This week in PR (14 June newsletter)

There are more than 25 content links in this week’s roundup.

We’re in the midst of the election campaign with less than three weeks to go. The party manifestos have now been published; there are debates amongst and interviews with party leaders most days of the week.

While everything is political, I’m taking a break from party politics this week.

Instead, the focus is on three other themes emerging from this week’s talking points, with only oblique references to the election. This week we discuss leadership, the creator economy and a brilliant charity awareness campaign.

Lessons in leadership

The election campaign has shone an unflattering spotlight on political leaders, with the exception of Sir Ed Davey who has not been given a prominent platform and has had to earn coverage for the Liberal Democrats by not taking himself too seriously.

Richard Price, editorial director at Zeno London, used the campaign as a hook to talk about the challenges facing all organisation leaders. They may want to avoid the spotlight, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult.

Like it or not, leaders find themselves in a position where they must act as public spokespeople for their organisation. And sometimes they have no option but to face difficult questions… It is overwhelmingly likely that at some point every business leader will be compelled to speak out. And when that time comes, you’d better be ready.

Managers and trainers need to prepare possible questions and put leaders through mock interviews - just as political advisers prepare politicians for set piece occasions.

Leadership coach Louise Thompson talked from experience about the challenge of becoming a leader and adjusting to the new role.

[Organisations] assume that the talented comms specialist who had the answers to everything, will automatically become an effective leader of people, able to manage teams beyond their own technical expertise. And then they wonder why so many struggle to make it work. 

She provides a guide to your first 100 days as a communication leader (a theme borrowed from politics, where the first 100 days of a new administration is seen as key to its subsequent success).

Another adjustment from communicator to leader is the switch from the focus on words to a focus on numbers, a theme explored this week by Paul Stollery, co-founder of consultancy Hard Numbers. He addressed the challenge of growing a business whilst simultaneously bearing down on costs in order to survive a downturn.

When the bottom falls out of the economy, budgets tighten yet the need for leads becomes more urgent than ever. It’s a pincer movement, and one that leaves a lot of agency founders struggling to balance the short term need for cutting spending, and the mid-to-long term need to grow their businesses.

Stollery avoided any reference to politics, but this trick of conjuring growth while constraining spending is precisely the challenge that will face Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves should they be the next occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street.

Looking for growth? Consider the creator economy

You want some positive news - and the evidence to back it up? Influencer marketing expert Scott Guthrie highlights some first of a kind research from the US into the scale of the creator economy.

And it has scaled very fast since this is a twenty-first century phenomenon. The data suggests there are 27 million paid creators in the US - that’s 14% of all 16-54 year olds.

A proportion of these consider it a hobby; yet more could only be considered part-time. But the average annual earnings of the 11.6 million full-time creators is reported as $179,000.

There is a downside (of course there is): almost half of these full-time creators face burnout because of the demands to keep posting content.

(There’s a further risk from political decisions: a possible ban on TikTok in the US would remove one of the main channels for sharing creative content.) 

But what defines a creator, and is creator the same as influencer? According to Guthrie:

Creators are defined as those who consider themselves to be a Creator or influencer AND received income in the past year for their work as a Creator, whether in the form of cash or goods/services.

Australian consultant and author Trevor Cook was reflecting on this same question this week and has some useful observations on ‘the (over) hype of the ‘creator economy’.

Talk of creators makes us think of young people sharing lifestyle content. This can be offputting to most business owners, who don’t see any connection.

So Young suggests two categories and points to the overlap between the two:

1/ REPUTATION CONTENT CREATORS - these are established business owners selling their own products and services; they create content to build visibility, trust and reputation in the marketplace with a view to supporting their commercial goals. 2/ INDEPENDENT CONTENT CREATORS - these individuals essentially run micro-media businesses; they build their audience first and then work out ways to monetise that audience.

He advises business owners to learn lessons from indie content creators.

Learn from the indie players and be inspired by them! Maybe even try and employ some of their strategies and tactics in your business, but don’t become too over-awed by what they’re doing because they are playing a different game.

Campaign of the season

It’s hard to gain cut-through for marketing and comms messages, especially during an election campaign.

So let’s end with praise for British Heart Foundation and its ‘Til I died’ campaign timed for the European Championships (see photo above).

James Herring explains the thinking and the teams behind it:

‘Til I Died’, highlights the need for heart research funding by showcasing the unfulfilled dreams of those affected. The campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi aims to raise awareness that heart disease can affect anyone, regardless of age. 12 individual murals hand-painted by OOH production agency Grand Visual, reflect the fact that 12 young lives are tragically lost to sudden cardiac death every single week in the UK.

Awareness-raising may not be an AMEC-approved objective but it’s understandable in the context of a charity needing to assert the importance of its work. And the association with football is well chosen, and not just for the timing. Football fans will be well aware that cardiac arrest can affect even fit sportsmen. Christian Eriksen, who now plays for Manchester United in the premier league, is in Denmark's squad and may face England in a group match next week. Yet he collapsed on the pitch three years ago in a match in the pandemic-delayed Euro 2020 competition before being resuscitated and fitted with an ICD device to detect abnormal heartbeats. Denmark, then I almost died.