GLOBAL: Effective campaigns increasingly have PR baked into their channel strategies, according to a new WARC report which analyses the most effective campaigns from around the world.

The report, WARC 100: Lessons from the world’s best marketing campaigns, analyses the world’s top effectiveness campaigns as ranked by the WARC 100, to uncover shared creative, media and measurement strategies.

The 2018 study found that PR is an increasingly prevalent part of the cross-media strategies of campaigns in the WARC 100, with creative and channel strategies often revolving around a highly PR-able element.

The past year has seen an increase in the use of word-of-mouth marketing and public relations in the mix, both versus last year’s WARC 100 (45% vs 38%) and overindexing compared to the rest of the cases published (45% vs 26%).

Half of the campaigns in the top 10 used PR to great effect, with the Australian Transport Accident Commission’s Meet Graham campaign a prime example.

The ‘indestructible human’ model who was central to the campaign was designed to attract maximum coverage through PR, and was a hugely successful campaign both in terms of measurement against campaign objectives, and in award wins.

In a highly cluttered advertising environment, it could be argued, creative platforms need to work increasingly hard to maximise earned as well as paid media, and having a highly PR-able idea is one way to achieve this.

Research from the ANA has shown that a majority of marketers plan to increase staffing and spend on public relations over the next five years – a development attributed to both the rise of digital communications channels, which bring PR and marketing much closer together within brands, and the increasing importance of integration and consistency across campaigns.

WARC now publishes the winners of the SABRE Awards, the world’s largest PR awards programme, delivered by The Holmes Report and recognising superior achievement in branding and reputation in North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, South Asia and Africa.

Sourced from WARC