PRCA ‘Positioning Digital’ event part two: Do the best online PR campaigns require offline activity?
I’m increasingly thinking they do.
It was born out of Mat Morrison’s excellent PRCA talk the other week on how to ‘position’ digital PR.
This was the second presentation of the morning after Fernando’s.
They both resonated but this one stuck out a bit as it was starting to say something different about the relationship between online and offline. Marketers are the only people who distinguish between the two. People don’t. In a few years, the web will be accessible everywhere too and ‘offline’ innate things will be trackable online through gizmos like RFID tags. Look at what Guinness are doing with balls as an example.
Does this become an online PR campaign now because there is some video content and online chatter about it? No. Our campaigns should enable us to engage the audience we’re trying to reach where they are and through the channels they are using, not dictated by our journalist relationships to guarantee a ‘hit’. And our campaigns should be born out of ideas that can work across the channels we need to reach the audience, on or offline.
Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question here… what about; is digital the way in which to reposition PR agencies?
This brings me onto one of Mat’s final observations in his talk; the best ‘online PR’ campaigns he uses as case studies in his deck are not actually done by PR agencies. And of course, if you work in PR, that’s a bit annoying.
But wait. Perhaps there is an answer. And maybe it’s more obvious than we thought?
How about flogging ideas, not process.
The advertising agencies who, back in the day, pioneered TV, for sure sold the process of getting visual images of branded images onto thousands of little boxes around the country to take a leadership position and become TV advertising gurus. But once TV advertising was commoditised and everyone was doing it, the pitch perhaps reverted back to ideas. If everyone is now arriving at traditionally acknowledged ‘PR’ ideas for communication solutions, and using social tools to tell the story (commoditised by every marketing discipline going), is there therefore an opportunity for PR agencies to be lean, mean, ideas obsessed, marketing G-units with no divisions of labour (or creative departments) and refocus their offering on ideas…(executed by the people who thought them up… flawlessly)?
The other process stuff; ‘menu PR’ and the apparatus to communicate and distribute the idea through earned (and paid for) media should be hygiene factors in the clients decision. I work in an integrated agency and the definition of being ‘creative’ is changing. Portfolios are increasingly filled with iphone apps, youtube contests, stunts, guerilla work, ARG, blog sites, Twitter feeds, content pieces and event ideas. And we have one of the most creative ad agencies on the planet right now (Crispin Porter Bogusky) supposedly using PR techniques to arrive at their ideas.
If public relations agencies execute our own ideas too, on and offline, engaging directly with the ‘public’, wouldn’t this be a great way for digital to reposition PR?
