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Edelman’s content studio move is super-smart

If I were starting a PR firm today the last thing I would do is admit it.

The term carries such baggage and the industry – for all its instances of brilliance – is regarded as having to narrow a remit.

However, if you’re a leader in that field best to ignore the baggage and get on with leading things. And that’s what I see Edelman doing with its moves into digital, metrics, social media and lately content production.

My former boss, Simon Jones at Bell Pottinger, put in place a really important fundamental in the way I’ve been thinking about the future of comms when he insisted, time and and again, that “PR is just content production and distribution”.

At its most media-relations focussed, it works like this: your network of influencers are journalists. To do the best job for clients produce the content the journalists will want in a format that’s useful to them and get it to them.

Much smarter then, than obsessing about the future of the press release, is thinking about how the network is changing and therefore they type of content that’s useful to it.

Edelman’s launch of a studio is, therefore, super-smart. Hope we’ll see a blog or some other way of following the progress of the idea…

,
Antony Mayfield

2 responses to “Edelman’s content studio move is super-smart”

  1. David Brain Avatar
    David Brain

    Thanks for that endorsement Anthony. We’re noodling here with some variations on it in European markets and so if you have any thoughts then let us know……nice to cacth up next time you are in town by the way.

  2. Mark Hanson Avatar
    Mark Hanson

    It is super-smart and has to be the way that PR and advertising responds to a changing media landscape. I have to say I’m very jealous of the folks working at Edelman as they have the resources, senior backing and foresight to pursue things that are keeping them at the forefront of ‘new PR’.

    We are trying to do similar in a smaller way at our shop, Staniforth. One example is a deal we have with the north west trade media website, HowDo. We felt that to showcase our content studio to in-house PR and marketing people, we should produce some content that ‘makes us useful’ to the network. So we are producing weekly video content for the site, branded Staniforth.

    http://www.how-do.co.uk/north-west-media-news/how%11do-tv/how%11dotv-episode-two:-an-interview-with-connectpoint-chief-exec-nick-bradshaw-200804232430/

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