Speed doesn’t tend to do things by halves.
We launched with a bang, we’ve always aimed to set the bar higher with our campaigns, our approach to working with clients and the work environment we create for our people.
Tomorrow we’re aiming to mark the beginning of the next stage with an enviable sales event featuring former Government communications head Alastair Campbell, former Virgin PR mastermind Will Whitehorn and Speed’s Stephen Waddington, who co-wrote the new book Brand Anarchy with me.
Yes it’s a sales event, but only in the contact-making sense, with no hard sell (not even a copy of the book). In the course of compiling research for Brand Anarchy, Stephen and I undertook many interviews with experienced, expert and infamous communicators who’ve been at the sharp end of the media and its changing times over the past few decades.
Alastair is one of many people quoted in Brand Anarchy, and agreed to come and talk tomorrow about the end of the age of spin and the need for a more authentic style of communication in the future. It’s something that many brands will say they’re already doing, yet most are being challenged by the dizzying pace of media change and requirements to overhaul how they plan reputation management.
One of the reasons Brand Anarchy took 18 months to write, besides the fact that both of us lead really busy lives and did the copy in the evenings, and on trains and planes, was that some of the chapters had to be updated twice because they were out of date by the time they’d been written.
It’s symptomatic of how fast media is changing, and how fast PR is having to change too. Which is why Speed’s next stage is going to be about taking the PR programmes we run beyond audience engagement with clients’ brands, so that the audience has sustained participation in the brand story. It’s a long way from just broadcasting a message at people via conventional media outlets.
What do we mean by that? Well we’re not giving it all away yet, but suffice to say the expertise we’ve gathered and been exposed to in writing the book has given us some insight into how to push the frontiers of PR a little further.
In many ways, what we’ll be doing is getting back to some of the true principles of PR – proper public relations, not just media relations.
Stay tuned. We’d like you to participate in our story too.
