WHAT MAKES A CREATIVE PR AGENCY?

Every PR agency says it’s creative. Spend ten minutes looking through agency websites and you’ll see the same promises: big ideas, cut-through campaigns and award-winning creativity. Being a creative PR agency won’t set you apart anymore. 

So what does? 

We don’t think it’s louder campaigns or bigger brainstorms. The agencies that consistently produce work people remember follow a tried and tested formula.  

A good creative PR agency starts its thinking with a strong narrative platform. This is marketing speak for an umbrella theme that all stories work towards. If it’s not there, you work with your clients to define it. From “fighting fast fashion” to “making chocolate exploitation-free”, focusing creativity behind a singular thought definitely makes for a sharper creative and something that’s distinct from the next stunt or activation. 

Then it’s about tracking what’s going on in the world, in the media, in the public’s consciousness, to find the right moment for an idea to happen. A creative PR agency will be good at spotting these moments. It could be a hot summer or cold winter, a political debate or celebrity shenanigans. These moments produce both spontaneous and planned opportunities to be creative.  

Finally, it’s ensuring that any idea has a genuine human insight and then building a campaign that’s so simple people instantly get it. 

That sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often agencies start with the idea and try to make it fit the brand afterwards. That creates stories that don’t hang around for very long. 

So where should great ideas start? 

Before we think about creative PR campaigns, we always start with our narrative platform by simply asking one question: what do we want people to think about this brand? Not next week or after one campaign, but over the next few years. 

This thought runs through everything we do, from product stories and reactive media to creative campaigns and company news. Without this, it’s just a series of headlines that don’t add up to much. 

Take our work with Del Monte. 

Before we started throwing ideas around, we knew the story we wanted to keep building: fresh fruit as part of the moments people love most. 

That became our filter. Every idea had to help tell that story. If it did, we explored it. If it didn’t, we moved on. 

Find the right moment 

Once you know the story you’re trying to tell, it’s much easier to spot the moments where your brand naturally belongs. 

For Del Monte, that’s exactly how we landed on Wimbledon. Del Monte has supported British tennis for years through partnerships with the LTA and leading British players, so this wasn’t a case of jumping on a summer trend. Tennis was already part of the brand’s DNA. 

We just needed to find a way to make the brand part of the experience but staying true to all things fruit. 

Look for the insight 

Every year, thousands of tennis fans queue outside Wimbledon for hours in the hope of getting tickets. The world understands this, so we focused on the queue. 

What would actually make standing in that queue a little better? We asked 1000 people and surprisingly, we saw that 40% of Brits would happily have their hair cut ready for the day ahead, while they waited. 

Then we looked back at the product. 

It was called Fresh Cuts. 

Everything suddenly fell into place. 

The audience wanted fresh cuts. Del Monte already had Fresh Cuts. We just had to bring the two together. 

Keep it simple 

One thing we’ve learnt over the years is that the strongest ideas are usually the easiest to explain. We always say that if you can tell someone about it while making a cup of tea, you’re probably onto something. 

So, simple ideas make good stories. Journalists get them. Consumers share them. Someone mentions them over dinner, at the school gates or down the pub, and before you know it, the campaign has taken on a life of its own. 

That’s exactly what happened with Fresh Cuts. 

We created a fully functioning barbershop just steps from the Wimbledon queue, where celebrity hairstylist Tobias Bell gave fans free tennis-inspired trims while they waited. We were, of course, also handing out Del Monte Fresh Cuts fruit pots, giving tennis fans a fresh haircut and a fresh snack before they even made it through the gates 

We could explain the whole campaign in a sentence or two, and that’s one of the reasons why it worked so well. 

This simple idea wasn’t just a clever play on words. It brought together Del Monte’s long-standing support of British tennis, the belief that fresh food should be part of the moments people love most, and an audience insight that made the Wimbledon queue a little more enjoyable 

The result was more than 30 pieces of media coverage across titles including Metro, The Sun and The Grocer. Tobias Bell’s social content alone achieved more than 60,000 views and over 600 engagements, taking the campaign far beyond the Wimbledon queue. 

Best of all, it was what we call “low lift, high impact”, a cost-effective creative PR idea that was easy to implement, fun, engaging and fitted the brief perfectly. 

For us, this is what makes a creative PR agency stand out. Not bigger ideas but better thinking, because the best campaigns begin with understanding the brand, understanding people and finding the point where the two naturally come together. 

Get that right and the headlines usually take care of themselves.