If you take a look back to the golden era of Maddison Avenue’s ‘Mad Men’ or The London press club’s lunchtime ‘briefings’ in one of Fleet Street’s many drinking establishments, you’ll be forgiven for thinking PR was all about media relations. You’d be right, it was. If you could hold your second bottle of wine as well as you could hold a conversation with the editor, your clients would stand a better chance of getting featured in the following week’s paper. However, it’s hard to think of any industry that has changed more than media over the past 50 years.
Just look at the way information sharing has transformed since then. Before email, there was the fax machine which had its heyday in the 1980s. Then came the World Wide Web in 1991, and a few years later, Microsoft Hotmail, which signalled the death knell for faxes and pagers. It’s strange to think that Excite—the world’s very first search engine—was created in 1993, five years before the launch of Google. Fast forward a few years and search engines have given birth to SEO, while social media has produced a new industry of content marketing, hashtags and influencers as well as giving a voice of the all-powerful consumer.
New technology has exponentially increased our ability to communicate and the previously un-challenged print and broadcast media has been facing years of increased competition in the form of 24/7 news and opinions, fake news and everything in between. In order to be heard above the noise in this new world of communication, any campaign, activity, tweet, blog or video has to possess engagement or risk becoming lost in the noise.
Formerly the bedrock of PR, media relations is now just one part of the puzzle. The digital explosion has also given us data which we can harness to establish success across industries and help to tailor PR campaigns and strategies. Big data, small data, it’s all readily available: the potential to quantify, impact and evaluate in more detail has presented a plethora of new avenues for communications professionals to explore.
Any organisation that does not embrace the power of digital will be at a disadvantage. However, getting bogged down in statistics on their own can be dangerous. Instead, PR practitioners must combine technology with creativity, an approach that has long underpinned communications campaigns. We are now better equipped to predict future trends, identify new followers and ensure dialogue is engaging and interesting.
At Relevance, we have developed our approach and created Relevance 360 Suite, launching this month. This brand-new product offers PR, marketing, advertising as well as ever-evolving digital services, all under one roof. With the addition of SEO, mobile location targeting, native ad integrations and YouTube advertising (to name a few), our core skills cover a fully comprehensive list of services to create compelling campaigns for our clients.
We are proud to help businesses tell their stories, impact their followers and engage with new audiences. Through this 360-degree approach, we are executing brand strategies and marketing/PR campaigns that lead the way on every platform.
Integrated communications are nothing new, but in today’s connected world it is essential for us to be at the forefront of technology to help give our clients the upper hand. Marketing which is digitally engineered for engagement and tailored for trendsetting is the future and the future’s looking pretty “suite!”
