Search results for: “Byron Sharp”

  • Personal data leads + more things

    Consumers don’t believe use of personal data leads to more relevant ads, report finds | Campaign AsiaThe report also found that consumers still trust TV ads over their digital counterparts. On average, consumers are twice as likely to say TV ads provide a more positive impression of brands than common digital formats. The top concern about digital platforms amongst those polled was fake news on social media (53 percent), followed by cyberbullying, online predators, child endangerment online and children’s data privacy. “While consumers embrace the technology, there remains a multitude of concerns regarding advertising on the technology. These concerns are a significant reason why TV actually still remains the medium most likely to provide a positive impression of brands,” Juhl said. – Personal data leads to apparently less effective advertising. So why would you recommend digital for brand building activity??? Supports Gartner’s position that businesses will move away from personal data and Byron Sharp’s idea of smart mass marketing. More on how personal data leads to ineffective targeted online ads and ad blocking here.

    Street Media
    Television via Flickr account Naked Faris

    People call for boycott of filmmaker Sam Morales after alleged catfishing of trans woman | Rappler – interesting online scandal in the Philippines at the moment with apparent complex catfishing of gay men and trans-women

    Facebook eyes multibillion-dollar stake in Reliance Jio | Financial Times – if the board game Risk was about global telecoms infrastructure instead of military conquest, the truism ‘never fight a land war in Asia’ would change to ‘never buy a carrier in India’. I can’t see how Facebook is going to do any better with its holding than Vodafone etc

    Singtel-backed OTT service Hooq enters liquidation | Advertising | Campaign Asia“Global and local content providers are increasingly going direct, the cost of content remains high, and emerging-market consumers’ willingness to pay has increased only gradually amid an increasing array of choices,” a Singtel statement said. “Because of these changes, a viable business model for an independent, OTT distribution platform has become increasingly challenged. As a result, HOOQ has not been able to grow sufficiently to provide sustainable returns nor cover escalating content costs and the continuous operating costs of an independent OTT distribution platform.” – it will be interesting to see how people like MUBI and NowTV do moving forwards

    Recession pushes Hong Kong shoppers to sell their luxury goods | Financial Times – interesting article however the speculation on mainland Chinese trading in secondhand luxury might be impeded a bit. A mix of fakes and and a desire for new things. They would need to have strong trustworthy authentication. And might want to vent that market abroad as well as Japanese players like Brand-Off have managed

    Inside China’s controversial mission to reinvent the internet | Financial Times – this sounds like a right mess. We’ll soon have a splinternet

    How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policymakers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Oxford Academicweak or subtle interventions are often most effective for the would-be propagandist. In particular, outright scientific fraud—intentional publication of incorrect, fabricated, or purposely misleading results—is not only unnecessary to influence public opinion on topics of scientific inquiry, it is also riskier and often less effective than other forms of manipulation. Biased production, which does not involve fabricating results, is a successful strategy for misleading the public. And in many cases, biased production is itself less effective than selective sharing – HT Ian Wood

    What Does the Symmetry of Your Logo Say About Your Brand? – asymmetric conveys excitement. I was left with so many questions, like what about rotational symmetry in a logo?

    Madison Avenue Insights | The Next Big Thing in Media & Advertising: Simplification – great read by Michael Farmer, but will they look with a clear eye at the current digital marketing being done from a brand marketing perspective?

    “Krisenmarketing”: Warum Werbungtreibende nun ihre Etats nicht einfrieren sollten › Meedia – yes its in German but it comes out fine in Google Translate: Financial, insurance or telecommunications companies in particular should instead rely on customer-centered communication and pick people up instead. They would have to show existing customers that they are there for them during the crisis and offer solutions. For example, Deutsche Telekom is doing exemplary with its campaign “We connect Germany” and the specific services. Banks could also help with liquidity shortages.

    London has the highest productivity levels in UK PwC – without productivity improvements levelling up isn’t going to work. Interesting that London performed this high, yet was lower on females in employment with a higher female unemployment rate

  • Creativity in data

    I had the honour of being part of a panel for the PRCA on the creativity in data run in association with The Work Crowd.

