The new PR International Business Handbook was developed through a collaboration between Creative Culture’s network of over 2,000

cultural experts in 110 countries and ICCO’s network of over 3,000 agencies across 66 countries.

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Melanie Chevalier, CEO, Creative Culture writes:

In the globalised world of PR, it can sometimes be difficult to navigate

different business and cultural environments. This handbook will provide PR

practitioners around the world with key information for

conducting international business; highlighting the extremely

important, but often overlooked, details that will help your

business relationships with foreign stakeholders run smoothly.

 

In a globalised world, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t get

you anywhere. To ensure success, you’ll need to spend time

getting to know your local audiences – such as their

environment (political, cultural, social and economic), and their

likes and dislikes, for example, in order to understand what works

and what doesn’t. The latter, in many ways, is often more important.

 

Global communications are littered with examples of cultural

blunders, which in many cases, have led to damaging years

of crisis management and brand re-building. Knowing how to

position and communicate around a brand, product or service, in

a way that is understood by the target audience, is vital to success.

However great your USP or message appears to be, it

doesn’t necessarily always cross boundaries in the same

way. First, you need to understand the international

challenges and devise a strategy to overcome these.

Then you need to decide which channels to use. Where

does the local audience watch, listen or consume media, and

how is that particular media landscape structured? These

answers will, no doubt, differ from market to market.

 

Demand ICCO’s members, spread across 66 different countries,

have galvanised the production of this unique handbook, bringing together both the

key information you need to understand each market’s political,

linguistic and cultural nuances, as well as examples of recent

campaigns that have demonstrated a good understanding and

articulation of communication requirements for key markets.

 

Creative Culture, working with ICCO’s network and our own network of over 2,000

cultural experts in 110 countries, and utilising our 10 years

of experience in advising, developing and managing

communication strategies for a wide-ranging group of brands,

we hereby present essential information on 61 countries.

 

The information within is easy to navigate and designed to

provide the essential, top line, level of knowledge for each market.

The handbook is constantly updated to remain current,

in light of ever-changing political and media landscapes.

In some instances, you may require deeper and more bespoke

intelligence into a market, sector and/or culture. If

this is the case, we can provide this tailored insight,

with fast turnaround, and in-the-moment knowledge,

through our expertise both centrally and locally.

Please contact us or ICCO so we can understand

the exact and bespoke insight that you require.

We hope you find this handbook useful and please

let us know if there is anything else you would like

to see included or amended in the following issues.

Grzegorz Szczepanski has been elected as Vice-President of ICCO (International Communications Consultancy Organisation).

The long-time industry leader fought off competition from four rivals to win the position which he will assume in October 2019. He will serve as Vice-President for two years before becoming ICCO President in October 2021.

Szczepanski is currently CEO, Hill + Knowlton Strategies Poland, having held senior positions at Burson-Marsteller, Edelman, UniCredit, and Heineken. He is the founder and first President of the Polish Public Relations Consultancies Association (ZFPR), which he brought into the ICCO network in 2001. In 2016 Szczepanski began a second period as ZFPR President.

The role of ICCO President is to lead the strategic vision and direction of the organisation, uniting a diverse membership around the most critical global PR issues. Szczepanski’s message to ICCO members focused on consolidating and reclaiming PR professionals’ position as reputation management experts that impactfully communicate truth. Szczepanski says:

“I believe PR professionals are destined to play a decisive role in shaping a stable future for humanity. As ICCO’s future President, I would focus on communicating the strong value proposition we offer to businesses, governments and the general public, enabling us to more frequently win our deserved seat in the most meaningful decision-making forums, both globally and regionally.”

Current President Elise Mitchell, representing PR Council, USA will finish her tenure in October and Nitin Mantri, President of the Public Relations and Communications Association of India (PRCAI), will move from the ICCO Vice-Presidency to the President seat, which he will occupy for the next two years. On Grzegorz’s victory, Nitin said:

“It is a great pleasure to welcome Grzegorz Szczepanski as ICCO’s new Vice- President for the next two years. Grzegorz is one of the most experienced PR professionals in Europe, with an illustrious 25-year career. I am looking forward to working alongside him to advance our profession and grow ICCO’s services to members”.

