Public Relations Strategery

This post originally appeared on PRDaily. 

Over the last decade, PR pros became enamored with words like omnichannel, PR-led creative and disruptive marketing. Harboring dreams of Cannes Lions and huge marketing budgets, agencies pivoted resources toward consumer marketing. Then on one March night in Oklahoma City, everything changed. Corporate affairs became fashionable again. As PRovoke Media put it:

“…it is painfully clear that the agencies that are surviving best amid this year’s chaos are those that bring industry-leading expertise in such areas as corporate reputation, crisis counsel, public affairs and employee engagement.”

As COVID-19 presented an opportunity for corporate communications to truly contribute to public health efforts in a meaningful way, organizations rushed to call agencies for help with corporate reputation, internal communications and crisis communications. Someone had to reassure the employees. Someone needed to communicate what to do in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak. Someone had to explain the new operational processes and procedures to staff, vendors and media outlets alike. And someone had to expedite the cadence of communications to public officials to near real time.

The pendulum swung back, hard, to an old standby: corporate comms and its suits, process documents, strategy decks and employee memos. As we look ahead to a post-pandemic world, it’s tempting to think brands and organizations will remember this and maintain this emphasis on corporate communications.

History tells us otherwise. The pendulum will swing back toward those sexy consumer marketing programs yet again. Budgets will not only shift back toward performance marketing, consumer marketing, social media advertising and other ROI-driven activities, they may even increase to compensate for time spent out of market.

But that doesn’t mean corporate communications will go back to where things were in 2019. The past year and all of its high-profile challenges—public health, social justice, climate change—reminded us of the value of consistent strategic corporate communications programs led by senior experts. Now that they’re in the spotlight, corporate communications pros at agencies and brands should take advantage by staking their claim to the executive support, budget and resources they need to maintain their pivotal role. To do this, they should apply the techniques their counterparts on the brand marketing side of things have used for years to increase their budgets and influence in the boardroom:

1. Spice up your work with more photos and graphics.

Compare a project pitch or proposal created by the consumer PR team vs. one created by the corporate comms team. One looks like a term paper, filled with jargon and a lot of extra words. The other includes photos, charts and graphics, outlining consumer-driven ROI. Which one do you think will grab the attention of the decision-maker? Which one are you more likely to set aside to read later?

2. Come up with your own ideas.

It’s never been easier to find case studies of “best practices” and “lessons learned” for whatever problem you’re trying to solve. There’s sometimes less risk in following what someone else has already done, but when you rely on what’s worked for someone else, you’ve made yourself a commodity, a replacement part. Why pay top dollar for expertise if all I need to do is Google the best practice?

Instead of trying to find out what worked for someone else, start coming up with your own ideas for how to address your company’s unique problems—understanding that there arguably is no existing plan for what brands have faced in 2020.

3. Commit to those ideas, and sell them.

Any creative will tell you it’s not hard to come up with a good idea. Anyone can do that.

The real value lies in people who can get that idea into the final presentation deck, get executive buy-in, secure the budget and get final approval to execute. Stop saying: “That’s great, but we could never do that.” Stop letting the bureaucracy kill your ideas before they even get started.

4. Connect the dots to show your value.

Marketing does a great job at marketing itself. Teams create shiny, shareable video case studies that tell the story of the challenges they overcame and the results they delivered. They point to data that show that for every single dollar invested in consumer marketing, they delivered three, four or even five times that in sales.

Corporate communications, on the other hand, is too often viewed as an admin expense. Corporate reputation leaders should take advantage of the spotlight and create compelling case studies and stories that demonstrate the ROI of what they have accomplished.

By nearly every measure, 2020 has been a terrible year for agencies and marketers. Corporate PR has been one of the few bright spots. This is a golden opportunity to completely reframe the value of corporate communications.

It’s been said necessity is the mother of invention. Well, we’re all going to find out just how true that is really soon. On March 11, 2020, everything changed. From manufacturing to travel to sports, every industry was forced to rethink everything.

Over the last few months, companies around the world moved millions of office workers to remote work in a span of just a few weeks. Restaurants moved their entire business to carryout and delivery. Retailers figured out how to do curbside pickup without months of red tape getting in the way.

