Blow Up Your PR Program
Know what I hate? “Maintenance Mode.” That’s the feeling you sometimes get when you’ve been working with a client for 1 — 2 — 3+ years and the program is WORKING but seems to be on AUTOPILOT.
Clients need to challenge their agency partners to think bigger, more strategically, more creatively — even if only for the mental exercise: you never know what might spring from such brainstorms.
Agencies need to challenge their clients more often, too. Agencies are often hired because of their creative nature: so it’s a shame when PR pros decide to prefer a boring, safe client to an eccentric, unpredictable client.
Sometimes it’s up to the Agency to enforce these new ways of thinking.
At SHIFT we try to make it standard procedure. It’s common (and encouraged) for an account team to call for an all-agency brainstorm to whip up fresh ideas for a long-standing client, on a biannual basis. We try to recapture the zing of wild ideas that are more typically generated for a newbiz pitch.
It’s rare to find a client who doesn’t love it when their account team blows-up the standard Weekly Call Agenda to discuss a fresh raft of ideas to invigorate the program.
You can’t live life (and serve clients) on autopilot. You’ve got to take the controls and do a li’l loop-di-loop now and then.
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Some businesses still think that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but that is very antiquated way of thinking. You are right that both the agency and the client need to challenge and encourage each other to always be improving.