Over the past three weeks ICCO board members representing 66 countries across their national and regional associations have been voting for two ICCO Officer positions.

The second of these is the Treasurer, who serves on the Executive Committee as well as exercising supervision over the organisation’s financial affairs. Alison Clarke for the PRCA in the UK was elected into this role, which she too will assume in October, replacing Andrey Barannikov, CEO, SPN Communications.

ICCO Chief Executive Francis Ingham said of the results:
“The ICCO Board has been blessed with some outstanding leaders over recent times, who continue to drive our ever-expanding organisation and I look forward to working with another. Grzegorz will bring a wealth of international experience and a fresh perspective when he becomes our first Polish Vice-President and later President.”

Jon Meakin – Chair, AMEC Agency Group, and Global Head of Strategic Services, Grayling

PR agency people are a strange breed – and I say that as a longstanding member of that tribe myself.

We are full of contradictions: Fiercely competitive with one another, and with rival agencies, but at the same time extremely fickle, very often willing to jump ship to one of those rivals for a fancy new title, a salary bump, or some other perceived advancement.

But throw a few folk from different agencies together in a bar, and with enough (ahem) lubrication we soon discover that our agencies aren’t so different, after all. We all struggle with the same pressures and challenges – attracting and retaining good staff, adapting to a rapidly and continually changing media landscape, maintaining profitability when clients are expected to do more with less… not to mention the egos, the personalities, the petty politics. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying: “Same sh*t, different logo”.

That is not to say agencies do not cultivate distinct cultures, value propositions and services – they do. But let’s face it: There is much more that unites us than divides us.

Giving it all away

One common gripe in the agency world is the expectation that we should pitch for free. And it’s true, an awful lot of work goes into every new business pitch. Tens of thousands in staff hours, as well as hard costs, and an expectation that we should effectively give away our strategic thinking and our best creative ideas for free, in the hope that we will be appointed following an often long and torturous pitch process.

Personally, I think that’s just the cost of doing business. You have to speculate to accumulate, and there are plenty of other industries where much more is invested in speculative sales pitches.

But what I do find bizarre is that once we have been hired, we often continue to give away our most valuable strategic thinking – voluntarily.

I’m talking about measurement and evaluation.

Recognizing the value of our efforts

I’m making a generalization here, but for the most part, measurement and evaluation is not something we do well in the PR profession.

For years I’ve seen “measurement and evaluation” lumped in with “account management” during the budgeting process, and that part of the budget squeezed to a minimum because we want to devote as much of the budget as possible to execution. And then the “measurement” actually ends up being little more than “reporting”, invariably left to an intern or junior account executive to do little more than count clippings and calculate “total reach” in some backward-looking report that we call an evaluation, but actually isn’t.

Sound familiar?

Why are so many of us so afraid to budget for, and undertake real evaluation, that analyses outcomes and impacts, and not merely outputs? That becomes the basis for informing future strategies instead of simply being a look back at recent history? That acknowledges what has not worked, as well as what has, so that we can make intelligent decisions and continually improve?

PR: The poor relation

There are probably as many reasons for this as there are agencies, but it mostly boils down to a few key factors:

Firstly, we (and our clients) are prisoners of our own experience – we’ve always done things in a certain way, so there is a resistance to change.

Secondly, there is a skills question. When I and my peers came up through the profession, the importance of writing was drummed into us above all else. And we continue to recruit in our own image, hiring wordsmiths when we also need data scientists (as well as coders, film-makers, graphic designers…).

And then there’s the question of budget, which is a circular one: PR budgets are often modest, so we don’t set aside budget to measure and evaluate, and therefore we can’t prove whether what we did worked or not, so budgets remain small… and so it goes on. And PR remains the poor relation of the marketing mix.

It’s time to break that cycle.

Common Ground

It’s time to acknowledge that in the area of measurement and evaluation, perhaps more than any other, we have much in common, and much to learn from each other, if we could but check our egos and put aside those rivalries.

I am proud to be spearheading ‘Common Ground’, a new initiative by AMEC (The Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) to further the adoption of best practice measurement and evaluation within the PR agency sector.

