Kupritz shares her experiences in PR, explains why she’s excited that the category Creative B2B will be introduced for entries at Cannes Lions in 2022, and speaks to trends in the PR industry...
TenacityPR is a content hub. I work as a ‘creative B2B specialist’ with agencies and companies either on a retainer or campaign basis in the marketing, creative and art industries. When a brief comes into the system, I evaluate it and then brief service providers I have worked with for years in ‘PR’ sister agencies analysis’s, editorial, and strategy.
TenacityPR offers a specialist creative B2B consultancy to our client base which consists of a mix of agencies, business and brand owners.
In today’s PR landscape, emotion and excitement are what is needed to capture attention. This is why we believe that in the contemporary PR landscape, creative strategies are the ticket to cutting through the noise and differentiating a brand from its competition.
What we are seeing in PR is that marketers can use their investment in advertising agency campaigns to create stories that can take on a life of their own. There are different messages around campaigns that can act as ‘silver bullets’ to extend ROI on marketing and brand investments. This is where the creative aspects of PR come into their own.
PR working with advertising agencies on campaigns is not new, but perhaps it hasn’t always been as apparent as it is now. It is so inspiring to hear that the Cannes Lions festival will be introducing the Creative B2B category in 2022. I think this will open the space for the value and creative potential of PR to be seen – with a refreshing message, maximising the B2B sector with angles that might not necessarily be the sales goals, but will help to create greater awareness for brands stakeholder values and purpose.
That really depends on whether the brief has B2C or B2B objectives and on what budgets have been made available for PR and media.
Whether PR is briefed at the beginning, middle or end of a campaign is not really that critical, we are there to spot those angles and get them out to the media as widely and creatively as possible.
As the space has become quite cluttered with influencers and social media, PR’s mandate has remained very simple - to funnel communications through to the business and other media that matter! Although it sounds simple, a passion for outcomes, experience, and dedication to relationship building over time, is what sets successful PR practitioners apart. I believe these will be the benchmarks of future awarded PR campaigns.
Apart from the media relationship networks mentioned before, knowing what content to place where skill is at the core of PR. It takes a deep understanding and interest in the media industry, how information is consumed, and which news trends are relevant.
Choosing a newsworthy angle that relates to the campaign’s goals, but which is not overtly promotional is the essence of ‘native PR’. The increasing popularity of brand newsrooms is a perfect example of this, whereby PR content is required to fit the standards, tone, and editorial style of a particular news platform. I like to call it ‘21st Century Advertorial’.
I think this is changing all the time. Agencies can use the increased awareness and impression statistics generated by the PR exposure to support their awards entry campaigns. PR activity can act as a valuable supplement to influencers and social media in this regard.
The objective should be to ensure that a campaign creates ‘talkability’, not just in the ‘industry’ but ‘crossing over’ to general or public interest. That’s when a campaign becomes award winning across categories, of which there are many at advertising festivals. B2B’s Earned and Native messages and media pitches are all part of the roll-out amplifying the awareness. A stakeholder thought leadership piece in a top news platform might be more engaging than an ad on the same media platform.
Covid has had a huge impact on the communications industry. Content has become the opium of the people. The industry has become a hybrid of marketing and traditional PR which is neatly packaged in Gini Dietrich’s PESO model. Unfortunately, it's fundamentally wrong for the sake of an easy-to-remember acronym, it should land on Owned, then Earned, Shared, and Paid; but the OESP model doesn’t sound as succinct, it’s difficult to remember and would lose the irony of currency. ROI, measurement has plagued PR for 100 years.
