Early in my career, my background focused primarily on public relations for consumer packaged goods, specifically in food and beverage thanks to my experience at Nestle. When I received an offer to join Duarte, a renowned creative agency that counted half of the world’s top 50 brands as clients, I vowed to push myself outside of my comfort zone and challenge myself to be excellent in my craft of communications. It was an exciting, albeit slightly, scary time but one that I am forever grateful for the opportunity.
While at Duarte, I became a much stronger T-shaped communicator, working across different aspects of communications rooted in psychology and design. And I learned a tremendous amount thanks to my manager, who was an advertising veteran with years of experience from Ogilvy and JWT. A modern-day Mad (Wo)Man in the industry today.
Seven Key Lessons PR Folks Can Learn From Advertisers
For a few of my peers, the lateral move to lead an account team at a creative agency seemed odd. But I learned so many lessons about the fundamentals of communications from the advertising and creative world that have made a more thoughtful, strategic communicator, including seven key lessons below.
1. Research is Everything.
Whether we were onboarding a new client or starting a project with a client we have worked with for decades, everything was rooted in research. As the account manager, I was responsible for understanding and shaping the larger communications objectives and strategy from the client, and ensuring the creative team delivered assets that meet those needs. This meant I had to spend time deeply understanding the client’s business, competitive landscape, and the stakes involved.
As a PR person, research is paramount to understanding the larger business landscape and media conversations happening to develop a well-informed strategy that isn’t tone deaf. In addition, PR is not just about writing down what the subject matter experts said; it is about truly understanding the content and how that fits into the business inside and out. A PR person should understand how every pitch, every quote, and every customer benefit drives business objectives.
Research is also the key to getting a gauge on where your organization sits in the public’s perception, and the barriers you must overcome in order to gain relevance or drive the perception shifts you desire. Without a well-researched audit of your organization’s current state, it is difficult to have a targeted strategic PR plan that will be effective.
2. Know Your Audience.
Any time we signed a new project, the first question the creatives would ask is: “Who is the target audience?” Understanding the target audience was our north star for all communications work, as it should be.
We would spend a considerable amount of time with key stakeholders to drill down: who is the target audience, and what do they care about. While these seem like easy questions to ask, narrowing your focus to a primary and secondary audience for your communications work can be a challenge. It’s human nature to want to communicate to all, but as the old saying goes, “you can’t be everything to everyone.”
Once we would narrow on our audience, we would really narrow on our audience. This could include making up fake personas for our target audience members, sketching out what they would look like, and making up hypothetical reactions to different messages. All of this was intended to bring to life who you are trying to reach: humans!
Within PR, often times we lack focus on narrowing to a few key audiences, and truly profiling the audience. Instead of trying to connect with millennials, imagine trying to connect with Chloe who sells her own jewelry on Etsy and works as a freelance designer. With this persona, it is more clear that Chloe values freedom and creative expression. So then the communications challenge becomes: how can you position your product to appeal to her values of freedom and creativity?
Another common watchout is dehumanizing reporters by lumping them into a mass audience of “media.” We often hear that “media won’t care about that,” or “reporters may find that interesting,” but who specifically is representing this mass population? Reporters, like all people, respond to storytelling that is aligned to their values and interests, and feels personalized for them. By getting narrow on the type of reporters (technical reporters, etc) or even better a specific reporter, can help drive a more emotional connection to your content.
3. Identify What’s Ownable.
This step is one of the most complicated, but also one of the most important: synthesizing what you know about the larger landscape, the business and the audiences to find a key attribute or customer insight that is truly unique and relevant for your business.
Great brand positioning hinges on highlighting what is ownable for a brand. As we would go through branding and positioning exercises with clients, we would dive deep on audience insights and understanding their problems and lifestyles. We would ask ourselves, “what can we create or solve for them that no one else can?” From there, we would pressure-test that against competitors. “Why is our product better?” And last, we would look to the external landscape to check: “Is anyone else saying this?”
