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How has the pandemic changed technical PR?
23 April 2021
In a guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, Managing Director of Stone Junction explains how the pandemic has changed the world of PR, a year after its impact began to be felt in the UK.
PR is dead. How many times have you heard that said? I remember the Internet killed PR off completely, shortly after I began work. Then, later, search engine optimisation killed PR, before the Penguin and Panda Google updates did the same thing. Recently, the pandemic killed PR. Unfortunately, nobody told PR it had been killed and it’s been thriving away in the background all along.
However, the pandemic, just like all those other issues, has changed the industry. At Stone Junction, we’ve seen a shift in what clients want from PR, we’ve seen a transformation in the way technical PR campaigns interact with the political landscape and we’ve seen international barriers collapse further.
The shift in strategy and creative
It used to be that campaign strategy and creative was done by branding and advertising, and that the concept was then ‘rolled out’ into PR. This always felt counterintuitive to me. After all, what is PR but the management of ideas, issues and opinion?
One might argue that this shift began some time ago and the financial consolidation caused by the pandemic has only exacerbated it. I think it’s also true to say that the complexity of the issues raised by COVID-19, on both an emotional and scientific level, have reinstated the notion that it should be PR leading the way, because it is most suited to this type of complex communication.
There has also been a core change in the need of the marketing industry – where once, a picture spoke a thousand words, now the primary currency of the search engine is language, not imagery. As a result, the industry has turned to PR find the right words.
This has led to a further rise in owned content, already a decade-old trend, which has been key in shifting the strategic and creative onus on to PR.
Irrespective of where the shift began, the bottom line is that clients come to agencies like us for ideas that will work across the line. They want owned content, earned content, shared content and paid content – very probably in that order. They want everything to work together in a single, harmonious whole and the way to make that happen is to make the ideas work at a fundamental level. We like our clients to think our ideas are so obviously perfect for them that they can’t believe they aren’t already doing it.
The political landscape made real
There is a cliché that if you don’t care about politics, you don’t care about life. The pandemic has made this more real than ever, both by making life and death into a very real consequence of political decision making and by making the, sometimes ethereal, world of government a very real part of day-to-day business.
A technical PR campaign that doesn’t recognise the impact of politics on industrial decision making is unlikely to cut through in 2021. Industrial and business policy has never been more important to the STEM sectors. In a way, it’s unsurprising that the lobbying of the likes of David Cameron and James Dyson has come to the fore in post second wave Britain. Business has never been busier in the halls of Westminster.
The vanishing international barrier
Five years ago, the idea that the United Kingdom could be closer than ever to the rest of the world in 2021 seemed insane. We were heading towards an insular mentality and becoming less relevant on the international stage. Now, the tech adoption COVID-19 made essential has, in turn, made international trade much more common in technical PR.
When Stone Junction receives an enquiry from a new customer today, it’s as likely to be from Europe, Asia or the USA as it is to be from Birmingham, Stoke or Manchester. Science, engineering and, to a lesser extent, technology have always been industries without borders, and now the marketing services that serve them have been forced to become the same.
As a strategic decision, we began to diversify internationally in 2014. Fast forward to 2021 and we have more than a dozen fluent languages in house, as well as multiple global campaigns, with over seventy percent of our campaigns featuring an international element. Coverage in Asia is as easy to generate as coverage in Leicester. But even had we not done this, COVID-19 would have forced the process on us.
Where does this leave us?
The convergence of these strands means that a technical PR campaign in April 2021 has to be much more than it was in January 2020 and a totally different animal to April 2011. PR is dead again, as it has been so many times before. The temptation is to conclude my article by also concluding the cliché and writing the words ‘long live PR’. I think I will spare you that unpleasantness for now. Instead, let’s just welcome this new era enthusiastically and together.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. His biggest passion in life is pizza is technical PR, so if you are as passionate about it as him, drop him a line on richards@stonejunction.co.uk. He loves a chat.
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