How are we going to achieve that? By creating a forum through which agency people can speak to, and learn from each other, in a non-competitive environment.

Radical? Maybe. Bonkers? I think not. No, I firmly believe we all have something to learn from each other. There are so many issues common to all agencies: How to persuade clients (especially those with modest resources) to invest in measurement and evaluation? How much should that investment be? Is there a minimum?

How do you bring about a change of culture within your agency, to embrace the value and importance of robust measurement and evaluation? In particular, how do evaluation advocates within agencies persuade colleagues to ‘sacrifice’ a proportion of a client’s fee to allocate to measurement and evaluation? And how much should that be, especially for smaller clients?

How can we educate clients and move them away from old-fashioned models and metrics?

How do you measure effectively for clients on a shoestring budget?

How do you build an in-house measurement or insights practice from the ground up?

Which measurement and evaluation companies are best for what sort of client? Which tools are best used for which metrics?

How can we stop measurement being backward-looking, and make evaluation a forward-looking planning tool, prescriptive rather than descriptive?

Time to show our hand

Why should agencies give away their ‘secret sauce’ to their competitors? News flash: There is no secret sauce.

Different agencies certainly approach measurement and evaluation in slightly different ways, but the principles are the same. Best practice exists – and is freely available on the AMEC website for any agency that wants to adopt it.

And if you don’t believe me, ask my peers at Fleishman-Hillard, Golin, H+K, Ketchum, Mischief, The RED Consultancy… they are all in on the Common Ground initiative, and want to share their knowledge, their skills and their experience for the benefit of the whole profession.

Through AMEC, we will be organizing events and sharing content in the coming months, in London, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Dubai and elsewhere. For details check the AMEC website or drop me an email – we’d love to have you involved.

It’s time to come together to raise the standard of measurement and evaluation throughout the PR agency world. Let’s find that common ground, and build upon it.

If you would like to get involved in the AMEC Agency Group’s Common Ground initiative, please email AMEC Agency Group chair, Jon Meakin jon.meakin@grayling.com, or AMEC managing director, Johna Burke johna@amecorg.com.

Visit the House of PR at Cannes Lions Festival on Wednesday 19th June at 11am to join a discussion about the Common Ground initiative.

Don’t Cry Wolf have become the first ever start up agency to be a platinum sponsor of ICCO’s House of PR at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. They join WE Communications and FlieshmanHillard as the first three to confirm for the 2019 festival.

Francis Ingham, Chief Executive, ICCO said

“For the past five years, the ICCO House of PR has offered PR pros at Cannes a base to come together and exchange ideas on creativity. Previously, it’s only been global agencies that have been present here -so it’s fantastic to welcome the presence of our first-ever start up agency official sponsor. Don-t Cry Wolf -a true leader of the pack.”

John Brown, Founder and CEO, Don’t Cry Wolf has said

“It’s not just about the rosé!”

“We’ve got something to share about how creativity can, and should, be nurtured with social good in mind. Also, we want to discuss how a creative agency can be run with a net positive impact on the environment and society.

So, we’ll be curating a day at Cannes Lions where Don’t Cry Wolf and some of our B Corp buddies, both agency and brand side, will be taking the stage to talk about creating campaigns with an eye on improving society. We’ll also explore purpose washing and how organisations have to change their setup first before they start banging on about positive outcomes.”

ICCO will be rallying the industry once again at our Cannes Uncovered event on 30th January to preview changes to Cannes in 2019 and provide some expert advice for judges to ensure PR winners across the board in June. Details here.

The House of PR is the independent hub for PR professionals at Cannes Lions to meet, work, relax, learn, and have fun. Attracting the biggest names in PR throughout the week, it’s also a perfect cost-effective way to host your own events, workshops, seminars, drinks receptions, or showcase work and technology in the heart of the festival.
This year we have a space that is five times bigger, allowing for larger events, displays, and workshops. ICCO is an official sponsor of Cannes Lions giving the House of PR sponsors exposure, credibility, and a direct connection with the competition.

For more information of the ICCO House of PR at Cannes Lions 2019 contact rob.morbin@iccopr.com