Happy New Decade
Waving goodbye to a year, and starting a new decade has for me, like many of us, been a cause for reflection. There’s been highs and lows – cultural, political, economic, environmental – as well as in our comms industry and closer to home.
For Bottle, last year wasn’t a knockout year from a revenue perspective, but it’s not all about the dollar. Despite the drag of our political and economic backdrop, we are super chuffed that we stuck to our 2019 new year resolutions to propel our digital proposition forward. The “unbelievable” results (to quote our Goodyear client) have blown us and our clients away…and our client retention and average retainer values are keeping our FD very happy.
As a comms industry, whilst there’s been some positives, it still feels like digital transformation is taking time – or rather, it’s harder to assess the growth in a one-year period. So, I’ve ditched the 12-month view and taken the dawn of a new decade as an opportunity to look back and forward with a ten-year lens.
So what happened in PR and Communications in the last decade?
The ups.
Technological advance in how we consume media is without doubt, the big story even though the seemingly small updates to platforms go almost unnoticed, and we quickly think the new functionality has been there, “like forever”. But the shifts over ten years are quite big – after all, it’s hard to imagine a Christmas without…
Reaching for your iPad for a quick dip into the news in the quiet moments between family leaving and another set of friends arriving. It’s hard to believe the first iPad was launched in 2010.
Insta-influencers influencing your Christmas wish list, showing how to dress the gram-able Christmas table, or how to create the best angel body shape in the snow (even if you are nowhere near snow). Instagram didn’t launch until April 2010.
Catching up on the all-you-can-binge-on catalogue of ‘must watch’s’. Yet Netflix only landed in the UK in 2012.
Asking your voice assistant to play the ‘best Christmas songs’. Siri was launched in 2011 and Alexa 2014.
And in communications, there has been a big move towards purposeful campaigns such as ‘Like a Girl’, ‘This Girl Can’ and more recently, ‘What To Do Before You’re 11¾’. It’s been heart-warming to watch the debates ensue on whether a Cannes winning campaign was originated through a PR or an advertising thought. PR is very much on that stage now.
The coming of age of social media saw, in 2012, the first global fundraising campaign of any significant proportion starting with the #nomakeupselfie which topped out at over £8m for Cancer Research UK, followed quickly with the ice-bucket challenge.
The downs.
We’ve had some pretty big challenges within the communications industry, with the term “fake news” reaching its Trump Tower sized peak in 2016, quickly followed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Then the collapse of Bell Pottinger provided a stark reminder to agency leaders to repel the fatal attraction of high profit-making accounts at the expense of transparency, responsibility to employees and being a ‘good’ business. Their high profile fuelled the media storm, for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t a good look for our industry, but I don’t think it had a lasting impact on the reputation of our sector.
The area where I’d hoped our reputation had positively shifted is in being known for continued innovation within the constantly developing digital playground.
Yet, we are still asking the same ‘are we taking digital seriously’ question as this 2009 PR Week article was. Despite some stellar examples of digital being at the heart of PR, I feel like the reputation of our discipline is still quite... traditional.
Surely it’s time that our 2019 Digital PR & Communications Report captures the full spectrum of Digital PR – drilling into PR for SEO strategies, understanding training gaps in understanding DA, SERPs, backlink profiles, use of audio (I don’t mean radio), as well as video storytelling. Simply reporting on the industry’s use of social media and ‘online media outreach’ makes it look like we’re just starting out on the world wide web and Facebook. Not putting it at the heart of our planning because we know that’s what makes our stories go further, influencer deeper and last longer.
So, looking forward, what will the next decade bring?
By 2030, will we be ticked off with TikTok? Will we have found a way to stop (or significantly limit) tech giants using our personal data to influence (unwittingly) election results? And will the climate agenda have been the last nail in the coffin for print media?
I don’t profess to be an authority or able forecaster on such complex questions. What I am sure about is that AI will improve efficiencies (time / personalisation) in our day-to-day consumption of media and that the ‘news’ will be read, watched, listened to, on many more platforms than Ofcom currently bulk into ‘Other Online Media’.
And as an agency leader, my hopes for our industry over the next decade…
We’ll be more accountable.
Yes, we’ve moved on from AVE, but we’re still a long way from cracking the measurement conundrum and are at risk of looking like a marketing intern; naïve and excitable about using reach as a key metric in our reporting (Impressions were the most popular metric in the 2019 PRCA Census). It’s nice to have big numbers, but one that shows that 3x the worlds’ population could have been exposed to your story… hmm.
And as more clients become more aware of the organic search benefit of digital PR, we’ll have warded off the risk of PR being lazily lumped in with SEO and compared against PPC competing for ROIs at the bottom of the funnel. We’re more than that, we need a new model that quantifies our contribution to brand growth at the top and bottom of the funnel.
We’ll be smarter
Tailored newsfeeds, check. Personalised social feeds, check. Podcast popularity, check. There is a time and place for watching, reaching and listening to news, inspiration and thought-leadership.
The technology is there to understand audience preferences and we know whether a long-form or a short-from article, video or image is best with certain audiences, at certain parts of the day. ‘Programmatic PR’ isn’t really a thing and that’s probably a good thing. But we’ll be developing insightful, meaningful, multi layered stories that connect with our bullseye audience in the right platform, in the right content format, at the right time – as BAU. More meaning, more relevance, less wastage.
We’ll be kinder
I’m not talking about trolls (although permanently muting them would be helpful).
The ‘print is dead’ threat has been there for decades now. But I’m hoping that the deafening evidence provides the burning (literally) platform for real change and getting the balance right between print and online.
And we’ll have fairness across all demographics and orientations. I’m confident that this will not only help our “PR people are white, middle classed people called Charlotte” reputation, but the diversity will bring greater insight to even better, culturally rich, game-changing campaigns.
I sincerely hope so anyway.
Here’s to the next ten.