The Comms Revolution - Has PR become too boring?

By David Josephs

So much has changed since I embarked on a career in PR back in the 1990s. In some ways, it was so much more straightforward back then. Our job, typically, was to gain attention for our clients in relevant media. I was working primarily in business to business communications, so the trade media was our target. And that meant print magazines.

Sometimes that was product PR. Some clients wanted to convey their opinion on their industry, too, and so we came up with the idea of thought leadership programmes.

My advice to companies with even the most unlikely products (and we’re talking the piping systems that carries oxygen around hospitals, pipework for sewers and four pages per minute laser printers here) was to seek to entertain as much as they felt able.

Photography was a big part of this strategy. Even the most mundane of products can be made to look more appealing in the right setting, with the right lighting, and photographed by a proper expert. I have no doubt my clients gained more than their fair share of coverage thanks to the skills of the brilliant photography studio we worked with.

We developed imaginative research studies, too. Often this involved deploying tactics more commonly found in consumer PR to convey our message. It didn’t always work. That’s the thing about creativity. It doesn’t always fly. But when it did, we’d achieve spectacular results, with clients invited to talk about the findings on national TV. Game changing.

Thirty years on and we have so many more tools at our disposal. We can create high quality video with ease. We have an abundance of easy to use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. We have multiple opportunities to entertain and inform.

But few companies are brave enough to be entertaining. To even interject humour into their messaging.

If the purpose of any communications campaign is to inform, then we have to think about the way in which we try to inform. We need to stand out, and with so many companies making so much noise, we need to think creatively about this.

Using humour is not free from risk. What you and I find funny might be completely different. Humour often pushes the boundaries of good taste, too. But we can all name brands who use humour effectively in their communications. One of my favourites is the glasses retailer Specsavers, with their great ‘should have gone to Specsavers’ slogan. IKEA and Sixt also have a reputation for fuelling their communications with humour wherever and whenever they can.

One my most satisfying campaigns was for a management consultancy who wanted to demonstrate their expertise in IT helpdesk support. It’s not perhaps a topic which appears that fun, right? But my team devised a series of recognisable characters to depict how many of us try, struggle and fail to sort out our own IT problems.

The campaign may not have won the Edinburgh Comedy Award, but it did entertain. So much so that we achieved national TV coverage for our client, leading to considerable brand awareness.

In my opinion, where possible, communications campaigns should include some kind of entertainment. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok lend themselves to this kind of approach.

And in my experience no subject matter is too dry to entertain. It’s more about attitude. There’s room for any company to both inform and entertain. You simply have to be prepared to try something different.

After all, the core purpose of any PR campaign, or indeed any other form of marketing, is to grab attention, right?