spite of this our advice is rarely taken and we may have to further adjust our policies towards conferences for trade missions.
Trade Missions
We
24. It might be worth including in this report that, as
indicated above, missions are becoming steadily more difficult to publicise for the simple reason that Hong Kong is receiving more and more missions from UK as well as other countries and they no longer rate as news.
are having to try to devise different ways of attracting media coverage and are tending to try to obtain more "exclusive interviews" and to play up those purposes of missions likely to be of direct benefit to Hong Kong commerce e.g. joint ventures, new technology or new labour/cost saving methods rather than straightforward sales. We rely heavily on the stories and pictures with captions issued by COI, and sympathise with their difficulties in trying to make bricks without straw at times but would stress the importance of their material in our publicity campaigns which are appreciated by missions, at least when they arrive here and realise the value of publicity in their attack on the
market.
Information Staff
25. The information staff consists of one home-based
officer and three locally-engaged staff, viz:-
Information Officer - Mr D L S Coombe (Grade 7 E)
Information Assistant
Personal Assistant
Mr Frederick C H Wu (Grade - LE II)
Miss Stella Fung
(Grade LE III B)
Translator/Information Clerk - Miss Anna Ng
11
(Grade LE III B)
/In