    Creativity and data

    Here was the synopsis of the panel discussion that the PRCA put out.

    Communications is frequently seen as all about ‘big ideas’. But increasingly, it’s being recognised that to develop a big idea that’s really going to have an impact, it’s not just about creativity. Now, the winning formula is creativity + data.


    Of course, data has always played a role in the creative process, but historically through a more ‘rear view’ measurement of past behaviours. However, with technology advancing and predictive analytics utilising newly available data, the data we have access to is more forward-looking than ever.


    The ability to synthesise these insights is super-powering strategic planning for businesses, but it’s definitely not just the boardroom who should be interested in ‘running the numbers’. Maths and data may not be seen as natural bedfellows of storytelling and creation, but have we been underestimating the power of creativity in data? Ultimately, is data a friend or foe to the creative process?

    I kicked this around with Camilla and Richard. Here are my thoughts that came from this process in no particular order below:

    I wondered what the forefathers of the communications industry would have thought about the question? Leaving ethical considerations aside for a moment about the legitimacy of their techniques, what would they have thought?

    Edward Bernays was famous for using consumer insight, research and psychology in his work. It would likely have felt very alien to Bernays that we were even asking such a question. He would have felt that the answer is self-evident a 100 years later.

    Data isn’t a friend or foe to the creative process. It is part of the creative process. The sieving of data to get down to the grain of truth – the insight that you can hang your creative idea off.

    Thinking about the nature of data itself is muddled. Over the past couple of decades the communications industry has struggled with measurement. This then shaped its perception of data.

    • Data is quantitative
    • Data is tech dependent
    • Data is precise

    All of which is wrong:

    • Data can be quantitative, but qualitative data is also important, particularly to the creative process. Qualitative data is the stuff of stories and storytelling
    • A lot of data is technology dependent, but a lot of good stuff from a creative perspective isn’t. Marketing communications as an industry, has increased its use and importance of cultural insights in planning
    • Quantitative data isn’t always precise. Correlation and causality aren’t the same things. In addition, if online ad fraud has taught us anything, it is to be skeptical of data quality

    I am not saying that communications should move away from obtaining and using quantitive data. But this should be balanced by a focus on qualitative data as well.

    Data is seen paradoxically as ‘all around us, pervasive’ and expensive to obtain.

    So what data should the creative planners of the communications industry care about? Some of the sources listed below are free, some are books that are worthwhile investing in and others are expensive services that even the largest agencies struggle to afford in many markets.

    The data that the client has already

    Clients are already sitting on a wealth of information inside their organisation:

    • Past marketing campaigns. What has worked, what hasn’t.
    • Web analytics – what content is doing well. What do we know abut site visitors?
    • Key words that they use for SEO. What language should we be using for coming with messaging?
    • Sales data. Not just qualitative data, but what is coming out of sales calls and customer services enquiries? What concerns prospective and current customers? Why do they buy? Do they stay loyal? Do they have great stories? Who buys and who is likely to influence a buying decision?
    • Competitor research including brand tracking data if available
    • Planning work and creative briefs done by the clients other agencies. Chances are that a comms agency will have been brought in after other agencies. What channels are those agencies looking to leverage. Where can you complement their work? What is the human truth that they are hanging their creative from? Are there any design cues in their artwork?

    Work smarter, rather than harder. It is foolish to try and do the same information gathering twice. A client’s willingness to dig and get this for you gives you a rough read on how important your work is for the organisation.

    Best practice data on efficiency and effectiveness

    The marketing industry as a whole has put a lot of money into the Ehrensberg Bass Institute and they have compiled decades of marketing science research to some accessible books. How Brands Grow parts 1 and 2 are constant references for me.

    The IPA’s publication The Long and The Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Fields is another reference for me. Binet has updated this research to cover B2B recently.

    They help me answer questions such as:

    • Is PR the right tool to solve the client’s current problem?
    • Is our creative likely to be effective?
    • How much should be focusing on brand building versus activation?

    To make your life easier, here’s a slide where I distilled optimal channel choice versus marketing strategy.

    Zero-Based Budgeting

    Where you see ticks, that’s when the marketing tool (PR, advertising etc) will do the most good.

