The New PR You can tell that Public Relations is pulling ahead of Advertising as the architects of buzz. How else to explain why Google and TiVo have become such well known brands –and verbs—in such a short space of time? Companies are investing in ‘viral games’ and ‘contextual marketing’ rather than prime-time events. So adding a few dollops of buzz as a PR tactic can’t possibly hurt, even though some of it may be stealthy (there’s a black art called ‘astro-turfing’ that responsible PR pros won’t touch) and experimental. You know it’s a different ballgame when sending a rubber duck to the Regis and Kelly show on ABC creates more brand buzz for insurance company, Aflac, than a press conference! Buzz, the modern variant of gossip, is a combination of marketing communications (which is all about telling our commercial stories) and public relations (used to narrate particular angles of a story) in a highly networked world. We’re talking of a world that is bypassing the printed media for its first contact with news, where mobile phone companies handle more data traffic –essentially text messaging— than voice, and a world in which email stories and chat room postings travel faster than a newsletter or a press release. Whether we communicators agree with all this or not, a whole new set of communication tools have quietly upstaged the trusted old ones. You know: corporate video, the press briefing, the product launch, the employee handbook, and the carefully storyboarded TV commercial. The role of advertising is waning, points out Laura Ries, co-author of the 2002 book, “The fall of Advertising and the rise of PR.” She cites Amazon, Starbucks and Krispy Kreme as companies that have leveraged PR to build their brands. “People do not necessarily believe, trust or even listen to advertising messages,” she says. Agencies have been put on notice, and some have re-invented themselves. Two factors brought about this: a piece of technology, and the struggling global economy. The little black box, often referred to as a PVR (a personal video recorder) introduced TV viewers to a new form of time shifting. Advertisers saw this as a dangerous trend where people could “TiVo” a program –record it, skip past the TV commercials, or stop a program in its tracks for a bathroom breaks.  The other factor was economic. Mass marketers were looking for smaller investments in marketing across a vastly segmented audience. TV commercials just weren’t cost effective. At a 4As media conference in February this year, P&Gs Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel announced that “there must be and is life beyond the 30-second TV spot.” He then declared that the company (which spent over 70% of its $2.5 billion ad budget on TV in 2003) was replacing its ‘media planning’ account with something called ‘communications planning. Translated: they would hunt out new media venues. And hunt they did.

In Advertising circles, this shifting of the tectonic plates is hard to miss, as brands such as Nike, Mazda, Burger King, Adidas, even politicians, drug companies and activists look to new media venues and new tactics. Call it The New PR, or Guerrilla Marketing Communications, where companies have got a taste for the infinite possibilities of Dan Rather is now a magnet for those who want to write the obituary for the big media. This site, is what bad PR can look like, not just for Rather, but for anyone, any industry, any event.

marketing programs that inject passion into the near-obsolete ‘4Ps’ model, and truly involve customers. I am talking of viral marketing, communication campaigns involving text messaging, promotional Web sites, and even forms of ‘activism’ to promote an idea, or motivate people, or demo the brand values.  “Word-of-mouth is the real secret weapon in building a brand,” says Ries. “But how do you get the first mouth started? The media is a great place to start. You don’t need traditional media for that.” Creating buzz in real time The need to shift away from the mainstream media –a model based on ‘grabbing eyeballs’—challenges marketers to create their own media –a model based on generating buzz. Take the case of an Adidas campaign in Asia that eschews advertising. The ad agency designed an ‘event’ by building a 328-foot 8-lane track in downtown Osaka. What’s so unusual about that? The ‘track’ is built on the vertical face of a skyscraper! Another one was built in Hong Kong. Extreme athletes compete in these events (so timed to coincide with the Olympics) and demonstrate the campaign theme: ‘impossible is nothing.’ Check the “Impossible World Records” web site at http://www.adidas.com/jp/impossible/  (click on the race track on the left)Looking for buzz means being creative even when using the traditional media. In the pre-internet days the nearest thing to ‘integrated marketing communications’ (IMC) was getting TV audiences to call a toll free number to enter a sweepstakes. In the TiVo and SMS era, the audience gets to vote using text messaging, then watches how their vote affects the outcome of the event. The best example of integrating the brand right into the program content was Coca-Cola’s role in American Idol. Such ‘advertainment’ is a brand marketer’s dream: buzz plus product placement; customer participation plus measurement. As Mark Dempster, of USWeb/CKs once observed, the brand manager of the future is “like an air traffic controller…it’s all happening in real time.”  Going Viral This New PR may sound rebellious and anarchic but those who demand it are intensely focused on measurement, which can also happen in real time. Marketers who are looking for life beyond the 30-second commercial are monitoring click-throughs, and the time spent on product pages. BuzzMetrics, a company that pharmaceutical and automotive marketers turn to, tracks the ‘naturally occurring conversations,’ a.k.a. buzz, on message boards, blogs, review sites, and ‘gripe sites.’ It has tracked ‘passion’ and ‘advocacy’ for instance, to see what brand attributed might breed ‘evangelists.’ Mitsubishi experimented with a cliffhanger TV spot during the last Super Bowl, getting viewers to visit a special Web site at www.seewhathappens.com to see the dramatic ending of the commercial. Others are ‘seeding’ URLs into commercials, leaving audiences to discover web sites for themselves. Such viral marketing tactics have included a very odd companion web site for Burger King called ‘Subservient Chicken’ (See Sidebar 2) and long-format commercials called ‘Webisodes’ by BMW and American Express that never see the light of day on TV. Speaking of going viral, take the case of Ford, which unleashed two Web-only TV commercials earlier this year for a model called the “Ka” in the U.K. One ‘unapproved’ version for the sports model, (see it at http://www.ifilm.com/viralvideo?ifilmid=2633283) depicts the moon-roof decapitating a cat! Yuk! Exactly why the ad got passed on in true viral fashion, generating more brand awareness in weeks than other ads get in months. The tagline for the Ford SportKa is “The Ka’s evil twin.” Anyone willing to bet that Ford’s ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather was truly ignorant of it?  If all this looks experimental, it won’t be for very long. A newly formed Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has plans to make what’s now a guerilla tactic, a legitimate practice. They are working on metrics and ethics issues. The day can’t be far when ‘creating buzz’ is given the same attention –and budget- that brand building once received. Word of mouth is not a fuzzy medium, and can be implemented into a communications plan. “PR firms are very good at building relationships” says BuzzMetrics’ President & CEO Jonathan Carson; “a lot of the core competencies of PR play right into what is necessary for successful word of mouth marketing.