Global Voices of PR: Injecting Creativity Into PR Campaigns

There’s a real risk that, after working with a PR agency for multiple years, PR campaigns can start to feel stale. Even in the technology sector, a hive of innovation and change, it still happens. One of the simplest solutions from an in-house PR manager’s perspective (and very commonly deployed) is to switch agencies in the hope that an entirely new team will bring fresh thinking and drive better results. 

But, in doing so, all the knowledge and experience built up by the current agency is lost. All those relationships between the agency and the client’s senior team are broken. Those finely-tuned ways of working are gone. 

My view is that striking a balance between agency stability and a constant stream of new ideas and creativity delivers the best result. So, how does that work? What can the agency do to be creative? What can you do as that in-house PR leader to foster new innovations? 

A tight client-agency relationship

Our agency network is made up of 14 tech-focussed PR agencies and hundreds of tech PR professionals so I’m blessed with expert insights. Louay Al Samarrai, co-founder and joint Managing Director of our Middle East agency, Active DMC, believes that the agency and client working together is the vital ingredient to creativity. He says:

“Creativity in PR campaigns is a 50:50 effort between the agency and the client. We love coming up with new ideas. A few years ago, we developed a plan to display our client’s name across the entire 800-meter height of the Burj Khalifa on New Year’s Eve! As you can imagine, the campaign results were incredible.

We’ve developed some fantastic ideas that go far beyond the usual press release or byliner approach. But these ideas also require commitment from the client side to bring them to life.

Creative campaigns need a client-side contact who is willing to champion the idea internally. They need to be committed to the process—because it’s going to be a lot of work for them too.

They’ve got their day job, managing the day-to-day campaign, and now we’re handing creative ideas over the fence to them. They have to help manage and push those ideas forward. So part of the answer to great creativity is having a client who is equally committed.”

Louay also tells me that budgets within tech companies are often siloed, with separate allocations for PR, marketing, field marketing, sales, and so this also needs to tackled:

“To project a logo onto the side of the world’s tallest tower, for example, you may need funding from the field marketing team—so that needs to be factored in. It’s a different pool of money. As a PR manager, you might have great ideas coming to you from the agency, but you’ll often need to tap into multiple budget lines to make them happen.”

Louay also suggests a gradual approach to injecting creativity can help:

“Start with a small idea. Take a phased approach—build it out slowly and see if you can open budgets and approvals step by step. As a partner, we’ll deliver those smaller campaigns flawlessly and that gives us the opportunity to go bigger next time.”

The echo chamber kills creativity

Jocelyn Hunter, founder and CEO of BENCH PR, our member agency for Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, suggests that the key to unlocking creativity often lies in gathering multiple data points and listening to multiple voices.

“It’s really important for PR teams to talk to sales—not just to tech company leaders. The sales team is often closest to the customer, so they understand the pain points that help us craft relevant storylines.

Informal catch-ups with journalists and influencers are another valuable source of insight. It’s incredibly helpful to have relaxed conversations with them about what they’re interested in and the trends they’re seeing in the market. We can then feed that intelligence back to clients and steer PR campaigns in new directions.

It also helps to read ‘everything’. Our teams monitor the news daily, looking for fresh angles to introduce into our campaigns. Newsjacking has always been effective, especially for smaller companies that might otherwise struggle to make an impact in the media.

Creativity needs data—and it needs outside voices. You can’t keep talking only to your client and expect new ideas to flow.”

Injecting creativity into tech PR campaigns

At a practical level, here are seven tips of my own for generating new campaign ideas:      

• Discovery Exercise The agency conducts interviews with your senior leadership team annually to uncover fresh ideas, emerging narratives, and new opportunities.
• Biannual Planning and Review Cycle Set aside dedicated time every six months for a strategic review. This allows for clear thinking, separate from the demands of day-to-day campaign management.
• Formal Brainstorming Sessions – Organised sessions with attendees from across the business and agency focused solely on idea generation. This can help spark fresh perspectives and challenge the status quo.
• Gradual Team Refresh – Asking the agency to bring in one or two new faces every couple of years, while maintaining core team continuity, helps introduce new thinking without disrupting established knowledge.
• Internal team campaign reviews – it can be really helpful if the agency can share campaign plans and results with other team members within their own agency to review them and spot opportunities to do something differently. 
• Real-Time Opportunity Scanning – Both you and the agency should monitor the news constantly for breaking stories and trending issues that might serve as a platform for a new PR campaign. 
• Tell the agency what you are working on – agencies can’t work in silos away from you and your colleagues. If you can make update calls two-way and interactive, it’s quite possible the agency can spot opportunities and add value to an activity you already have planned or is underway. 

Injecting creativity into PR campaigns isn’t about tearing everything down and starting fresh with a new agency every few years—it’s about building a collaborative, insight-driven relationship that constantly evolves.