Article | 10 Jul 2015

How did the PR industry fare at this year’s Cannes Lions?

Posted in PR and Communications, Alice’s Blog,

The festival of creativity in Cannes has just shut its doors for 2015 after what was another bumper year. The Croisette was packed and the parties were louder than ever. Continuing our future of work series, I wanted to look at how the PR industry faired this time and whether it is finally showing its light from under the proverbial bushel.

According to the official blurb Cannes uses to define PR it is: “the creative use of reputation management by the building and preservation of trust and understanding between individuals, businesses or organisations and their publics/audiences.” But what does that actually mean?

Well, for me, it means that PR is becoming harder and harder to define. The boundaries are blurring. It could be argued that everything shown during Cannes had an element of PR in it - including the commercials and as such would be eligible to be entered into the awards.

Furthermore, should we live and die by definitions. It is clear that integrated campaigns are the ones that work best, which means a collaborative working environment from the start. What if every agency adopted a scrum culture working environment, where creative, marketing, PR and copy-writing et al all work together in the same space for the duration of the campaign, bringing in freelance talent to help fulfill the brief until the project is complete. From a hiring prospectively agencies that are doing this are hiring the best talent as savvy individuals realise they need exposure to different parts of the marketing mix.

If everyone worked in a more collaborative way, then we could do away with the ‘them and us’ awards and celebrate creativity and ingenuity in all its glory – allowing great work to shine and inviting the entire team to bask in the afterglow.