I’ve been particularly impressed at how agile brands (big and small) have been in adapting to this “new normal.” And while some of these adaptations have been most welcome (no middle seats!), they’ve been driven primarily  by survival. What happens when brands start using this as an opportunity to strategically think about how to transform…everything?

Looking forward, there won’t be a return back to normal. The story won’t be about recovery. It will be about transformation. The agility that we’ve seen over the last few months will become the new expectation, and the brands that realize this will come out on top.

Across industries, there are virtually limitless first mover opportunities for brands to creatively address some of the most long-standing and frustrating customer experience issues. I’ve listed some below but could easily come up with a dozen others over a beer or two.

Home Improvement

• Will contractors that commit to wearing PPE while in your home become a permanent policy?
• What commercial hygiene products (sanitizers, air dryers, etc.) will become “must-have” items for today’s homeowners?
• Will homeowners look to create permanent “quarantine spaces” to allow for easier separation of sick family members?
• What builders will focus on retrofitting homes with multi-generational spaces to allow older family members to cohabitate vs. going to a senior living facility?

Retail

• Will contactless payments via phone replace credit cards much faster than we thought?
• How should shoppers navigate the store differently?
• Is there a more hygienic way to touch and try out in-store products before you buy?
• Have masks and hand sanitizer received permanent placement in checkout aisles?
• Will self-checkout become the new standard at all retailers – clothing, toys, electronics, etc.?
• How can the dressing room be re-imagined to keep people coming into the store to try things on?

Dining

• Which restaurants will replace the traditional tipping on the receipt with Starbucks’ “post-purchase tipping” method?
• What’s the most realistic/effective face covering for cooks? Servers?
• Is there a new algorithm for determining the optimal seating arrangement in a COVID-19 environment that minimizes the spread of the virus?
• Which traditional sit-down restaurants will embrace the pizza slice model and transition entirely to carryout and delivery?

Sports

• Can we develop a new way for football fans to watch a game at the stadium?
• What’s the new way to sell hot dogs, beer, and cotton candy to fans in their seats?
• What’s the new way for players to give autographs to kids?
• Beyond touchless toilets and faucets, is there a way to make stadium restrooms more sanitary and efficient for fans?
• What do live broadcasts look like when there’s no fans?
• What sports broadcast will finally move forward with the most obvious of innovations – real-time on-field audio?

Travel

• What’s the future of the hotel check-in counter?
• What’s the new standard for cleaning hotel rooms?
• How can we eliminate middle seats on planes forever?
• Is there a safer, more efficient way to board passengers on a flight?
• Can seatback touchscreens be made touchless?
• What’s the optimal post-COVID seat design on trains, buses, and planes?
• Do we really need to still manually adjust the fan dial above our heads?
• Will subway cars reorient seating so no one faces one another? Will car occupancy be limited?

Amusement Parks

• Is there quick and effective anti-viral material or spray that can be used to disinfect rides in between runs?
• What can be used to show you purchased a ticket instead of relying on wristbands?
• What replaces the turnstiles everyone touches as they enter the park?

Beauty/Fitness

• How can makeup counters be adapted to be more sanitary?
• Nike’s created hijabs using performance material – who’s going to innovate face masks optimized for sports?
• Is there a better way to sanitize gym equipment in between uses or will we continue to use sprays and paper towels?
• We’ve already seen companies specialize in creating gym equipment that fits into your décor – who’s going to create furniture that doubles as gym equipment? Chairs that convert into weight lifting benches? Rugs that double as yoga mats?

Commercial Real Estate

• What’s an optimal post COVID office seating plan look like?
• How many office buildings are going to install walk-through body temperature scanners?
• Touchless faucets/soap dispensers/toilets and toilet lids seem obvious, but what companies will use this opportunity to rethink the very way a toilet or a sink is designed?
• What will doors without door handles look like? More automatic revolving doors? Foot-operated doors?
• Will we see voice-activated elevators?

