WHY EVERY PR CAMPAIGN NEEDS A SUMMER HOLIDAY

Have you ever thought about the inspiration for the very best PR campaign? Perhaps the immediate image that springs to mind is a PR agency boardroom full of stressed executives wracking their brains for a brilliant idea? The reality is that in today’s agency world, the creation of the very best PR campaign is much more fluid. Often snippets from TikTok are shared on WhatsApp, or digital news feeds pinged over LinkedIn, or quick pics of things we’ve spotted on the street shared on Teams.

Inspiration comes from everywhere and when you’re heartland is digital PR, your campaign ideas need to be shareable. For us, as we head “back to school” this September, we’re actually using our summer holidays as inspiration for upcoming digital PR campaigns.

Why? Roll back hundreds if not thousands of years and we know that information was passed down through storytelling, and so stories are the lifeblood of good communications. Those stories are rooted in real life because it’s authentic, relatable, and emotionally resonant material. People remember stories!

Fast forward to today and not a lot has changed. Real-life experiences are a goldmine for effective PR campaigns. Whether it’s a customer interaction, a random moment on your commute, or a holiday experience that sticks with you, the world around you can inspire PR that feels more human and hits closer to home.

So how do we turn our summer holidays into PR campaign gold?

1. Listen and Observe

You’re never going to be inspired if you spend all your free time head down checking your emails on your phone. The best ideas come from looking up, listening and watching the world around you. It’s the very best way to find stories. Here are a few examples:

Booking your trip: Listen to how you are explaining what you want from your holiday. What’s important to you? What you are struggling with. These are all important points to you as a customer and so they’re great angles for PR.

Reviews and comments on the hotel you’ve booked: We’ve all scoured Tripadvisor looking at the comments and reviews, but what is it about that product or service that people love? And what is frustrating them? Again they can act as inspiration for the very best PR campaign ideas.

Sunbed Surveillance: What are those two people in the pool talking about? What stories are they sharing and why? This can help identify what kind of stories are shareable. Look closely at the people sharing them. What’s their demographic and what type of language are they using?

These moments reveal more than research ever could. They help you tap into emotion, which is the core driver of effective brand PR.

2. Find the Human Element

We live in a scroll-heavy, marketing-saturated world. What cuts through? Being human.

The most liked and shared social posts are in fact those awkward moments, funny encounters, or even failures. As a brand PR, how can we use these moments to humanise our story telling? Was there an experience where we failed but it lead to something new, better and exciting? Did someone on your team discover a creative hack by accident? Or, did a customer share a story that made you look at your service differently? It’s the human element of these events that lead to great PR campaigns.

3. Draw from Emotions

Not every campaign needs to be groundbreaking. Sometimes, ordinary emotions as a result of the mundane day-to-day have a wealth of campaign power in them. The frustration of forgetting your wallet or finding euros in your passport from your last holiday. The comfort of a familiar route to a holiday destination, or the smell as your arrive. Tying your brand to these simple but universal experiences helps your PR campaign connect without the hard sell.

4. Be a Story Collector

Rather than waiting until your on the spot and have to come up with a great idea for a client brief, why not collect stories in advance. We have story banks for many of our digital PR clients. These are moments, quotes or quirky observations that directly fit the client brand and brief. From overheard conversations to daily observations, we may not need to use these stories immediately but we can review and draw upon them when we need to. Over time, these fragments form a rich archive of potential campaign material.

We use a Teams channel to easily gather and share thoughts but you can use a notes app, a physical journal, or even a shared team board.

5. Test the Vibe

OK, so we have lots of ideas but how can we turn it into a really successful PR campaign? The vibe test is whether the idea makes sense. Would those two people talk about it whilst chatting in the swimming pool? Would you stop scrolling if you saw it in your feed? Does it feel real, genuine, authentic? As we review our ideas and develop PR campaign creative, we look back to real life to make sure our ideas are on the right track.

So, here’s a task. Why don’t you look back over your summer and search for the creative inspiration. It could be the headline act at a music festival, holiday clothes shopping, that mosquito bite or your friend’s sunburn. Great PR campaigns don’t have to start in a strategy document, they start in life, because great communications is life, just filtered.