Double post from work blog in an effort to centralize ...
I promised Stephanie Smirnov I would answer this question since I joined DeVries late last year: why would a strategic planner with roots in advertising take the challenge to work at a PR firm and help start a Strategy + Innovations practice? What role could planning play in a PR environment? In other words - why now - why did I leave advertising and does it really matter?
This is first in a series ...
Reason #1. The Rise of the Snack: It’s been happening since I started in the online world in 1998, but with the growth of social media and lives of continuous partial attention content consumption has become more like snacking, and less like a meal (and when it is a meal, it's often ad-free). And what has that done?
To steal economist Hernando de Soto's term out of his context, the articulation of brands' values and value via television advertising and other traditional forms of communications (including most web sites) has become dead capital. In other words, brands and their advertising avatars have become assets that cannot be used to their fullest.
And so, the value and values of brands need to be unlocked in new ways.
That's where the question of craft comes in to understand who is best able to make 'dead capital' regain its currency in this environment. We hear that 'Great ideas can come from anywhere.' or "There's only one job in advertising (and why use that word, 'advertising' anyway, Alex?). It's true in theory, but does it hold in practice? Have most constituents of the brand-er ecosystem really contemplated what The Rise of the Snack means and the impact continuous partial attention has on what we do?
At the last Account Planning Conference, I was struck by the dichotomy of the optimistic view of the brand new world (or is it the New Brand World?) and the great malaise a lot of the (really really good) planners I spoke to there felt. Why is that? It was more than just envy for that guy who quit planning to found Method, right?
It's likely it has something to do with the pressure that Snack-sized content culture has put on the context and utility of the tools and teams most agencies use to solve the problems we're paid to solve.
It would be arrogant to say that any one agency or type of agency is positioned better for this change. But...bringing together the craft of planning with that of PR is wonderfully poised to unlock brands' capital.
Others (and that's only one example) have discussed how planning has changed recently. This is just the start for us...
The next few posts are going to talk about why the ground in PR is especially fertile to lead new directions for strategy + innovation and why I'm here: the new ways brands work (not exclusive to PR, but think molecules, not pyramids!), what Darren from Bewitched has to do with it and how a business model makes a tremendous difference. I'll probably cook up a few more things too as the writing goes on...
Making things that work in a snack-centric world doesn't mean thinking small, nor does it mean creating only massive efforts that people have no alternative to ignore. The onus is on us to craft ideas that live on both levels, as morsels consumed quickly, with other dishes, some bigger than others, all of which add up to rich, tasty narratives.
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