PR Salon #2: Report and pics

Last week the second edition of PR salon took place at Pakhuis de Zwijger. Despite the unusual heat wave in The Netherlands, the event was a great success. The evening kicked off with a presentation by Stephen Corlett, Managing Director of 180Amsterdam who was the first, but certainly not the last to make the statement that… the old, traditional press release is dead. For him, everything is PR as long as it is interesting.

Peter von Satzger, PR Director at MTV Europe joined us from Stockholm to give his take on PR without frontiers. The worst assignment for him is to receive a boring press release that has nothing to do with the European market. His solution is to ignore the release completely and to find another exciting way to appeal to his target audience. Dressing yourself in a meat dress, putting on weird make-up, finding the only living Sangpur tree and funding its survival, all can be seen as PR and is way more interesting than a press release.

Stein Janssen, Head of Strategy at BSUR showed the impressive 3,5 minutes film L’Odyssee de Cartier as an example of a global campaign that at the same time managed to appeal to specific cultures. The audience questioned, however, whether splashing around so much cash to create a grandiose film and throwing in some cultural icons, was a way to make this a PR campaign an international success.

Alexandra Kedward, PR director at Philips Consumer Lifestyle closed of the evening with two excellent case studies: Les Sims and the Philips Wake-Up light. The computer game Les Sims was to announce an update, which in itself wasn’t very exciting. A social media Sims campaign parodying the French elections spiced things up and the campaign was widely covered alongside the actual elections. The Sims campaign, for Kedward, was a great example of an internationally appealing concept, which is easily adapted to country level. Kerrie Finch, from FinchFactor has done a tremendous job moderating the panel discussion as the audience fired up questions to the panelists.

The main learning to take away from the PR Salon #2 is: in order to successfully communicate across borders, don’t limit yourself. Be creative, brave and replace boring informational copy of the press release with a real, touching story.