    The Holmes Report and WARC have collaborated so that if you have a WARC subscription you can access award winning case studies and learn from campaigns that have solved similar problems to the ones that you face. None of the industry organisations or communications have distilled this kind of data down into a comms agency equivalent and Binet and Fields.

    Desk research

    • Videos – its amazing the insights you can pick up from observing YouTube videos
    • White papers – I have become a pack rat for these, I download everything and keep them on my machine because you never know when you might need it
    • Your own data bank. I have over 40,000 site links to content that I’ve found of use in the past. It’s where I go to before DuckDuckGo since I already know its of a certain quality. I use a social bookmarking tool called Pinboard

    Academia

    Both Scopus and Google Scholar have got great resources on social science based research. In addition, Wolfram Alpha is a really good sources of validated data points. The British Library can also be a treasure trove of content.

    Articles

    • Blog posts (like this one)
    • Free and paid resources for example: Apollo Research, Business Insider Research / Contagious / Datamonitor / D&B Hoovers / Ebiquity / Emarketer / Economist / EIU / Financial Times / Forrester Research / Gartner L2 / Global Web Index / IPA databank / Kantar / Lexis Nexis / Little Black Book / Mintel / Nielsen / Pew Research / Statista / WARC / YouGov
    • Management consultancies in particular McKinsey do a wide variety of research
    • Other planners (for instance here’s an article that I wrote about trends in the beauty sector)
    • Trade bodies (particularly good examples are the GSMA Intelligence and CES)

    Government statistics bodies

    • CIA World Handbook
    • EuroStat
    • Government national statistics offices (Wikipedia has a great category page that points you to the right countries and regions for these sources)
    • IMF
    • UN Statistics Division
    • World Bank
    • World Economic Forum

    Social listening data

    Social listening data needs to be used with a certain amount of caution. It is a measure of the level of discussions around a given subject but not the sum of them. Some of them are likely to happening in real world settings, many in ‘dark social’ – social interactions that tools can’t see.

    As a rule of thumb in European countries there tends to be less B2B social discussions going on than the US. For consumer brands there has been some good work done to show how social media listening attributions (volume, share of voice, sentiment etc) can approximate to brand tracking.

    Primary research

    This could be everything from:

    • Quantitative focused research: running a quick and dirty survey on Survey Monkey, a reputable omnibus survey provider like Dalia Research, Kelton Global or YouGov through to commissioning a piece of bespoke research
    • Qualitative research: eye tracking, focus groups, interviews, neurological scans to analysis response to stimulation, observational research, video diaries
    • Field trip: go out with sales people, meet clients, walk around stores and notice what people do, strike up conversations in stores or trade shows. The art of the flâneur is made for the planner

    More information

    Academia

    British Library – getting a reader pass

    Google Scholar

    Scopus (paywall)

    Wolfram Alpha

    Best Practice

    How Brands Grow What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp

    How Brands Grow: Part 2: Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, New and Luxury Brands by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp

    The Long & The Short of It: Balancing Short Term and Long Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Fields

    Other

    FT Graphics

    World Economic Forum reports

    Governmental organisations data

    CIA World Factbook

    Eurostat

    IMF Data

    UN Statistics Division

    Wikipedia category page on national statistical services

  • Marketers bookshelf recommendations

    Books

    My recommendations for a marketers bookshelf is based on my own reading. My own experience is very consumer, brand communications and behavioural change focused. Here’s some recommendations, they aren’t in a ranking or grouped in a particular order.

    Insights, planning and strategy

    Most marketing communications projects are trying to create some sort of behavioural change in the audience, so understanding more about persuasion has got to be a pretty handy thing right? Robert Cialdini  has two great works:

    How Brands Grow part 1 and part 2 – pretty much the modern marketers bible for B2C brands of various stripes. Byron Sharp distills down decades of evidence-based research that has been carried out by Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science attached to the University of South Australia. The research institute has got a who’s who of corporate sponsors supporting their work and using their data:

    • General Mills
    • Grupo Bimbo
    • Procter & Gamble
    • Red Bull
    • Unilever

    You get the idea. If the research is good enough for these brands, it’s good enough for you.

