Creative Agency Secrets

THe good just got really great.

sending unsolicited and inappropriate marketing messages has always been close to what we now call spam.  

In the blogosphere, this direct approach without first establishing an online relationship and credentials / rights is considered more invasive and inappropriate than in the offline or email-only world.

Bloggers are very good at negative publicity.  And at campaigning / lobbying.

This wiki suggests that people blog these PR companies' URLs.  I.e. get no email at all from them (and probably report them to spamcop and get the domain blocked at server level). And heres a list of individual email addresses blocked by the author of "The Long Tail" and editor of Wired Magazine.

How damaging will that be to your business?  Imagine, no emails getting through certain servers and to some key journalist/blogger individuals - and all because a colleague made a mistake… 

ACTION - check your PR company is not on that list and your individual PR representative isn't either.  Your brand is doomed online.  Move your business elsewhere. 

Companies that I know who are on the list include [note I am not linking this text] Edelman, Bigmouth, Bite, FourtyThree, Global Results, Lewis, Ogilvy, Porter Novelli, 

Wise up. 

Anyone working in Marketing communications might find this website a useful resource.

MyRagan has a good selection of  forums, groups and interest areas which will give you nice new ideas that you can use for your clients' campaigns.

Use the 'take the tour' video on the home page when you visit for the first time. 

BIMA do the BEST dinner debates.  I’ve attended a couple in the past. 

I am going to this event, and it promises to be a fantastic debate to add to the discussions that I started here and here.

Jamie
Galloway, Director of Digital Media, Central Office of Information. The
subject of the conversation for the evening is: ‘The future for PR in a
digital world’

[Nice use of English.. the future FOR not, you notice, the future OF….!]  Pedants of the world unite.

BL Ochman has a lot to say about oneline marketing, but picking up on my earlier threads on the Deathe of PR she ably demonstrates where sheer bloody-mindedness is hampering some in the trade from moving with the times.

My favorite comment of the night, from a woman who works for Biz Bash and who refused to give me her name (What are you going to do? Write about me?"):

"people who read blogs aren’t very educated."

The bottom line on the meeting - there is still
discussion going on at high levels about whether and how PR and
marketing can work together. And whether or not bloggers are
journalists, or idiots. And about whether corporations should blah blah
blog.

Dear New Media consultants: any time you start to think that new
media is making inroads into corporate settings, think about these
fossils …. er, folks.

Now maybe that’s a strong position to take.  And she is in US.  But it resonates closely with what Richard Stacey and I were discussing in the lobby after the London Social Media Cafe prototyping meeting…. Some PR company clients will continue to buy old world PR.  There is a role for it.  Many will move onto other forms of online and offline communication - some DIY and others using broad marketing communications specialists [who may be PR agencies or other more integrated agencies].  But we both agree that everyone needs to research and consider the new social media world before making a decision on whether or not to participate.

Following my meeting with Adriana a couple of weeks ago, I have started to see VRM coming up in others’ blogs.  JP has some fantastic points here.

and I wrote a comment to follow

Matteo, you are right that the advertising industry faces a huge challenge and will splinter off, in my view, so that this ‘new world’ of positive, permission-based communication runs parallel with the old world of mass advertising.

What is curious and doesn’t seem to have bene mentioned yet, is the fact that brands *should* only want to advertise to people with money.

This will be the main discriminating factor.  The old-style advertising and direct marketing will increasingly have money-less audiences and those with money will protect themselves digitally and start to strike the sort of ‘bargains’ that you and JP describe.

Roll on the new future!

PS I used to work for Don Peppers, the man who coined the phrase 1to1 marketing.  His first book was the 1tot Future.  I think it’s here.  Now.  Finally!

At a meeting yesterday, I was told about an exciting interview that in-house has done with Don.  It’ll be released as a series of 3 minute videos on their site shortly.  What I want to see is whether his views have moved on since 2000.  And whether he has actually *done* any of the smart things he talks about.  I note that he doesn’t seem to have joined in the blogging conversation, and surely, Cluetrain should have been part of the development of the 1to1 business model….. but I fear it hasn’t / isn’t.

Reading Adriana’s post on "Thin Air PR", thanks for the hint, Leo.  I was struck by the strength of feeling about the possible end of the business model whereby brands pay an agency to lobby the media on their behalf in order to generate column inches of written material.

What is public relations anyway?  The means by which brands try to get themselves talked about in the media.  And extended into events (experiential), lobbying MPs (public affairs), print media (media or press relations), public speaking (public relations).

Now let me digress into a real dead end…. what is the real definition of Public Relations?

Barrons says Form of communication that is primarily directed toward gaining public understanding and acceptance. It tends to deal with issues rather than specifically with products or services. Public relations uses publicity that does not necessitate payment in a wide variety of media and is often placed as news or items of public interest. Because public relations communications are placed in this manner, they offer a legitimacy that advertising does not have, since advertising is publicity that is paid for.
Management Help says
Public relations includes ongoing activities to ensure the overall company
has a strong public image. Public relations activities include
helping the public to understand the company and its products.
Often, public relations are conducted through the media, that
is, newspapers, television, magazines, etc.
The PRCA trade body says Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you.  Public
relations aims to earn understanding and support, and influence opinion
and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and
maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and
its publics.
[although I prefer the other PRCA - Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association]

So lots to validate the service and professionalise the relationship that a brand has with its audiences.

