Oli Sweet leads Ipsos’s ethnography department. His researchers venture deep into the lives of the people they're studying, armed with cameras so they can discover things they'd never find out though surveys.

Oli talks to Liton about how ethnography works, how it’s used in PR and how you can do it on a budget.

🐶 How Mars Petcare boosted its sales by millions when Oli’s team found out why people weren’t buying pet food in South America.

🥴 How spending time with underage street drinkers taught Oli (and his clients) more about how young people behave.

🪧 Why the empathy gap means traditional communications approaches to tackling obesity is all wrong and based around fat-shaming.

💬 The say-do gap in research and how to get past the fact that people aren’t always right when they answer surveys.

🕵️ Why backing up your ideas for good stories with evidence leads to success in PR.

💞 Why empathy is so important for brands.

💰 How to talk to your clients about getting a research budget.

📰 Using ethnographic research to come up with news stories.

GUEST - OLIVER SWEET

Oliver Sweet leads Ipos Moris’ Ethnography Centre of Excellence. Find out more about Oli’s work at www.ipsos-ece.com - where you’ll find eye-opening ethnography videos.

You’ll find Oli’s story about dogs in South America written up here: http://www.ipsos-ece.com/style/pdfs/mrs-impact-top-dogs.pdf

PRESENTER - Liton Ali

Liton Ali is director of Henshall Centre www.henshallcentre.com

Find him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/henshallcentre

🧮 As a professional communicator today, you can't just rely on getting messages across through words and pictures. You also need a proper grasp on numbers and data so you can base your stories on real insights.

Kristian Foged's company Simply Thought helps agencies add data analytics and insights, strategic planning, and measurement and evaluation services to their offering. He's also well known for his work with BME PR Pros and serves as a member of the Blueprint Advisory Board.

Kristian was part of the team that set up Archetype's insights and analytics practice and his career highlights the emerging career path agencies need to start building alongside traditional roles. In this episode, Liton talks to Kristian about the specialist services his new company offers and how demand for the skills involved is growing.

Kristian also talks about the power professional communicators have when it comes to activism and issues - not just to put a nice spin on external stories, but to influence internal change.

TOPICS COVERED

📊 Why is the ability to crunch numbers and analyse data an overlooked skill for PR and communication people?

🔬 How research-based insights and data are vital to successful creative ideas and why you should validate your ideas.

💷 How to go about using research, data analysis and measurement tools when you don't have much of a budget to put towards them.

🕵🏽‍♂️ Audience understanding and analysis is a vital part of PR, so you can't just follow your gut instinct and mustn't assume that your audience is you.

📈 How Kristian helps agencies with new business by offering insights, analytics and measurement as a plug-in service.

🤖 Why agencies should look to automation to improve the things they're doing rather than fill in gaps in areas they don't understand.

Simply Thought: https://simplythought.co/

Kristian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kristian_Foged

Paul Cockerton is known as a creative genius, having set up various successful businesses including Dynamo PR and Any Question Answered - an SMS service that answered our weird questions long before Alexa and Siri were born. He’s responsible for a lot of award winning campaigns for all sorts of brands and now leads Clarity PR’s services for tech start-ups.

Liton asks Paul (@pcockerton) about his creative process and about what he’s learned from his award winning PR work over the years.

TOPICS

💡How Paul and his team come up with ideas.

👂How important it is to be present and engaged in what’s going on in your client’s world.

🎯 Why effective creativity in PR doesn’t mean trying to be original.

💌 Audience empathy is the most important part of creativity.

🌟The story behind HTC’s gold-plated phone launch with its own security guard.

⁉️ How the creative thinking behind Any Question Answered was based around the audience’s real needs.

☝️Why you should look up more often.

💥 How tension drives creativity - you need to use the tension between process and free thinking.

🖖 Why diversity is so important to a successful creative PR team.

🧑🏽‍🤝‍🧑🏽 How Paul’s team collaborated remotely during the pandemic.

🖼️ How images make a huge difference when pitching creative ideas to clients.

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Find out more about Paul and his work by following him on Twitter - @pcockerton and reading www.clarity.pr.

Radioactive is an an agency known for getting amazing results with creative PR ideas. In this episode Liton asks Angharad Planells, head of client success at Radioactive, to give away some of the secrets behind their creative campaigns.

🧰 Hear about some of the tools Angharad and her team use in the creative process.

🤼 Learn how her team divides up tasks going into a creative project and why they don’t start at the brainstorm stage.

🎁 How Angharad persuades clients to get behind creative ideas.

☢️ What it’s like to work in partnership with ultra creative PR man Rich Leigh.

🌾 Why the most important thing to do is look at the problems your client solves and discover ‘a grain of truth’ to build a successful campaign.

💸 The stories behind The Instagram Rich List, the MoBros Beard Strokers campaign and more.

