Blog - plain talk

This year put many public relations professionals to the test, seeing just how quickly they can think on their feet and react. While we weren’t prepared for this scenario, this year has reiterated to many companies the importance of a crisis communications plan. You can’t plan for every potential scenario, but having an overall plan is important. It helps your business handle an emergency situation effectively. Here are some insights and examples of successful crisis communication planning.

We are surrounded by photographs pretty much every waking minute that we are using any type of communication device these days. In the realm of social media, photographs, and video content rule the platforms. Let’s dive a bit further into the subject of taking photos for social media. (Well, I’m not sure that I would be considered a photography legend, but I certainly have had and I am having a wonderful career in this visual world that we live in.) I am the Managing Director of the Content Creation Studio at PriceWeber. I work in photography, advertising, and social media pretty much every day of my life. I am going to share five tips for taking great photographs for social media.

A casual reader looking at spirit sales numbers for 2020 might think it’s a pretty good year. After all, in July, Nielsen indicated a 52-week rolling sales increase of 5.1%. But those numbers do not tell the whole story. Overrepresentation in sales increases by the larger, high-awareness brands and well-known value brands, and stocking up (or hoarding) has potentially skewed the figures for months to come. Of greater concern is that off-premise stock-ups and at-home consumption may lead to spirit brands feeling more like commodities than before. Another concern is that the worst on-premise closures since Prohibition are straining the sales and brand value of many spirit brands. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll look at four strategies brands can use for their spirits marketing and how to overcome the effect of critical on-premise losses.

While most of the world is in quarantine and practicing social distancing, one social media platform has continued to maintain a rapid growth in downloads, especially in the U.S. According to Sensor Tower’s report, 2019’s second most downloaded app worldwide, TikTok, saw an 18% increase in downloads, tallying the number to 2 million between March 16 and 22, compared to the previous week at 1.7 million.

In this edition of our Plain Talk series, we’ll examine brand trust and corporate social responsibility and discuss how the two are interacting during the current COVID-19 global crisis. We’re exploring the ways smart brands continue to communicate and build trust with consumers from a physical distance.

As marketing professionals with years of experience, we’ve all learned to trust, to some degree, that little voice inside our heads that tells us when we may have stumbled across an idea that could be genius. Intuition. Inspiration. The gap in time and space where the magic happens. Creatives in our industry thrive on honing their intuition to drive new ideas and break new creative ground. But in today’s highly fragmented and diverse customer universe, many brands find out the hard way that real insight must guide intuition. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll noodle some cautionary instances where a well-written research and insight development plan could have saved brands a lot of money and heartache on controversial ads and promotions.

Ad dollars are on the move in the financial space—increasingly shifting from traditional to digital, specifically to mobile. While financial services have historically relied on more traditional vehicles, times are indeed changing. In this edition of the Compound Interest series, we’ll discuss why it is time to look at digital ads for financial services and how to do it.

Influencer marketing has become a digital monster. Are you doing it? Are you doing it wrong? Should you be doing it at all? If so, how and under what circumstances? In this edition of the Plain Talk series, we’ll take some of the mystery out of influencer marketing and dispel a few myths along the way. First, let’s talk about the money.

If you’ve been advertising online for any amount of time, you’re probably already pretty familiar with a couple of the most common ways to run ads on the web. In this installment of Plain Talk, we’ll break down dynamic search ads vs responsive search ads and what they can do for you.

In today’s Plain Talk newsletter, we’re talking about corporate social responsibility initiatives. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans’ trust in the federal government to handle both international and domestic matters is at the lowest point it has been in more than twenty years. Only 35 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the U.S. government’s ability to handle domestic issues. Meanwhile, trust in the government to handle international issues ranks only six points higher at a mere 41 percent.