Fidel Castro said; “a revolution is not a bed of roses, a revolution is a struggle between the future and the past”, but here’s a story about my present. I’ve just pulled that quote from goodreads.com as I researched this article. In my browser I have tabs open on thesaurus.com and a couple of blog articles. All of those sites appeared ad free to me thanks to the adblocker I am running.
At the same time on my second monitor I’m watching YouTube videos as I write – selecting what I watch by clicking on links shared by friends via Facebook and by strangers via Reddit. As I do this, one car brand has decided in its wisdom to target me (and presumably people like me) with a horrible unskippable pre-roll on every single YouTube video I watch.
This means every couple of minutes I am forced to tolerate the same ‘driving through the country’ shot, the same generic jangly guitar library track, the same inexplicably enthusiastic voice-over man reading the same price point and inane end-line, on a product I have absolutely no interest in, from a brand I am rapidly feeling very negatively towards.
It is an unforgivable drain on the audience’s precious resources of time and attention, but also a great illustration of the struggle between future and past that is pushing the communications industry towards a revolution of its own.
The key to out-performing your competitors in the current marketing environment is to understand that all attention has to be earned. Even if the access to that audience is paid for. It is this ‘always earned’ context that is increasingly pushing public relations and social agencies to the front of the inter-agency pack when it comes to understanding how to provide value to clients’ businesses.
While advertising and media agencies have spent the last 50 years thinking about how to interrupt and steal attention in the most unavoidable ways possible, PR shops have been focusing on how to position a story to get traction and generate genuine interest from audiences. Their current skills are simply more transferable to the demands of modern and future audiences.
None of this is to say that technology isn’t driving significant change in the PR industry itself, only that the innate way PR and social businesses think is not being challenged in a way being felt by the ‘tradvertising’ agencies. Here are six examples of how this is coming to life:
1. A thicker, richer, more creative playbook: innovation is inherently newsworthy and technology allows marketing teams to create new news in myriad ways beyond the PR staples of surveys and parties. We’ve (hopefully) moved beyond the era of doing everything with drones and vending machines, but genuinely interesting innovation stories such as Microsoft’s new Project Oxford emotion recognition demo are fantastic drivers of earned media.
2. Taking activations to the masses: gone is the time that an experiential activation is a deep engagement for the passing foot traffic alone. Today, great activations can be appreciated across the world with simple content capture and a modest, smartly targeted ad spend. Women’s Aid in the UK brought their domestic violence-preventing idea to life on a single digital billboard, but the content created around the story reached millions online, as did the world’s first gender recognition ad from Plan.
3. Access to the means of production: shrinking interest lifespans and reducing costs of production technology means that there is little justification these days on spending half-a-million dollars or more on a single ‘film’. Smart firms are taking significantly smaller budgets to produce dozens of multi-format content pieces to tell stories in the formats that perform best across all the channels where the audience are paying attention and engage them over time rather than in one hit. It’s the story that people care about, not the colour grading. Just look at the success of Serial.
4. Paid as a tool to amplify earned: with better ability to measure and track behaviour as a result of seeing coverage and content, it’s becoming harder to justify reach as a meaningful metric. Smart brands are putting media spend behind the content that generates the best tangible, behavioural results on a cost-per-result basis. Many agencies have been slow to embrace this content-led test and learn approach to managing budgets, and as a result public relations and social agencies are quickly becoming adept at managing paid social campaigns to amplify coverage and content reactively based on what’s actually working.
5. Niche targeting and hyper-relevance: the ability to use social media platforms to target niche demographics and interest groups without reduced cost efficiency means that hyper-relevant, tailored coverage and content can have a greater impact than big, one-size-fits-all broadcast pieces. Public relations and social shops are already well practiced in tailoring stories to different audiences and can now extend this expertise to drive more effective paid spends. Check out how Ford use different influencers to target different demographics.
6. Content partnerships: people trust their influencers more than brands. Public relations specialists have been working for decades in the space of building relationships with publishers, who care that their content appeals to their audience in a way advertisers have never needed to. Now that publishing sits with millions of influencers as well as the traditional media, this audience-centric approach to storytelling is easily transferrable to the modern environment and PR and social teams are successfully integrating Instagram stars, YouTube creators and A-list bloggers into their narratives, using a wide range of tools to identify and engage with the best possible partners for any brief.
In this time of constant transformation one thing that is unlikely to ever change is the importance of big ideas to achieve a disproportionately large share of attention. By combining their heritage and expertise in earning attention with emerging technological opportunities, public relations and social agencies are able to bring ideas to life in ways that many traditional businesses are not, but this comes hand-in-hand with a need for the public relations industry to continue to up their game creatively, and attract some of the top-tier creative talent that has traditionally sat with the big advertising agencies.
In the time it will take for the rest of the industry to catch up, earned media specialists have a real opportunity to disproportionately drive the most value for clients and audiences alike.
By Ogilvy Public Relations head of digital, Craig Page