Creatively led campaigns carrying strategic messages are not a thing of the past.  In fact, it’s time for the agency industry to stop and think about how PR and marketing campaigns (but particularly PR) are created and implemented.  Business to business campaigns should no longer be the poor sister to consumer programmes, which can often be sexier and bolder in their delivery of messages.

Companies need help with their messaging and many of them want to work with creative led agencies who can bring something new or different.  I’ve heard a lot about agencies who aren’t really pushing any boundaries or introducing anything new and exciting to client campaigns.  Too often in the PR world we think about the budget a client can pay and agencies even prefer not to push too much to secure additional budget.  That’s fine as existing clients and their budgets are important to retain and many marketing departments cannot find additional budget.  However, with every good idea, budget can be found.  If one particular idea helps to secure more business for that client, they will listen and spend more.  But there’s another challenge and one which the agency should be quick to consider – how, with the same budget, can it be more effective?

Current PR tactics can be boring because they are tried and tested and have worked in the past.  I’m not talking about ignoring our traditional tools and heading towards an all social media landscape, this is more about using different tactics to deliver strong, hard-hitting messages to an audience that is well understood and well researched.  One of the advantages that advertising has over PR is that it has statistics available to back up the sale.  A media pack will have demographic information, readership, geographic information, circulation and sometimes even a test group or focus group to align the purchase of a page of advertising to a particular readership of a particular publication.  For online sites, this information is dealt up via SEO and the profile of the average reader, click throughs, eyeballs, frequency, number of page views etc is all available to assist with targeting.

Clients want agencies who can challenge their thinking, not just do what they ask.  Fresh thinking is long overdue and even agencies who do it well should continue to push boundaries.  Clients get excited when they see ideas visualized in front of them, conveying ways in which they could promote a message in a more compelling way.  This has been true throughout time and is still true today.  Creativity in PR is something that is banded about a lot but very few agencies really deliver exciting and thought-provoking campaigns.  It’s time to rethink the thinking here, and we’ll certainly be among those agencies that will strive to do that.

Now where did I lay my copy of Mad Men Series 4?