinto, for example, last year committed $33 million in community investments in Western Australia alone on top of paying billions of dollars in government taxes and royalties.

Unsurprisingly for an ad executive, Harris reckons mining companies should boost their advertising budgets to help get their message out and garner more grassroots support.

"If you look at prominent, high-profile brands in Australia that are respected and trusted and loved, you have organisations like McDonald's that sells fast, fatty food -- and one of their key engagement points in the community is the Ronald McDonald House program," he says.

"That's a couple of million dollars a year in each state. Compare that to Rio's $33m investment in WA communities.

"If the government said, 'We're going to ban people under 18 from going into McDonald's', there would be a massive community uprising.

"Because for 52 weeks of the year, McDonald's are out there engaging with the community."

Harris says the federal Labor government was willing and able to take on the industry by introducing a resources tax because few voters felt any strong allegiance to mining companies.

"The government would look at polling, and the answer would be, 'We don't care, have a crack at them'," he says.

"Go to the western suburbs of Sydney or the northern suburbs of Melbourne -- there are people who don't know it exists.

"Look at the community support for Ford, a declining industry, a declining brand and the level of community support for government grants and handouts to Ford.

"Then you hear about coalmine closures in the Bowen Basin -- where's the community support for that?"

Harris acknowledges that the mining industry's advertising campaign against Kevin Rudd's proposed resources super-profits tax in 2010 was highly effective.

After all, his firm created some of the AMEC advertisements.

But, he says, the industry shouldn't be blitzing the airwaves only when it has a crisis on its hands.

"The industry has to start being proactive. It needs to get out in advance and build a bank of goodwill. You can't just sit there and only contact people when you've got a problem," he says.