Modern-day PR is multi-dimensional & more channel-specific: Pranav Kumar

In the last 10 years, PR has taken a different dimension, especially after the entry of social media and the rapid shift to digital, especially in the pandemic period. At the same time the industry has been facing stiff challenges, moreover client expectations have also increased, with more emphasis being given to digital and online reputation management. The industry has undergone a radical shift and the current times have pushed the industry to change gears.

In conversation with Adgully, Pranav Kumar, Managing Director - India, Allison+Partners, speaks at length about the change in PR with organisations transitioning to digital, how the pandemic has shifted consumer behaviour and much more.

Stage is set for IMAGEXX Summit & Awards 2022 – to be held in Gurugram on June 16. Click here to attend.

How has PR evolved in the last 10 years? Going forward, how will the industry shape up as the dynamics of the PR is changing with the acceleration in digital?

Modern-day PR is multi-dimensional and increasingly more channel specific than agnostic, with content, messaging, and engagement varying as per the platform and audience. The fundamentals remain the same however, with messaging and engagement skills at the core. As practitioners, we excel in these areas and have the savvy to intersperse our earned media and messaging skills – whether it is pitching for a media outcome or engaging with a digital influencer or even building assets for a digital campaign.

Today’s hyper-news cycle is more digitally amplified than ever before. Couple that with massive audience or consumer empowerment, an increasingly disrupted macro-environment and polarisation, the implications for PR are tremendous. Leading-edge practitioners must make themselves indispensable as brand and organisations navigate today’s complex environment.

Traditional Vs Digital – there is a rapid change in the way digital is approached today. How is your company helping clients to manage and handle this digital transformation?

I do not think we need to consciously think about digital, it is more than a prerequisite and is embedded firmly as we look at campaigns holistically. It is par for the course. As a collective of creative PR strategists, we look at driving effective earned media strategies for our clients, which include tapping into more digitally driven, multi-format outcomes ranging from podcasts to short-form video and long-form thought leadership content. Our approach towards campaign ideas is rooted in being integrated with both, digital and marketing legs, if the brief demands it.

To meet the needs of today’s marketers and brands, Allison+Partners has a ‘Marketing Innovation Team’ (MIT) comprising nearly 100 specialists across the globe. MIT leans into marketing innovation through data and technology to help brands harness disruption to their advantage. By enabling brands to tell compelling stories that make deep connections and create lasting impact. We are equipped to help clients think smarter and spend shrewder to achieve the strongest results in this time of accelerated change.

There is a start-up that is being launched every other day and most start-ups trust PR a lot. What is the role of PR here and as an agency, how do you help them build their reputation especially when they come with tight budgets?

It always helps when one is working with start-ups or for that matter, any organisation which values what communications can do as a marketing discipline. If you look at some of the most successful companies founded a decade or two ago, most invested in PR early for the intangible value it brings in reputation and brand building (examples include Salesforce, Zomato, and many others). It always helps us to be on-board in the early stages of a start-up’s inception for better strategic alignment, allowing us to shape its narrative, value proposition, and overall brand more effectively. One must adapt on the fly as the organisation scales and transforms expeditiously. Budgets are always a challenge and as I alluded to earlier, it helps working with the right client partner who values what you bring to the table.

The pandemic has shifted behaviours and trends across industry. What kind of shifts have you noticed in the PR industry? What are the client expectations today and how do you manage those expectations?

The pandemic has been a challenging time for everyone and hopefully things are turning for the better. I think if there is one key takeaway for the PR industry from all of this is that such was the velocity of disruption in the early days of the pandemic, clients needed to communicate even more to serve a variety of business and altruistic compulsions. While budgets were certainly impacted, given the uncertainty back then, it is safe to say that PR entrenched itself increasingly as a business-critical function. I think the pandemic has some noble learnings for us as a society as much as it did for brands. The biggest shift we see is brands leaning more than ever before into authenticity, empathy, being purpose and value driven, altruistic and at the same time balancing business imperatives.

Is media training still an important component of the services that the PR industry offers? As an agency how do you help and advise your clients to handle and face the media confidently?

This is one of our specialist areas and ties into multiple frameworks that we offer as a firm for corporate reputation, thought leadership, executive positioning, and crisis + issues management. Media training is essential for companies to build a solid bench of spokespeople and create their very own ‘spokes-stars’ as a result. The responsibility of delivering messaging, building, managing, and defending reputation sits with spokespeople for the most part. In fact, not only do clients constantly want us to media train incoming spokespeople probables, but also ask us to run annual refresher workshops to keep their engagement and delivery skills sharp.

Also, given the complex and distributed nature of business today, we are seeing clients wanting to build a deeper bench of spokespeople beyond the C-suite and to include leaders from business units, geo-specific functions and even customer facing executives such in banking and retail. For instance, for one of our clients, we have media trained over 30 executives for a pan-India consumer business and a similar number of General Managers for a global hospitality group.

With the advent of social media, news travels fast today, especially fake news. What is your view on this and being a seasoned PR professional, how does one manage to control and curb fake news?

While news organisations are doing their bit to keep fake news at bay as are social media platforms by working with armies of fact checkers, clearly fake news is a menace that is not going to go away anytime soon – whether its misinformation or disinformation. As PR practitioners, we too have an important role to play as gatekeepers of news and information stemming from our client organisations. The onus is on us to build transparent and trusted relationships with journalists and influencers and be careful about which trending news stories or conversations we want to perpetuate or quell. We need to keep a razor-sharp focus on the veracity of information, ensure that we are sticking to credible news sources and outlets, and are constantly fact checking. At the same time, we also have a role to play in monitoring the news cycle and stepping in to correct or mitigate any form of fake news. In short, we must be vigilant like never before.

New business pitches keep happening in the PR world. What is the difference you bring to the table to win businesses? Is there any process or methodology that you follow which helps your strategic thinking become sharper and more focused?

We are an incredibly collaborative firm and focused on driving strong coalescence of ideas, insights, perspectives coming from a multidisciplinary team. Basic hygiene areas apart, we always lead a pitch with an insights-led approach, deploying a mix of listening and analytics platforms to unearth insights, inform our strategy and to fuel creative approaches to client briefs. We make it a point to immerse ourselves into the client’s business and industry to add value. When it’s showtime, it all boils down to a great team, chemistry, and valuable experience gained from successful (and not so successful) pitches to standout win!

What is your theory when it comes to ROI on PR campaigns? There are still no standard formulae designed and endless debates keep happening on this subject. What is your thinking here and how do you work on a win-win situation with your clients to evaluate the impact of PR?

Measurement is the most powerful tool a PR firm has in order to shape standards, optimise expectations, and prove the outcome of our deliverables – whether it’s with the marketing department or the CFO. Our goal at the outset is to combine the best of our thinking and technology to uncover insights for effective measurement. Allison+Partners offers custom-tailored measurement strategies that suit the metrics and key performance indicators at the forefront of each client’s business. To make these outputs and outcomes clear, concise, and easily understandable, we deliver this data using a variety of public and proprietary tools ranging from traditional media monitoring, online and social media monitoring, competitive audits.

Our teams work with each client to develop a “dashboard” that markets our shared PR work to all key stakeholders, which can include a variety of charts showing share of voice, tonality, and integrated metrics to paint an overall picture of “brand health”. Regardless of format, each dashboard is meant to be impactful and insightful for all who review it. We are an unbiased reporting team within the agency, we like to say we’re here to keep everyone both honest and aligned. Above all, we have found this truly drives everyone’s best and brightest work.