The curse of new-ness
Post by Planning Director, Max Wright...
As someone brought up in advertising, I’ve often considered the differences between advertising and other disciplines. Now, working in an agency where we genuinely work across the disciplines, it’s the PR people that have most recently got me re-thinking my thinking.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realise that advertising people are obsessed with the thrill of the new. Like magpies, we instinctively prefer the shiny thing, the thing that’s never been done before, and often just for the sake of it rather than because it’s the right thing to do. I’m sure that I’ve been guilty of instantly dismissing ideas, not because they wouldn’t work but simply because of their lack of ‘new-ness’.I suspect that this is driven by the belief in seeking standout at all costs or the ego-centric view that our audiences are just as obsessed with the new as we are. We have had it drilled into us that differentiation is always the answer, that the most innovative ideas transcend channels, and that we must keep up with those new sparkly trends, wherever they may take us.I think that by following this path, we often can get our thinking all wrong. PR people don’t have the same handicaps. Much like direct marketers, PR people, embrace the tried and tested. They’re comfortable choosing approaches that they know work and starting with the ‘bread and butter’ before adding the jam on top (sorry, I’m hungry.). They actually base most of their decisions on evidence rather than hunch and intuition or as one leading Planning Director put it, ‘guessing’.This comfort with the ‘olden but golden’ stems from PR folk having a clear understanding of their target audiences. Crucially, the bit that advertising people always forget is that these audiences are not consumers. The PR team’s audience is first and foremost, the professional media that they want to carry their messages for them, and they know them best.It’s because of this understanding that PR folk know that, in practice, it’s easier for a journalist or TV producer to sell an idea to their editor if they know it’s already proven as a successful execution. It reduces the risk. All those formulaic TV news packages or consumer surveys that fill newspapers everyday are often sneered at by advertising people but here’s the rub, they’re effective. And, it’s these very media channels that advertising people put such a high value on.Now, PR communications don’t work in the same way as advertising messages and they can’t be as easily evaluated but they do get things done. They can build awareness, salience and even, dare I say, actually communicate messages for brands and organisations. In reality, they ‘earn’ space for clients for a fraction of a ‘paid media’ cost. On this basis, ‘old ideas’ can be very successful indeed.In fact, when you think about it, some of the most successful advertising of the last year has hardly been ‘new’ at all. Advertising’s own industry body, the IPA, crowned a Hovis TV campaign that could have aired twenty years ago as the most effective and the blogging community heralded the US Old Spice campaign for a wonderful execution of a very old idea. The irony is that both of these campaigns have also benefitted from plenty of ‘earned media’ driven by smart PR folk whether working in online or offline channels.Next time, I’m working on a new campaign, I’ll be spending as much time exploring the things that already work as I will exploring what’s yet to be tested. And what’s more, next time some stranger asks me what I do for a living, I’m telling them I neither work in the advertising nor the PR business, and that I’ve just started in the communications business.
