Bright Spark – creativity is key in the competitive media landscape

Oli By Oli

Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” Although knowledge certainly helps – imagination, creativity and new ideas are crucial to achieving PR and communications success.

Creativity is an essential skill. Creative campaigns and content help our clients to stand out from the crowd, grab the attention of journalists, and communicate key messages in new ways.

The idea that creativity can only be cultivated in break out rooms, sitting on beanbags and having scheduled brainstorms, is outdated. New ideas are worked on every day, and from every corner of Spark. We use news articles, new data, expert opinions, and even current cultural references to give our work fresh and creative angles.

In a very competitive landscape, creative themes provide the edge for our work. Whether this is a new idea for market research to uncover standout data, thinking outside of the box for pitching techniques, or cleverly designed and implemented social media content.

So, to recognise what a creative bunch we are, we’ve launched a new internal award called “Bright Spark” (see what we did there…). On a quarterly basis, the team will get together to nominate the best examples of creative work within the agency.

Kicking off the nominations for this quarter, team members were recognised for new social media proposals to engage audiences via Twitter and Facebook channels, as well as new market research ideas that aligned clients with current significant news stories.

But there could only be one winner for this inaugural “Bright Spark” award. And this was Ginny, for coming up with a new line of media pitching for client commentary that tied to the newsworthy energy crisis stories. This quick thinking and creativity landed national coverage with Financial Times, Sky News and Daily Express – which underlines how valuable new ideas can be.

Keep an eye on our blog for more updates on our “Bright Spark” recognition programme, and check out other posts for advice on the key drivers for great media coverage.