Electronics

• What TV brands will make webcams and microphones standard in their TVs (to allow for easier at-home fitness sessions and remote learning classes)?
• What laptop brand will make ring lighted webcams standard?
• Which company will create the mobile UV light sanitizer that can be attached to your phone?

Education

• Learning to live with roommates is a key part of the college experience. What college will be the first to rethink the way dorms are set up?
• Sitting students every other seat is the most simplistic way to create social distancing, but is there a more creative way to rethink the traditional classroom setup?
• What college will entirely rethink remote learning as a core part of the four-year college experience?

Whatever industry you’re in, there are unlimited opportunities to write a new future, all while your competitors are trying to return to the past. And if you don’t, someone else will…push the envelope, create the headlines, fail (and learn) quickly, and create an entirely new reality, one that may or may not include you.

It’s not an easy time to be an agency PR pro. Trust in the media is at its lowest point in decades. Publisher walls between paid and editorial are disappearing. Earned media budgets are being slashed. Brands are dropping agency clients as they bring more work in house.

These trends have resulted in canceled pitches, cut and reallocated budgets, and agency layoffs. But the reality is that the role of a brand’s PR agency has never been more important than it is right now. For brands evaluating their PR teams and budgets this year, consider these nine benefits to having a PR agency partner.

1. Integration – Agencies provide a third-party perspective to identify synergies and drive opportunities to add value across the organization. In-house PR pros are often too silo’ed, especially in large organizations, to connect the dots across multiple teams and functions.
2. Drive business results – While in-house PR pros focus on telling their organization’s story, agencies are experts at creating narratives that differentiate brands in the market. This creates brand preference that drives the upper funnel and positive business impacts.
3. ROI – Although a relatively small part of an overall marketing budget, PR represents one of the strongest dollar-for-dollar investments a brand can make, and helps make the overall marketing investment to work harder.
4. Experience – Agencies employ PR pros with decades of PR experience who are able to provide strategic counsel based on experiences with dozens of other brands across many different industries.
5. Strategic Focus – Agencies have the ability to focus on long-term strategies rather than the day-to-day challenges and deadlines that can distract internal staff.
6. Flexibility – A PR agency partner gives brands the ability to easily pivot to different tactics by pulling in different team members and skill-sets on an as-needed basis.
7. Unbiased Perspective – Agencies can offer honest, unbiased POVs rooted in best practices that help identify strengths and weaknesses that may be hidden to internal staff.
8. Brand Protection – Insulated from the brand’s own internal politics, agencies proactively identify internal weak spots and emerging news trends that could have a negative impact and develop strategies for avoiding and/or mitigating that impact.
9. Talent Attraction, Development, and Retention – There’s a reason top PR talent go to agencies instead of brands – they offer top-notch mentoring, professional development opportunities, and diverse experiences. Most brands struggle to provide these types of resources and experiences necessary to attract and retain top PR talent.

Maybe the trends I mentioned at the beginning of this post have you considering cutting your PR agency budget or canceling that RFP, but the pendulum will always swing back. That could be during the next crisis, or the next election, or the next missed opportunity. Consumers have higher expectations for brands than they used to and the brands that invest in their relationships with all their stakeholders – employees, customers, the planet, their communities – will not only survive, but thrive.

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Headlines like this may soon be a thing of the past

September 30, 2019 will be the date that changed NCAA athletics forever. Maybe. Or Not. Who knows at this point?

That’s the date California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act. California’s Senate Bill 206 made it the first state to mandate deep reforms over how college athletes are compensated for their efforts. Right now, the NCAA rules bar players from hiring agents or receiving compensation from outside sources related to their sport. But the Fair Pay for Play Act would change that. College athletes wouldn’t be paid by the school as employees, but they would be allowed to earn money related to their “name, likeness, or image.” That obviously opens the door to everything from paid endorsement deals to social media “influencer” relationships.

Travis Knobbe, who also happens to be an attorney and a sportswriter has started a series of blog posts on this topic over at the Last Word on College Football. In those posts, he’s covering issues like who is going to pay the athletes, recruiting, transfers, and competitive balance. Those are fundamental issues that will be discussed ad nauseam among dozens of teams of lawyers and NCAA officials over the next 13 months (the NCAA Board of Governors has set a deadline of January 2021 to modify its rules to permit student-athletes to benefit from the “use of their name, image and likeness in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.”).