🧘🏽 Creativity doesn’t have to be big and wacky, there’s a big place for quiet creativity.

📈 Why asking for access to your clients Google analytics should be one of the first parts of your creative work.

📢 Why you should sometimes fight for ideas when your clients aren’t sure about them.

Sometimes you should brainstorm for fun, it helps with pitches.

Find out more about Agharad’s team’s work at www.radioactivepr.com and follow her on Twitter: @welsh_pr.

Martin Kavanagh is an occupational psychologist who helps companies make good choices when it comes to hiring people. His work involves using various assessments to help companies work out whether candidates will do well in the role they’ve applied for and if they’re likely to stick around.

💬 Why small talk in job interviews can lead to unconscious bias and why you should never asks things like ‘what keeps you awake at night?’

🤝 Why traditional structured interviews are better than casual chats over coffee.

🦄 The job descriptions we write aren’t always realistic or useful enough.

🏗️ The five building blocks of personality.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 How to avoid the ‘similar to me’ bias when hiring

🐐 Are personality test any more useful than zodiac signs?

⚖️ Why Myers-Briggs types shouldn’t be used for selecting new hires.

Journalist and media trainer Guy has been a nomadic worker for most of his career and wrote a book on the subject of flexible working - The Smarter Working Manifesto.

Guy also hosts The Near Futurist a podcast that explores how the world’s about to change, so he’s the perfect person to talk to as we all start to plan our transition to a new way of working - again.

We cover two main subjects: making smart choices about remote working as we get back to the office and how to be better at video meetings and calls.

EPISODE TOPICS

👩🏽‍💻 Rather than just working from a home or office, should we all become hyper-mobile, nomadic workers? Guy talks about why smarter working means choosing your place of work based on the activity you’re doing and looking beyond home and the office.

🎛 Technology’s not enough to enable hybrid working. While we were all expected to adapt mobile working because we had laptops and broadband, companies discovered that building a distributed team is more about culture and management.

😱 Will remote workers risk being isolated when we’re working as hybrid teams?

🏢 What’s the near future of the office as we start to go back into ‘normal’ working mode?

🧘🏾‍♀️ Flexible working was often something you only got to do when you reached a certain level - has this changed forever?

📹 Are we focusing on the medium more than the message with all this video-meeting?

🙋🏼 As he’s a presentation skills coach, Guy gives some advice on how you can improve the way you come across better on video meetings.

CCgroup’s Duncan McKean is on a mission to make tech and B2B Pr more creative. As leader of the agency’s deep tech team, he has spent much of the year working on improving the company’s creativity by coming up with processes, investing in learning and giving people the space they need to be creative. He discusses his team’s creative process with Liton and explains why creativity can’t start with a brainstorm.

👨🏻‍🚀 You need to help clients get past the inherent conservatism in B2B that may be stopping ideas.

🧗 Giving your team permission and opportunity to try things is one of the most important ways to boost your creativity.

🤼 Agencies should bring clients into the creative journey early and be collaborate with them.

📊 Creativity needs to be linked to objectives which help the client. You should be focusing on hard numbers, not just generating buzz or opportunities to see. It’s your job to help them build both fame *and* fortune

⌨️ Why writing is the start of making your agency more creative.

🧙🏿‍♂️ Storytelling is a fundamentally creative act that you need to use well when you’re dealing with particularly techy or businessy subjects.

🕵🏻‍♂️ Research is an essential part of being creative and doesn’t have to be expensive.

🦸🏽‍♀️To get your client to commit to creative ideas, you may need to involve people other than your regular contact.

You can find more about Duncan and his team at www.ccgrouppr.com.

Alex Lewington, chair of the PRCA’s recruitment forum talks to Liton about how the way an agency approaches hiring directly affects retention.

As an active recruitment consultant working with some of the best known agencies, she gives us inside information on what makes talented agency staff quit their jobs and what makes them stick around.

🗓Why annual review based promotions are a bad idea for staff and agencies.

🥰What agencies should focus on to retain staff.

💪🏽The most sought after skills on the agency market.

🧪How agencies can change the way they hire to get past gut-instinct decisions.

Alex is head of the PR team at recruitment consultancy Reuben Sinclair [www.Reuben-Sinclair.com](http://www.reuben-sinclair.com/) .

Visit www.henshallcentre.com/podcast for extended edit and video version.

As we all get ready for a hybrid model of home and office work, Empower’s co-founder tells us how his team builds relationships with clients from afar and deals with some of the challenges remote working creates.

PR consultant Emily Wearmouth joins Liton to talk about why emptying the dishwasher should go on your timesheet as a billable activity - in the right circumstances! With 20 years' experience working in PR agencies, she shares advice about how to avoid getting overwhelmed and why junior staff staff should say 'no' to their managers more often.