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CEO of the global PR firm GolinHarris, Fred Cook, lets us into some of the secrets of spin.

Settling down in the picturesque surroundings of the Dubai Creek golf club, Golin Harris' CEO Fred Cook tells me the tale of how the global PR company began life.

"The story goes that Al Golin placed a cold call to a guy named Ray Kroc who had a handful of hamburger stands called McDonald's," starts Cook; "the rest is history.

We've been working with McDonald's for 50 years." It is a typically sensationalist story for a public relations guy to open an interview with.

Not to mention a bit of a name drop. But the head of an international public relations organisation is going to know how to work a crowd. He certainly got my attention.

It is hard to believe that the softly-spoken American holds such an elevated position in a traditionally extroverted sector but his calm mannerisms belie the fierce vigour and enthusiasm Cook has for the job.

The limelight is the aspect of the job that most thrills Cook. Despite running his own PR agency for four years, he moved back to a salaried role within an agency. Why?

A small start-up agency cannot work with the big players that GolinHarris can and, put simply, he missed it. "When you have your own company there's a limit to what you can do and it gets somewhat repetitive and boring.

In an agency like GolinHarris, we work with so many great brands and we play a very big playing field. The work we do is very important and very high visibility and that is what's great about being involved in a large firm." Clients now include Kraft, MasterCard, BP, Nintendo and Yamaha - high profile indeed.

McDonald's is without doubt a big client but it is an interesting example to use given the controversy that has surrounded it in recent years.

The release of the bestselling book Fast Food Nation and the documentary film Supersize Me were potential PR disasters for McDonald's as the public gained a heightened awareness of the potential harm of eating fast food almost over night.

How does the agency responsible for its public image deal with events like these? Does it require a complete strategic rethink? Crisis management? Cook paints a different, much more restrained picture than you might expect.

"The McDonald's business and its philosophy are very well established and its core values have been in place almost since the beginning," he says, explaining that a dedication to a strong corporate ideology allows any company to build a 'trust bank' with their customers (an expression coined by founder, Al Golin).

"McDonald's believes that if it make deposits in a trust bank over time through its community involvement and its approach to its employees and the care it takes with its product, when things come up that don't go its way, its customers will have built up enough trust in the brand that it'll be able to weather that kind of difficulty.

And so far that trust bank has proved to be very effective in these kinds of situations."

An aggressive expansion plan and product diversification, healthy profits and continued success, point to the veracity of the trust bank theory. 2007 saw a 6.8% increase in global sales, worth a total of US$23bn. The number of customers served in that period was also 1 billion more than the previous year.

Being one of the very first companies to work with GolinHarris, the example provides valuable insight into the values and practices that underpin its PR operations. The passive policy propounded by Cook and his team seems very effective.

Tools are employed that treat the consumers as intelligent users. Information is disseminated about the products, nutritional values (in the case of McDonald's) and corporate practices to allow customers to make their own minds up.

It is a break from the aggressive tack pursued by some competitors.

Taking advantage of technological advancements is important to stay in the game, not just to stay ahead of it.

The more conventional methods of reaching customers have become outmoded, according to Cook: "Traditional advertising has become less effective as a mass medium to reach people and by comparison, public relations has become a more effective tool to communicate with," he says.

In his role as chief executive, it falls to Cook to keep track of the changes affecting his sector. This, he says, is the most challenging part of his job. "One of the things that I have to do is stay on top of the trends.

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