This week Octopus, in conjunction with our pals at PR Week and Marketing, held its Future5 Live Event to showcase the type of campaigns we think are starting to signpost the future of the PR industry.

It was a cracking bash with the PR industry seemingly in fine fettle. Fifty communicators from all sectors coming together to have a look into the future and hear from some of their peers who have conceived and executed cutting edge campaigns over the last year.

There was much positive debate, discussion both in the Q&A and over coffee afterwards. Here's a quick summary:

1. The campaign of the future will be totally integrated.

So to be a Future5 award winner in the future, campaigns will need to use all, not just some, of the  trends - research and planning, brand partnerships, audience participation, use of technology, and of course what we've termed, the BIG Idea. And maybe even more that will evolve in the future.

But to deliver those campaigns there needs to be a new skill set for agencies and in-house teams. Not just the core skills of media relations but content development, video, design, production, app development, influencer relations, direct communications, even traditional advertising. The list goes on. PR is doing lots of stuff it's never done before.

Of course you can get all of these different skill sets from individual agencies, but we're convinced that the more forward thinking ones (ahem, like us J) should be able to offer all of these services under one roof.

Any PR agency, or in house team, failing to innovate at the moment won't be here in a few years.

2. Managing risk versus trying new stuff

PR people are good in a crisis. We've long been the guardians of corporate reputation and let's face it, doing new things can be risky. So how do you minimise risk but maximise campaigns and new approaches? Well Future5 shows it's through research and planning, something that PR agencies have been slow to embrace.

Unless campaigns start with an insight into the audience - spotting gaps and new channels - we think they are at best ineffective, at worst risky to the brand. And lots of the Future5 winners demonstrated this.

3. Outcomes not outputs

One trend we've seen over the last couple of years with Future5 is the need to drive audience participation and action. This has been brought about by the growth in social media channels, like Facebook and Twitter, where encouraging 'likes' or 'follows' is easy and demonstrable. But increasingly PR is being asked to predict and goal ourselves on direct action not coverage.

This can be a problem for those who don't have the integrated mindset or the ability to benchmark. Without this foresight and confidence, you can't build more direct metrics around direct outcomes - sales leads, registration or online feedback - which undoubtedly is the way we're heading.

4. PR relationship with the business and who pays?

One comment made was that it seemed less about whether PR and marketing owned the campaign, and more about what tactics made it a success. An encouraging sign. But often, in reality there are still barriers. There is still the perception from many in marketing and beyond that PR is butting in on a conversation if it requires anything beyond the press release.

So what's the opportunity? The opportunity for PR is in coming up with campaigns, not just story ideas, and to go and find money from other parts of the business to bring these to life. Thinking bigger and more long term. Because in reality, the overstretched PR budget alone cannot do everything.

So, what was the message from the floor? Coming out loud and clear was think bigger and PR practitioners can all be rewarded with the opportunity to do more and evolve their roles. Develop well-planned ideas, integrated approaches and a focus on outcomes from your campaigns and your agency partners. And try and push outside of our comfort zones occasionally and not be scared of failing sometimes. Which is after all, the very essence of what Future5 is all about!

You can learn all about Future5 from our website pages or why not read all about the campaigns in Marketing.

Jon

As our Future 5 project for 2010 is coming to a close, it was a pleasant surprise for PR Week to produce a short video summary of the breakfast we hosted over at Haymarket towers. If you're reading this blog you've most likely heard of our Future 5 project, so I won't dwell on what it is too much. Especially as we now have our snazzy booklet on-line (drop us an email if you want a hard copy).

A fair few months have passed since its inception, and it's been good to see more and more of the trends coming into featured campaigns in the press, and great results for our clients when we practice what we preach. Also, from chatting to all you comms peeps, it seems as if we've hit the mark with what we're saying. Phew!

Rather than feel all warm and fuzzy about the project being a success, we are (like the rest of you!) planning for 2011 and beyond. How much will the trends change? How soon will they become obsolete? What exciting things will hit us right in the chops from leftfield? What next???? It's such an exciting time to be working in this industry, I for one, can't wait to find out what 2011 has got in store for us....

Julian

We like to think we get our campaigns spot on most of the time, but the minute you relax and take things for granted is when it all starts to fall apart like the proverbial house of cards. I guess, to some extent, that is what Future 5 is all about. Not taking anything for granted, and making a genuine attempt to find out what needs to be happening next with our industry, making sure that we are doing it - and doing it well!

There are many companies that invest billions into analysing the future direction of their respective industries. We don't have billions of pounds, and unfortunately we don't have a time-travelling DeLorean. What we do have, however, are some of the brightest and most capable minds within the comms industry at our beck and call - which turned out to be more than enough when hosting our "Future 5 Breakfast Briefing" with PR Week.

