Yesterday, you probably read, scanned or skipped an article about the media apocalypse. Today, you’re reading this one: a placement in a creative trade outlet, written by an earned media agency, about that apocalypse. So you’re probably asking—what the heck are we doing here?
It’s important we talk about the state of earned and creative campaigns, and do so with urgency. The short reason: Working dollars are working less. Content is everywhere. A shiny branded object exists for a total of 15 seconds in your consumer’s mind, and you paid more for those 15 seconds than you did five years ago.
The natural response to this phenomenon: creative agencies feeling the pressure to develop an “earned” muscle to take their work further. But here’s the thing: Most creative shops are struggling with this (heck, many earned ones are too). There are a lot of reasons but mostly because earning media in 2024 … is hard. Start with fewer writers covering more beats at fewer publications. And as TikTok becomes a steadfast engine for daily (hourly, minutely) trend production, there are more sources for news than ever before. Our own measurements have found that mentions of “TikTok trend” or “viral TikTok” in the headlines of mainstream news stories have nearly doubled each year since 2019.
Make no mistake, a new playbook is needed. Empty-calorie tactics—the microsite, the celebrity sponcon, the hashtag sweepstakes—are officially #dead. They’re driving coverage reports that resemble husks of what they’d have driven a few short years ago.
So, about that playbook. We at Praytell, an earned-first agency, have some ideas—some ours, some driven in collaboration with our partners at Contagious, a creative and strategic intelligence service for brands and agencies to think about the earned equation in ’24. Together, we’ve identified four factors that nearly every high-earning, high-performing creative campaign exhibits. And we’re now sharing them with you, a potential partner down the road. Here we go:
1. Gain deep brand understanding. Your creative campaign needs to take what people already love about your brand.
Not only are consumers more apt than ever before to sniff out an inauthentic piece of marketing, but brand-betraying creative is a missed opportunity. Make a bold strike with your creative, the kind that will draw clicks and eyeballs, but make sure it includes a path to conversion that is grounded in the reality of your product and brand.
2. Move with the cultural zeitgeist. Remember that reference to the exponential growth of media coverage of TikTok trends? This is the new normal. Kraft Heinz’s VP of North American brand communications, Nina Patel, has attributed her teams’ success to “creating work at the speed of culture.” Brands need agencies that “speak internet.”
Putting it another way, risk aversion is killing you. Stakeholder buy-in hamstrings your ability to strike quickly. The brands that find the most earned success have agency partners who, from the outset, coach this tendency and find ways to work within the bureaucratic realities of brand organizations.
3. Be willing to break things. Did your creative team deliver a killer idea, founded in brand truths and responsive to a timely trend? Great—there’s more to do. The next job is to find a novel way to deliver it. How are you telling your story? Where are you telling it? What’s the call to action? If your answers are all expected ones, it won’t matter how you arrange them, the work won’t stand out. Need an example? Check out any breakthrough campaign. The thing that ties them all together is one slightly subversive element that likely wasn’t there in round two or three. You’ve got to push for that element or you’re cooked.
4. Build an attuned media radar. You’ve done it! You’ve got an idea no one saw coming. The job is done, right?
Not quite. This is earned media, and the rules are different. Our actual audience, the only one that really matters, the one that decides what earns and what doesn’t, are your friends in the media. Editors and journalists are increasingly becoming an endangered species, which means that each and every relationship matters more than it did before. You’ve got to be certain that your creative—and the team that drives the work—are savvy to the interests, quirks, and pressures that your target writers face. If not, ideas simply won’t convert.
Get feedback from writers. Ask them early versus late. Keep them close. Take their notes more seriously than your CEO’s (and don’t tell your CEO we said this). They’re probably onto something.
Sounds simple, right? Okay, maybe it doesn’t. Curious to learn more about how you can deliver breakthrough creative that earns—coverage, attention, engagement and more? We call our program Pulse, we’d be happy to chat more about it if you’d like. Drop us a line at [email protected].