    A key part of planning is working out that insight which will speak to your target consumers. Trends books are sometimes a handy short cut to creating a first draft of a hypothesis. You can do worse than leave through pollster Mark Penn’s Microtrends, Microtrends Squared and Microtrends Cubed that he has built up. If you’re thinking about transformation then Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future is the Microtrends for digital transformation. Tom Doctoroff’s What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer – is a another great primer.

    The Long And the Short of It by Les Binet and Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era. Binet is a respected communications planning expert, he is currently head of effectiveness at Adam & Eve DDB. He has published some of the best works on marketing effectiveness for the IPA.

    If you studied marketing in college David A. Aaker is probably a familiar name. His Strategic Marketing Management book is often an introductory core course text. It used to double as a doorstop in a lot of dorm rooms that I visited. If you want to refresh your memory on branding he has written an accessible primer to recharge long lost lecture memories: Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success.

    Truth, Lies and Advertising – Jon Steel’s work on account planning is that rare thinking; a very readable text book. I like to go back to it to boil things down to first principles and forget complexity.

    Inspiration

    When you’re looking for inspiration, there are two good approaches:

    • Go lateral. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies isn’t a book, but a set of 100 cards. Eno periodically suffered writers block in the studio and these cards are a successful approach that he developed over time with collaborator Peter Schmidt. It also works for finding your way through planning
    • Look back into time. If you are looking back into time, I would recommend Sun Tzu’s The Art of War if you are looking for inspiration on strategic approach. Buy the cheapest copy that you can get in print. Mine is covered in post-it notes and scribbles in the margins. More expensive versions have ‘business thought leaders’ trying to reinterpret it for you and just end up muddying the water. Those 13 chapters are well worth visiting on a regular basis. Bill Bernbach’s Book is a source of inspiration; as is the better known Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
    Communications

    How To Write A Thesis by Umberto Eco. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Ged have you lost your marbles, why would I care about writing a thesis?’ Eco’s book is a really good guide to collecting one’s thoughts and presenting facts gained through a comprehensive research process. As the old martial arts mantra goes: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Whilst Professor Eco isn’t a marketing scholar he knows a lot about thinking and being cogent.

    What about the last book on the marketers bookshelf? You’ve distilled all the knowledge from the rest of the books in this list, along with desk and possibly primary search.  You are ready to present your killer ideas to the client, or internal decision makers. Jon Steel has got you covered. Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business is a great refresher that helps shake you’re presentation game up.

    What books would add to a marketers bookshelf? If you have additional recommendations, put them below in the comments section. More related content here.

  • The influence post

    Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.

    Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.

    I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year.  Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.

    This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.

    This time last year I noted:

    Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

    Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?

    Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.

    Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit

    A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers

    The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?

    • Are they bots?
    • Are they stolen accounts?
    • Are the user accounts active any more?
    • Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.

    The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?

    • Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money

    The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?

    • Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
    • Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
    Trends in influence

    I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.

    Global interest in influencers have been accelerating

    Influence: Google Trends

    There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing

    Influence: Google Trends

    There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work

    Influence: Google Trends

    All of which supports the following hypotheses:

    • it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
    • A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
    • A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
    • Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
    What would influence look like?

    Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.

    Slide4

    If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.

    Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.

    How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?

    Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.

    Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format

    That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.

    • Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
    • Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the  high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
    • Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production

    All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?

    Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.

    Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:

    Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

    Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.

    This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).

    It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:

    • Consumer marketing
    • Mature product sectors
    • Mature brands

    You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.

    Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
    • There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
    • Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
    • You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
    • You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
    • You can lock out rivals out of relationships
    More information

    Mark Ritson: How ‘influencers’ made my arse a work of art | Marketing Week
    Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
    Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
    Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
    Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
    Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks – Stanford University and Facebook Data Science
    PLOS ONE: Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks by Lorenzo Coviello,Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer,Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
    Senior Execs Not Convinced About Social’s Worth | Marketing Charts
    Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy – Cha et al (2010) – (PDF)
    Visualizing Media Bias through Twitter. Jisun An. University of Cambridge. Meeyoung Cha. KAIST. Krishna P. Gummadi. MPI-SWS et al – (PDF)
    Mr. Bags x Longchamp: How to Make 5 Million RMB in Just Two Hours | Jing Daily
    It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers

  • The biggest Public Relations agencies; stuckness and market dynamics

    Untitled

    The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

    Macro picture

    What the numbers suggested at a macro level were three things:

      • Overall billings growth was declining year on year
      • The amount of agencies that were appointed into the top 250 (and were dropped) declined year on year. There is less market disruption

    Aggregate billings growth & top 250 list churn

      • The bottom 190 agencies (by size over successive years) accounted for less than half the billings of the top 25 for financial year 2017

    Bottom 190 out top 250 PR agencies billings

    Top 25 out of top 250 Pr agencies

    This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness. But if you were going to buy an agency MC Group in Germany looked to be the stand out choice in terms of changing the fortunes of a large agency billings

    We’re also seeing a likely tyranny of large numbers kicking in for the biggest agencies. Mid-sized agencies can be more agile due to less layers of management and less complex environmetns to worry about. They may be multi-market; but they’re not truly global. Which makes strategy and planning much easier.

    PR agencies are people businesses. At the core they sell manpower by the hour. Bigger agencies have more people, which means a greater management overhead, not unlike Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month essays on software engineering. There are more processes, which have built up over time and greater inertia to change. Then you get office and intra-office real politik. You can try and keep this down, but it is a function of scale; the battle against it becomes ever harder and you can only focus on its worst excesses. It tends not to surface when its impact only goes downwards in the management structure.

    Agency-specific hypothesis

    This next part was inspired by David Brain’s post on the performance of large agencies.

    PR seems to be acquired in a more tactical manner than previously. This has been happening for a number of reasons.

    A decline in Full Metal Jacket syndrome in comms planning. This nonsensical quote about Vietnamese people in Full Metal Jacket makes similar false assumptions. I’ve seen similar false assumptions in past global comms campaign planning that I have seen. Usually that meant creating something in the US and then expecting it to work on a fraction of the budget elsewhere. This means that there is less international work for agency networks. This has a negative impact on inter-office best practice transfer and building relationships.

    The influence of Byron Sharp. For many consumer marketers, How Brands Grow – based on years of marketing science research is the bible. When you look at Sharp’s work there are a couple of clear points when you use public relations as a tactic.

    Zero-Based Budgeting

    Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) has changed the marketing planning game. It pits public relations campaign efficiency and effectiveness versus other disciplines in sharp focus. In addition, some organisations have mistaken ZBB as a one-way ratchet tightening marketing spend. ZBB isn’t about continual cost-cutting, but continual optimisation – something that seems to have been lost in translation.

    PR agencies haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity afforded by digital and social for a number of reasons:

    • There is a tension. Between the focus on financial efficiency and effectiveness that the macro numbers suggest versus the investment in tools and personnel required. Where are the studios, strategists, planners and media desks?
    • There has been an expertise drain across the industry as agencies deskill; paying new people into roles less than the person who previously filled it. This means that over time there is a trench in expertise between office leaders and the rest of the team, making it harder for the office to scale and a loss of institutional knowledge. This has led to a lack of diversity in thinking amongst many PRs; let alone gender, race and age diversity. From experience I’ve found that digital natives aren’t necessarily the best digital strategists
    • Clients haven’t embraced the change. Social in particular sits elsewhere amongst the marketing team. There is a similar division with paid media. The focus (particularly in Europe) on performance marketing over brand marketing hasn’t helped. Hubspot-style content marketing is a reductive process that isn’t the friend of PR agencies; despite their expertise in content
    • The window of opportunity closes as organic reach declines. Social media marketing effectiveness requires paid media budget. Agencies have jumped in too late with insufficient confidence. Traditional senior management agency PRs have been curiously hung up on this. Yet we see: corporate communications as adverts in the FT and WSJ and consumer PRs do paid advertorials and paid product placement

    More information
    David Brain’s post: Why Are The Biggest Global PR Agencies Stuck? Does It Matter?
    Holmes Report

    And more related content here.