PR creatives rely on the work of research and measurement teams to prove their work is making an impact, FleishmanHillard Fishburn executive creative director Kev O’Sullivan discussed in Cision’s latest webinar.
“It is about how are you proving, demonstrating and measuring creativity,” he said. “Measurement enables us to show that our ideas have true value in the world and an authentic reason for being.”
He added: “We talk about FleishmanHillard Fishburn as an agency for change. That’s a nice notion, but unless you can really measure and demonstrate that change then you’re just another PR agency touting cheap creative.”
O’Sullivan noted that the agency took creativity seriously and didn’t conform to stereotypes about its use in PR, such as being the domain of hipsters or people wanting to simply ‘float things down the Thames’. He argued that while PR is a very creative discipline, it fails to talk about itself as such because there was an ingrained idea that “creating an advert for John Lewis” is how creativity is defined.
Through both his own presentation and responses to questions from webinar audience members and moderator Simon Hooper, senior account director at Cision, O’Sullivan discussed the metrics to use when measuring creative campaigns, the foundations of a creative idea, why a low creative budget can be more fun and his vision for the future of creativity in PR.
The full write-up can be found here.