It's integrated communications or bust

South African communications agencies need to evolve and adapt their skill set to match global expectations and the global industry transition across the media and marketing communications industry towards fully integrated communications.

This is according to Text100 regional director for EMEA, Cécile Missildine, who was interviewed in South Africa on a visit in November last year.

"The big trend for 2015 is the actual move into integrated communications and I think this is a key point for companies and agencies in South Africa and Africa. There needs to be a reflection on how to make all communications campaigns integrated. I still see people thinking in terms of traditional media and then adding on social media or digital media," she explains.

Missildine emphasises that integrated communications is not doing public relations with "a little bit of social" in it.

"It is looking at campaigns holistically. Where you look at a campaign or story and see how you can best disseminate that message, through:

1. Branded, owned content: Whether it is online or social media, content can also be pushed out through paid activities through sponsored links, sponsored tweets, paid SEO, and media relations elements.2. Earned media: Supplement other campaign elements or advertising campaigns with a story in the publication to make it rank higher in search or to pin it to the top of a page.

Missildine firmly believes that the human element is fundamental in all communication campaigns and that audience behaviour should be at the centre of any storyline or strategy. This is at the core of making integrated campaigns work in 2015.

"We, as humans, have specific behaviours and we are not dictated by the demographic we fit in - I see very little use of research into the psychology of consumers inside PR agencies. How do we tap into this reference point so we can engage with them and change their behaviours? Those are the questions we need to be asking."

In 2015 she would also like to see less publicity for the sake of publicity: "I often see clients putting their CEO on the cover of a magazine - just getting your name out there is not engaging people."

Top trends

In addition, her trends for 2015 include:

1. Thinking 360: Evolving towards integrated communications means that agencies, especially in South Africa, look beyond traditional and social - they need to think 360 and they need to get closer to their marketing clients.

2. Engagement: Engage people in a difference way, think about human element.
3. Branded content: Media relationships are sacred and PR people do not tell journalists what to write, so PR agencies have been slow in pushing branded content. But Missildine emphasises, this is a totally different strategy and you don't deal with the same people.

4. Creating new audiences: This is an area communication agencies will be going into in the future.

She says there is an opportunity for communications agencies to work with advertising agencies. "We should not sit back and see the digital and ad agencies eat away into our PR budgets. We have to work with the ad agencies and there should be a clean, clear definition of the advertising dollars, vs. the softer, media relations dollars. There is a grey area and that is mostly online. That is where the opportunity lies for the PR agencies. We suffer as PR people of a massive inferiority complex - 'we can never be as sexy and shiny as the ad guys' - of course we can!

"In the past we were the implementers, executing communications campaigns, now we are part of the thinking: that strategic conversation. There are still meetings and discussions happening on bigger campaigns that we are not part of, that the advertising guys are part of, but in the coming years, we are going up the 'food chain' and will be brought into the conversations happening [with marketers] earlier, to define the insights," Missildine concludes.

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