PR Creatives, Stay Half a Step Ahead!

A month has passed since the new fiscal year began. Perhaps because PR professionals tend to think about information slightly ahead of the season, our minds often race forward. While my consciousness is already in summer—no, actually, it's fully in autumn—leaving me feeling nostalgic, let's face reality and get down to business today. This time, I'll address a question I occasionally receive: "What is creativity in PR?"

The Era Demanding a PR Perspective in Creativity

As I've often said, we're now in an era where the quality of creative work alone rarely earns recognition from clients. What's demanded as campaign results is how effectively it engages the public and moves people. Perhaps influenced by this, I've increasingly received requests from creative teams asking, "Can PR help out too?" Initially, these consultations often involved showing us finished work with questions like, "Do you think this will generate buzz?" But recently, we've started getting involved earlier—at the storyboard stage or even the conceptual phase.

Questions like, "...we want to go with this flow, but from a PR perspective, is there anything we should add to make it more buzzworthy?" or "To get more buzz, how should we handle the expression here?"

While these questions might seem vague and hard to answer, getting consulted at this stage is actually a huge win for PR folks. It gives us the chance to consult early on, ensuring the content itself has the power to gain traction organically, considering various social contexts. The sharp creative directors get it immediately, saying things like, "Ah, I see! Yeah, yeah." That's when CR×PR hits its sweet spot. Sharing and integrating from the very beginning allows the campaign itself to be designed with depth and dimension.

For PR creativity, being "half a step ahead" is just right

While PR perspectives are increasingly being applied to creative work these days, there are also times when PR takes the lead in guiding creative. This naturally happens when aiming to broaden societal understanding, acceptance, and empathy, and to turn something into a trend. When PR leads the creative direction, the result tends to be expressions that are slightly milder, more easily understood and empathized with by anyone, and easier to talk about – rather than edgy expressions that might only resonate with the main target audience.

Of course, if the language is too obvious, it gets ignored. This makes achieving that very delicate creative balance—catching attention while remaining conversational—crucial. I'd like to call this "creativity that's half a step ahead."

This industry is constantly creating and disseminating new terms, but how many of them truly take root? While defining new domains with fresh language or making them visible is important, being edgy isn't an end in itself. That brings us back to the "half-step ahead" concept. Creating and disseminating edgy, never-before-heard terms that feel like they're "one or two steps ahead" will resonate with innovators and early adopters. However, to achieve explosive subsequent penetration, I believe the key is to keep the expression at that "half-step ahead" level.

What benefits does "half a step ahead" bring?

Take the term "○-katsu" (e.g., job-hunting, marriage-hunting, pregnancy-preparation, end-of-life planning) flooding the streets. For those creating cutting-edge creative work, this might seem like an outdated, embarrassing term they'd never use. Indeed, there are already many similar words: "shūkatsu," "konkatsu," "ninkatsu," "shūkatsu," and so on. But conversely, I think this very abundance creates a subtle, shared understanding among people: "Oh, you mean that '○-katsu' thing? You know, when you set a goal and just focus on preparing for it?" This ability for people of all ages and genders to understand and discuss it based on existing knowledge is incredibly effective for a term's penetration. Of course, if innovators or early adopters then provide supporting statements to promote understanding, comprehension levels will likely rise even further.

Take "probiotic activities" (菌活), which has gained traction recently—meaning promoting health through probiotic-rich diets. Various manufacturers use it, and it truly seems to be establishing itself in the market. In fact, whenever this topic comes up on TV, I often see presenters or commentators reacting with things like, "Ah, I see!" or "I was doing probiotic activities without even realizing it!" and then start relating it to their own lives. Getting people to use the term like that is important, right?

Keywords like "the third [something]" are also effective for boosting understanding. It's not "the third beer," but precisely because there's a "first..." and a "second...," the association "so the third one means this, right?" works well. Creating keywords with such hints is a valid approach. By the way, based on my experience, "the fourth..." has failed every single time, so just a heads up.

Once a term becomes established as common language, media outlets start using it frequently. It evolves from a temporary campaign keyword into a standard, recurring phrase. Media will treat it as regular content, thinking, "This topic always comes up this time of year!" In that sense, it's important to "open up" keywords to some extent. If you try to lock down a word with trademark registration, it becomes just one company's campaign word. Then the media won't pick it up. You must aim for the word's widespread adoption, while always positioning yourself as the central figure behind it. To do that, you should constantly monitor your positioning in the market.

Oh, and to that end, PR folks should definitely leverage media monitoring and social listening too—that's a definite plus! (Oh, sorry for the plug at the end!)