What’s next? - The Challenges for Cross-Media

This book brought me here: the Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR

Let me introduce you to a book first: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.

This book brought me here, London, England, put me in a classroom where I learned more information than I had ever before.

When I wanted to transform my career, I asked my friends for advice, and one of them showed me this book. I thought that its Chinese name is much more attractive: PR first, advertising second.

It sounds so interesting, who wouldn’t want work in an industry with a golden future? So I chose PR as my major.

The authors credit PR, not advertising, for the marketing successes of Starbucks, The Body Shop, Harry Potter etc.

It created plenty of debates, although half of them are about advertising, but I do agree with the author’s view that PR is about building the brand.

How do you build a Cross-Media brand?

What are the Challenges?

First of all, this landscape provides challenges and opportunities.

• Structure

Some old-fashioned organisational structures still exist, but some have changed already.

From the picture below, you can see that BBC attempts to build its Cross-Media brand.

One and a half years ago, BBC launched its Creative Future content strategy and announced significant organisational changes.

These changes were aimed to ‘enable 360 degree commissioning and production and ensure creative coherence and editorial leadership across all platforms and media.’

BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said:

"We need a BBC ready for digital and for 360 degree multi-platform content creation, which brings different kinds of creativity together – in technology as well as content – to deliver what we need in this converging world.”(BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/07_july/19/future.shtml

From this example, we can see that companies like the BBC have recognised the challenges in a changing industry and have made changes to its structure to operate more efficiently in a global world.

• The Creative Power

The Creative Power is another big issue. It's easy to talk about a “Big Idea”.

But how can we inspire an exchange of storytelling practices?

How can we use media creatively to reach our audiences?

And how can we unleash the creative talents to building the Cross-Media’s brand?

This is one the beauties of Cross-Media.

If you want to be creative using the Cross-Media, it is necessary to change your way of thinking. Not only do you have to come up with a big idea, but you also have to think how it applies to different types of media and how they interact with each other.

• Measurement

How do you measure the success of a Cross-Media campaign?

It is a new challenge to an old problem.

The solution is to develop Cross-Media research tools.

Yesterday, the latest news of The World Association of Newspapers was that they have 'launched a new website to support and promote the use of cross-media audience measurements that will allow publishers to provide a more complete picture of their reach than print circulation alone.' (Editors Weblog) http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2008/01/web_site_launched_for_crossmedia_measure.php


What's next?

Let's wait and see…

I believe that the future of PR must be cross-platform and multi-platform, and PR practitioners should take full advantage of the new range of platforms. As I commented on my classmate Ha’s blog:


“After all, it is people and not technology leading PR trends.”


By the way, because all BlogSpot blogs are blocked in China (which is another political PR problem of Google in China), so I will post my entries on my Chinese Blog (www.yitingxu.com)

I will try to keep it alive and post in English as well as Chinese.