In 2007, as the banking crisis began to reveal its ugly teeth, Haruna McWilliams and I published a paper on why clients should continue to spend during an economic downturn. Since then, we’ve had reams of IPA data and a global pandemic to deal with. As we stare down the barrel of an inflation fuelled downturn, I looked back at the article Haruna and I wrote 14 years ago to see if anything was still valid for the road ahead.
Fast forward twenty years and the competition for consumer attention is more intense than ever. It’s no longer enough to buy cut through as the big consumer goods brands did, instead we need to earn it. Pretty much every piece of communication now has to work in this way, regardless of content or channel. And earning attention, let alone talkability, is the very essence of PR.