Cut through the polite-speak and it’s clear that when brands can have direct conversations with audiences in a meaningful environment, maybe the middle man gets cut.

As I said in reply to Adriana’s post, there are times when a middle-man is a valid, rational response to a business situation and using a PR agency is a great resource and worth paying for.  I wrote

BUT there is a time and a place for a rational use of an outsider to, in your phrase, send a proxy to the party. 

And that is when you don’t have the manpower yourself. There is a
nice way to use outsiders to help you plan your public profile and help
execute it through ‘events’ where audiences can experience the brand
first hand and announcements to the printed media e.g. stock exchange
statements, annual reports, product recalls.

Where the questions remain are in the areas of ‘lobbying’ where
brands use PR agencies to sell in a story and try and get journalists
to try their product and write about it.

The honest way to deal with this practice is for the printed article [for the journalist] to include a reference sources list that includes the name of the PR
agency. It creates an honesty measure and also provides a clear link
back to the source of the information.

These are things I enjoy and so do well.  I’ve done most of them many times and can give you references, if you need.

In no particular order….

1 - Mentoring and coaching anyone with business development responsibility or who has to collaborate with biz dev to do their job better and get results

2 - Moving the whole company to an Enterprise 2.0 operation.  This is a more open relationship with its customers and prospects though using web 2.0 techniques (for yourselves not clients) and creating the open culture internally that enables outsiders to recognise the ‘personality’ of the agency - bypassing traditional outbound communication methods

3 - Facilitating an away day for a client or your senior team

4 - Improving your new business methods and, particularly, pitching

5 - Running a training session on "New business for non-new biz people"

A topic I’ve been mulling for a while is whether it’s possible to do "opensource" as a business model for creative agencies.

As is my wont, I’ll try the ideas out on a couple of agency bosses as I meet them during my normal line of work.  I have just had the first positive response to the suggestion.

My thesis, is that every agency says they are "creatively led" and "innovative" and "ideas-led".  But in practice, each one is very like any other.  A very few lead the field in creativity and innovation and the broad mass are followers. 

The broad mass are still very good at what they do, don’t mistake me.  But if you work for or own one of those agencies whose creative reputation is not yet as high a star as you hope it will one day become, how do you show the world how great you are at creative ideas?

The normal showcase you use is your client work.  But what if your client won’t let you run the best things you devise?  They choose the ’safe’ campaign.  Well, you use pitches as another opportunity to show off your talents.  And if you win the pitch - all well and good [but frequently the client still won’t let you run the really creative campaign you favour].

So what if you lose the pitch?  Well, there’s a fabulous document detailing all your best ideas for this particular brief sitting on a shelf in the office.

Here’s what I say

PUBLISH IT.

Here’s why

• if you are creative, it will show through
• You can then allow others to compare your work to the campaign the client finally ran with the winning agency (does yours stack up?)
• Prospective clients can see your truly most creative stuff
• Competitors…ditto….

I now have a second stage to suggest.  Allow others to use your material - YES MAKE IT OPENSOURCE

• Use creative commons licenses
• Let anyone take your best stuff and use / adapt it for their own purposes
• Take the credit for originating
• Promote it as a point of difference for your agency
• Let prospective clients work out how good your stuff is by showing them and the public how great it really is

I expect a few side benefits

1. Improved recruitment
2. Some great B2B campaigns to promote your business
3. The industry newspapers will ignore it…. for a bit
4. Smaller agencies will declare their connection to your work and you will get exposure through their clients (who may grow and come and see you sometime)….

Roll up, roll up, read all about it. Stephen Waddington of tech PR company, Rainier PR, seems to think I may have something worthwhile to suggest.

The ultimate scare story for a PR agency?  Corporate giant JNJ too irritated with mis-quotations by journalists who write without declaring their bias, revealing their sources or repeating what they’ve actually been told are in the process of launching their own online-press-office-blog-equivalent.

SITUATION
If a journalist brings down a corporation  his career is made.
The company provides context and content and the journalist writes skewed articles.
SOLUTION
Put the stuff online and publish the backstory so the reading public can make up their own mind about the journalist’s angle, attitude and orientation.

Working with the internal communications team "J&J By the Way" will be an online resource to migrate the press office online.  Turn the press release into a shell article which can be adapted / used and if (when) abused, can be linked to the blog which gives another viewpoint / detail of the briefing given to the journalist and explains the context.
Advangages? 

1. You can declare your bias online,
2. the bland public press relase can be backed up with proper detail for the public
3. the journalist and the blog has an audience wider than just the journalist writers.

Thanks for the story!

(more…)

Dave McLure says it all to back up the earlier story