Unspun

Is Ogilvy PR’s Marcia Silverman (clip below) channeling Herman Hupfeld? Herman who? Hupfeld, the guy who wrote the song As Time Goes By for the movie Casablanca. You know, the song with lyrics that goes…

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

Fundamentals considered, perhaps it is time to question the conventional wisdom about supremacy of The Message in PR thinking with all the digitization going on.

Unspun likes the assertion of Lois Kelly, author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-mouth Marketing, that messages, though important, should be consigned lower down in the heirachy.

Kelly’s argument is that messages by themselves are not effective anymore as products get more commoditized, audiences get more skeptical and the Noise gets louder. At the end of the day messages begin to sound the same if an organization or business does not have a unique point-of-view.

It is this point-of-view that would differentiate an organization from its competitors. It is also this that infuses passion into an organization and makes its messages come alive and meaningful.

As a PR hack Unspun thinks Kelly makes sense but it is a difficult sell to clients as it is tantamount to telling a colorless chump that they need to acquire a personality. The trouble is that many companies and the persons that lead them are not very interesting personalities, therefore they do not have an engaging point-of-view, therefore they do not have a credible framework to deliver their messages in.

Wonder what other PR hacks think?

clipped from strumpette.com Digital Media: Yes! and No! By Marcia Silverman, CEO Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide A lot of PR practitioners have expended time and energy asking if the rise of digital media has irrevocably transformed our industry. To those individuals, I will give an unqualified “yes”—and an equally assertive “no.”That’s not fence straddling—it is simply the truth. For while digital media have had an enormous effect on the way we serve our clients, our core mission—getting the right message for the client in front of the right audience—remains the same. The fact remains, however, that the client’s message always comes first. The rise of digital media has not displaced messaging as the key PR discipline—if anything, it has made us more focused in our approach to messaging.