PRBreakfastClub

What will be the next great, innovative PR firm?

I wrote this question in a note in my iPhone late one night last week. For those who don’t know me, I’m a bit of a nerd, and yes, these are the things I think about. Primarily, I posed this question to myself as part of my job at PRSA, which includes advocating the business value of PR. But I also ask it because I’m genuinely interested in finding the answer.

Who among my generation of PR pros — those old enough to remember Bacon’s before it became Cision but young enough that our entire careers have evolved online — will create the next great PR firm? The next Edelman or Burson-Marsteller or SHIFT Communications. The type of PR firm that comes to define a generation within the industry and advances the business of PR well beyond the status quo. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when every blog post and article in AdAge and Mashable was about how great Twitter was for marketers? That seems so 2009, doesn’t it? When was the last time you read a big story on how Twitter is grabbing marketers’ attentions and clients’ interests?

It’s just not happening much anymore. And, as we all know, if something is hot in marketing, we’ll talk it up endlessly, analyze its benefits and potential downfalls and examine every little nook and cranny of what makes something the current/next big thing.

And yet none of that is happening around Twitter. At least not on the scale it was six months ago, and certainly not on the scale of Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

“We accomplished what we set out to accomplish.”

Keep that quote in the back of your mind as you read skim pick apart the main points of this post. I’ll tell you who uttered this seemingly innocuous statement in a minute, but first, some background information:

It seems that the California Milk Processor Board — you probably know it as the folks who brought us the ubiquitous “Got Milk?” campaign and its many impostors — has gotten itself into some social media hot water over its most recent campaign.

What could be so unseemly about a milk ad, you ask? Well, when you try to use something that is wholly unfunny (like milk) as a way to poke fun of something that is also not humorous (e.g., women struggling with PMS) into an ad to sell more of your product, people tend to take offense at that. Or just get really annoyed. Read the rest of this entry »

Some quick thoughts from a marketing, PR and ad perspective on Google’s just announced new foray into social networking — the terribly named Google+ (as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land terms it*).

As I tweeted earlier in the day:

keithtrivitt: Prediction: Ad buyers will be all over Google+. More open analytics plus more targeted networks to tap into http://t.co/usHznta

I like that Google has started out by opening Google+ to only a select few and allowing them to invite their friends. Read the rest of this entry »

Keith poses an interesting argument in his post Battle in Adland: Big Shops Encroach on Little’s Digital Turf, and while I tend to agree with the top level assertions, I think there are many more layers to this particular onion. A rising tide in our industry surely floats all boats, and the fact that more companies/organizations/individuals are becoming digitally savvy, and larger percentages of marketing and communications budgets are being allocated to digital, means more of us have and will continue to have jobs. That helps everyone – a larger pie from which to slice.

But I disagree with the position that larger agencies are “catching up.” With acquisition-based growth, perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re buying up.  Read the rest of this entry »

As reality would have it, things haven’t quite worked out that way. Whether it’s continuing reports of traditional media – such as newspapers and TV – feeding much of the content we consume via social media, or collaborative efforts on behalf of competing marketers to increase their power, today’s marketing scene is more about the vast opportunities now available because of digital opening new doors, rather than who is winning which battles and how.

At least, that’s how it should be. Read the rest of this entry »

As the global economy continues to waver, things are looking positively rosy for advertising and public relations firms. With Veronis Suhler Stevenson predicting a 55-percent increase in U.S. spending on public relations services by 2013 (up to $8 billion annually), news has been rushing in from all sides of the major ad holding companies of expanding revenues and new digital opportunities.

The uptick in optimism started last week when Publicis reported a 19.8-percent increase in full-year revenue. Omnicom added to the fun after reporting 2010 revenues that were up 6.4 percent, which prompted this headline from the normally stoic Financial Times: “Omnicom heralds advertising acceleration.” Not a bad assessment of happy days to come.

But things really picked up this week after WPP announced it was developing a new interactive ad network to fully vest itself in all things digital. Read the rest of this entry »

Mere weeks after the PR world was shocked with news of unethical product review practices of client-developed iPhone apps by Reverb Communications, the profession is again faced with revelations of supposedly unethical practices, this time stemming from the undisclosed use of paid spokespeople by the toy industry as supposedly third-part, objective experts on local TV newscasts throughout the country, as Los Angeles Times media columnist Jim Rainey chronicled last week.

This glaring example of ethical misgivings from the toy industry brings clear an ugly truth in the new world of public relations: what is often best for the client is increasingly winning out over what is most ethical and best for consumers.

And that’s bad news for anyone serious about seeing the profession evolve and thrive. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Old Spice made some funny videos. Maybe you’ve heard about it?

Of course you have.

Now it is apparently time for you to learn from it, as you undoubtedly hope to be the next Old Spice-like thing that all the kids are talking about on the internets. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say it is very unlikely that Old Spice’s success can be replicated by you, or anyone. And I’m not saying that because I think Old Spice’s campaign was some perfect storm that wasn’t meant to take off like it did; it was clearly a well-engineered piece of awesome. And I’m not saying that we’ll never see a wildly popular campaign like this ever again; we will. But it won’t be anything like the Old Spice campaign because we’ve already seen that. Read the rest of this entry »

With all of the buzz around the new Twitter “Promoted Tweets” (really, ‘sponsored tweets’), and how that will impact our viewing and tweeting and other fun times on the increasingly addictive platform, one facet of the new ad-based service that got a bit lost in the all of the buzz was the role this service may play in PR professionals’ lives, particularly the ability to utilize promoted tweets during reputation and crisis communications situations for clients in which it is imperative that an official viewpoint, messaging or news stays at the top of a relevant search-based (for now, until Twitter debuts ads within personal Twitter streams later this year, as it plans to do . . .) Twitter streams. Read the rest of this entry »