No matter what happens between now and then, there are also going to be some fundamental PR, communications, and marketing issues that need to be ironed out. And colleges and universities are incredibly naive if they think this is only going to impact a small % of their student-athletes. This isn’t just about the Tuas and the Zions of the world. It’s for the Ohashis and the Tituses too.

Think about the junior four-star football recruit from a small town in the middle of nowhere who hasn’t quite lived up to his potential. He may be a third-stringer now at his university, but he’s still one of the biggest names to ever graduate from his high school. You mean to tell me there’s not a car dealership in his hometown who would gladly give him a free car to drive around town in exchange for using his face in their ads?

As a PR and communications professional has worked with everyone from local small businesses to big global brands, my head is spinning with the possibilities that exist not only for the student-athletes, their schools, and the NCAA, but for brands, big and small.

• Oregon’s ties to Nike are well-established. The obvious conclusion is that close school-brand relationships like this could become even more popular. But what about smaller-scale partnerships? “George Foreman Grills, the official grill of the LSU Tigers.” Or “the Southwest Airlines locker room at the University of Texas.”
• As a brand, is it better to sponsor the school or the individual athlete? What’s Zion Williamson without the Duke logo? Still a mega star. But would you know who Kenny Pickett is without the Pitt jersey? If you’re a brand looking to partner with a student athlete, are you more interested in the person or the school he or she plays for?
• Remember what you were like in college? Now think about how a brand paying you thousands of dollars would feel about those photos of you at that fraternity party at 2am appearing on Instagram. These are college athletes acting like college kids. As a brand, are you comfortable entrusting your reputation to an 18-year-old college kid? The rewards are high, but the risks may be even higher.
• Brands are going to fall all over themselves trying to get to the star athletes. But the real opportunity for brands lie further down the depth chart. Established stars like Baker Mayfield, JJ Watt, and Scottie Pippen were all walk-ons in college who worked their butts off and became huge household names commanding millions in endorsement deals. A brand could have signed them for beer money when they were freshmen. Could brands sign dozens of these players to four year contracts in the hopes that one or two strike it big?
• What if as a brand, you could personally keep a player at your preferred school for an extra year? Every year, you read about a player who left college chasing a payday only to not get drafted. They’ve now burned their college eligibility and don’t have a team. They’re worse off than they were before. Now, what if you got wind that the best player on your favorite team may be entering the draft early because they wanted to get paid? Maybe you decide to make college worth his while and give him a five or six figure endorsement deal if he stays in school another year.
• From energy drinks to beauty products to Amazon, brands have infiltrated college campuses via “social media influencers.” Due to NCAA rules, student-athletes have been unable to participate in this trend, but pending the outcome of the Fair Pay to Play Act, these doors will be opened to them too. How long do you think it would take Head & Shoulders to reach out to Trevor Lawrence and his 393,000 Instagram followers?
• What about the athlete from a second or third tier sport who rockets to viral fame? Had this law been in place last year, we would have seen Katelyn Ohashi’s face everywhere, from leotards to toothpaste to beauty products. But what does that do to her teammates? To the school? NCAA football and basketball teams are much more prepared to handle stars that get the media attention (and soon, the endorsements). How would that play on a gymnastics team? Or a field hockey team? Brands have the potential to create rifts within the very teams they’re purportedly interested in helping.

At the end of the day, no one knows how this is going to play out. It could be the end of collegiate sports as we know it. Or maybe nothing really changes. The NCAA did, after all, did drop this nugget into its announcement – “in a manner consistent with the collegiate model.” What does that mean? No one knows. But it’s going to be a very interesting 13 months, potentially followed by a 21st century gold rush as brands, schools, and athletes navigate an entirely new era of college sports.

If you’re a collegiate student-athlete or college administrator, I’d love to talk more with you about this. What are you telling your student-athletes about this? What rumors are you hearing? What questions do you have? Hit me up on Twitter at @sradick or Travis (@travisknobbe) and let’s talk.