For example: while I worked on the Jenny Craig brand, we found that 44% of adults made a resolution to lose weight; however, most abandon their goals by March/April timeframe. Given this audience insight, we created a targeted campaign launched in March called “Resolution Refresh” which used our unique 30-day jump start weight loss program that no other weight loss program was offering at the time.
It is important that PR professionals do their due diligence in creating a unique, differentiated, ownable positioning that resonates not only internally, but also externally. Without a foundation of strong positioning, your messaging will get lost internally and externally.
4. Learn How to Write a Killer Creative Brief.
When I was in my early days in PR, I was guilty of writing copy for a brochure or idea for a media kit, and sending it off to a graphic designer with the phrase “work your magic!” assuming that my job was done. Face palm. Thinking back on that, I cringe at the lack of direction and strategy I would give to creatives.
In creative agencies, there is a saying, “clients get the work they deserve.” This can be interpreted both positively and negatively. Being on the agency side, I would see first-hand how much better the creative output would be when the clients would front-load us with a clear understanding of their communications objectives and goals, allowing us to brainstorm on the strategy and execution.
A core backbone of any great creative campaign or communication initiative is the creative brief. Typically thought of as only for advertising campaigns, the creative brief is capable of so much more. I actually found creative briefs the most helpful when developing communications strategies.
A creative brief is essential in giving any creative team the direction and guidance they need to be successful. And often, it is a forcing function for a communications professional to be clear on prioritizing their primary and secondary audiences, their messaging, their objective, their goals, the perception barriers, and the reasons to believe. Even better is when communications professionals specify the emotional tone they are trying to achieve, along with tailored messaging or message weighting across the audiences.
5. Get Creative.
As a writer, I had respected the creative process, but working in a creative agency made me appreciate it that much more. Creativity is king. It is what sets apart best-in-class advertising. Everything hinges on the creative concept.
I was always amazed at people who can make creativity a business. I would always worry: “what happens if we don’t come up with a big idea?” It never happened.
There are a few tips that I learned from managing creative teams that has further inspired my own creativity, such as looking for outside-in inspiration and looking across different industries and ideas to find commonalities. But one of the biggest key learnings for me as a writer was to brainstorm with graphic designers.
As a PR professional, often we feel like we are only responsible for the writing, and the graphic designers will make it pretty. By brainstorming side-by-side with a graphic designer, we were able to make our creative concepts so much stronger by incorporating imagery wordplay that mirrored the visual style, and developing an emotional resonance that complimented both the manifesto and visual style. Creativity is what makes good marketing great.
6. Write A Truly Great Story.
Once you have a strong creative concept, great communications lies in the art of storytelling. Unless you are feeding information into a machine, all communications should be emotionally driven forms of stories. They are intended, after all, to appeal to other humans, who are motivated to make decisions by their emotions more so than logic.
Often times, I will see the content of the communications dictate whether or not it is worthy of emotional storytelling. All communications can be emotionally driven. For example: a technical case study can be transformed into a story about an engineer’s perseverance and victory over a complicated challenge.
As you think about building out content that aligns to your creative concept, always keep in mind the emotional tone the brief mandates, and the feeling you want your audience to leave with. From there, infuse every touch point and engagement with your audience with that emotion.
7. Bring Your Story to Life.
Once the content and storylines are defined, keep in mind all of the channels and mediums at your disposal. Not all stories are best told through a pitch or blog post. As communicators, think through the most effective way to create an emotional connection to your audience with your storyline.
First-person narratives often make powerful videos, or opinion pieces can often be beautifully written long-form think pieces. Calls to action can be effective through short social media posts or inciting others to join a larger conversation virtually. All of these tools can best deliver our stories.
Stretching outside of my comfort zone proved to be a great experience for me, as I learned a variety of different skill sets and experiences that have made me a better informed communicator. Do you all have any interesting key learnings from stepping outside of your comfort zone?
