PRMuseum Summer School Series, 2019
Session X: Invention in PR
with Adam Ritchie, Principal, Adam Ritchie Brand Direction
The Invention in PR Summer School session at the Museum of Public Relations is part of an ongoing series of talks and articles by Adam Ritchie about using public relations to create new products and services. It addresses the reality that PR teams live or die based on products' successes, and advocates for them to take a stronger hand in their creation.
PR has earned its seat at the decision-making table. But another meeting happened before it arrived. Each time a communications team readies itself for a launch, the product or service has already been determined, developed and often packaged. Sometimes PR helps inform certain features, but it rarely makes the first step toward the drafting table. The profession can do better. It can go beyond promoting what it's handed and invent newsworthy offerings from the ground up.
Through award-winning case studies, participants learn how to apply invention at the beginning of the PR process and take away usable strategies and tactics for agencies and in-house. The material encourages an entrepreneurial approach to public relations and covers creative problem-solving, selling an unconventional idea internally, packaging it, getting stakeholders buzzing, integrating social and untethering media outreach from the usual suspects at launch time.
With PR under constant pressure to evolve, it uncovers practitioners' aptitude for invention and teaches them how to harness it. With every communications discipline claiming to be in the storytelling business, it goes deeper than storytelling and into authorship. The objective is to cultivate a generation of rule breakers who create new communication vehicles and construct campaigns across industries. The goal is to reshape perceptions and the practice of PR from its past as an organization’s mouthpiece to its future as an organization’s creative engine.
When: Thursday, July 18, 2019, 6:00–9:00 PM
Where: Fisher Center – Syracuse University, 136 Madison Ave., 2nd Floor (front entrance), New York City
