How paid and earned media agencies can drive longevity and effectiveness together
PR and paid media agencies must work hand in hand to take full advantaged of earned media attention, We Are Different’s founder and director, Stuart Terry, and Avenue C’s chief strategy officer, Melissa Mullins, asserted at Mumbrella’s CommsCon event on Thursday.
Alignment between earned and paid media strategy was essential to both “enhance creative effectiveness”, create “longevity”, and deliver “efficiency”, said Terry.
Mullins and Terry spoke at CommsCon on Thursday
Speaking on effectiveness, Mullens said that the creative of a campaign dramatically impacts results.
“You have to have that hook, the thing that’s going to get consumers and audiences interested. So unless you’ve got that amazing product that can just sell itself, you are always thinking about that idea. What’s the thing that we can tell audiences in a new and different and creative way that’s gonna get them really engaged?”
That is where earned creative specialists come in, she said.
“One of the things that at Avenue C we are really keen to do is to start to think about how we can take those [earned] ideas into the paid space and use them to make our advertising more effective.
Putting paid media behind an earned idea is also critical to ensure that the attention endures beyond the 24-hour news cycle.
“One of the limitations we have with earned media is that news is new and therefore, by the very nature of it, it’s got quite a short cycle,” said Mullens.
“This is just thinking about how can we take that earned idea and that initial spike and interest, and that newsworthiness, and create your longevity and create that long tail for a campaign so that you do have that brand presence beyond that new spike.”
Social media, digital, influencer integrations and traditional media channels can all play a role in the paid media strategy following an earned execution.
However for earned ideas to transition naturally into the paid media space, Terry points to the need for media and PR agencies to be briefed together, and work closely on a campaign from the beginning, and that comes down to efficiency.
“So it starts with the brief and I’m sure we all still have situations where there’s a fabulous agency team, including your PR team, but then PR has been briefed totally separately to media,” he said.
“For us, the best integrated campaigns obviously start with the brief. And so making sure that you’re aligned as a team, you’re getting briefed together.”
“It’s not a media challenge or an earned challenge. It’s your overarching comms challenge that then you’re addressing.”
Even if the PR and media agencies are not able to be briefed together, it is important for both to know what they are individually responsible for, and how they’re best leveraging each other.
Terry said: “Even with the best integrated agency teams, I’ve seen it often is really great in the planning and then we all go into our executional bubbles and almost never meet again. So again, we found a lot of success with really maintaining that inter-agency collaboration and looking at the successes, the failures and opportunities to optimize, whether it be it from an earned or paid or other channel perspective throughout the campaign.”
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