The morning was a great success. This was all helped along with Haymarket's Philip Smith pithy chairing of the event; our very own Jon Lonsdale dealing with the cut and thrust of a questioning audience; and two further great presentations from Steve Kirk at Honda and Jamie Harley of Deloitte.

More details on the Future 5 trends/campaigns can be found here.

Feedback from the guests was brilliant, and I know that the majority of people in attendance were pleased to know their comms programs were starting to head in the right direction but also saw areas that they knew they could improve on.

However, one thing that did strike me was how hard some of our brand-side peers have to fight to get experimental and innovative ideas through. Agency side, you kind of take it for granted that you are encouraged to be as creative as possible, but this is sadly not always the case with our friends across the divide.

I hope Future 5 has showed our guests that to be brave you sometimes have to be willing to put your neck on the line and think differently.

At the risk of sounding like a Honda advert, one of Steve Kirk's remarks stayed with me that day - a quote from their founder, Mr. Soichiro Honda. "99% of success is failure." Basically, don't be afraid to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. Be brave, pick yourself up and be prepared to (boldly) go where no PR has gone before - that is what Future 5 is all about.

Julian

A few months back at Octopus we thought, wouldn't it be nice if we could look into the future? But, we didn't mean finding out the winning lottery numbers for the next week's draw, or even how England would fare at the World Cup (another Octopus stole our thunder on that one anyway!). We were thinking more about what the future of our industry was going to look like. We're pretty deep, right?

But with so much change going on - changing media landscape, changing consumption models, changing tools - how could we not want to know?  We noticed that we never seem to do the same project twice any more. Every project has a nuance or a new marketing objective to reach that stretches the old grey matter that little bit further.  

This got us thinking beyond Octopus Towers, to pinpoint some of the new types of campaigns that are going on out there in brand-land.  We decided, with the help of the nice people at PR Week, to create Future 5 a campaign that seeks out the most experimental campaigns and techniques that are ongoing in our industry and celebrates them!  

We had so many fantastic campaigns put forward that our panel of experts had their work cut out trying to decide between one great idea and the next. But somehow they did, providing us with our very own glimpse into the future.

So, being the generous people that we are, we didn't want to keep them all to ourselves. We wanted to share them with you all too. So here they are:

Research and planning: Honda and The Dream Factory

Use of technology: Orange and GlastoTag

Audience participation: Brothers and Festival Cider

Brand partnerships: Deloitte and Twitter Opera

The big idea:  Brewdog and Sink the Bismarck!

But this is just a taster, you can find out more about Future 5 here or you can join us at our VIP breakfast event at Haymarket Publishing's office on Wednesday, September 29th hosted by PR Week's editor, Danny Rogers.

As well as hearing about the outcome of the Future 5 project, it's a chance to meet with other like-minded PR and Comms managers and discuss how you think communication will change, so why not come along? We'd love to see you there.

Jon

At Octopus we're all about change.  We talk about it constantly - on our website, at our Monday team  meetings, when advising clients and of course when pitching to prospects.  There are lots of shifts going on in the industry that are well documented - changing media landscape, changing consumption models, changing tools - the list goes on.  But it's easy to talk about these things in theory rather than in practice.

But, what we've noticed is that we never seem to do the same project twice any more.

Every project has a nuance or a new marketing objective to reach that stretches the old grey matter that little bit further.  It's certainly not for the comfy slippers brigade.   It takes extra time, requires gutsy ideas, new skills and techniques as well as lots of good old fashioned elbow grease.  But it is brilliant.  Why?  Well, finally, we PR people are being asked to do the highly integrated challenging communications projects that we've always aspired to do.  We're getting to try things out and learn new stuff.

All this got us to thinking about elevating this beyond Octopus towers and trying to pinpoint some of the new types of campaigns that are going on out there in brand-land.  So we approached the nice people at PR Week about working with us on a project called Future 5.  They seemed to like the idea, and so here it is officially launching today.

We recognise that we can all learn lots from some of the cutting edge and experimental campaigns and techniques that are ongoing in our industry but that don't find their way into the mainstream.  So the Future 5 project is our way of finding them, celebrating them and trying and add to the conversation about the new trends set to shape our industry.

So if you're a PR or Comms Manager  we'd love you to get involved. Send us your comments, please enter your campaigns/stunts/launches that have pushed the boundaries in some way (even if you don't have rigorous evaluation  metrics we still want to hear about it!), or tried something out from other marketing disciplines, or maybe just approached a problem in a completely fresh way. Or maybe it's just cool and you're proud of it.

You should hear more about it from PR Week or our Future 5 event later in the year, and we'll be blathering on about it constantly as well.  So please stay tuned for progress reports.

Here's to the joy of trying more things out in the future.

Jon