PR Smith is an international speaker, marketing consultant and author of six books (translated into eight languages) renowned for their ‘edutainment’ style. These include Digital Marketing Excellence (co- authored with Dave Chaffey) and the SOSTAC® Guide to Writing Your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan. Paul created the SOSTAC® planning framework, voted in the top 3 business models worldwide by the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Centenary Poll and now adopted by LinkedIn, KPMG and Greenpeace, as well as hundreds of innovative start-ups. His SOSTAC® online portal at www.sostac.org helps professionals learn how to write the perfect plan (in four minutes) and perfect it thereafter. Professionals become SOSTAC® Certified Planners, while consultancies and agencies become SOSTAC® Certified Companies and trainers/training companies become SOSTAC® Certified Training Companies. Paul delivers inspiring talks and workshops around the world to professional associations and private organizations (https://prsmith.org/home- page/speaking/).
Paul’s consulting and mentoring covers government departments, blue-chips and innovative start-ups. From launching Christmas Crackers in America to Short Game Golf in China, Paul enjoys a challenge. He is currently advising the SuperNodeTM, which is connecting all Northern Europe’s windfarms with Southern Europe’s Solar Parks to fulfil and deliver 100 per cent of all of Europe’s future energy needs (https://supernode. energy/). He is also Sri Lanka Golf Tours’ Managing Partner, dedicated to creating inbound golf holidays on Paradise Island, the ‘Pearl in the Indian Ocean’. Finally, Paul is also founder and chief author of the Great Sportsmanship Programme (https:// greatmomentsofsportsmanship.com/) an inspira- tional NFP edutainment programme which, through short stories about sportsmanship, encourages youths to create a new generation of global citizens with sportsmanship values while also boosting interest in reading and sport. In short, it is designed to change the world (one small step at a time). Instagram: @prpsmith Twitter: @PR_Smith Website: PRSmith.org
Ze is an integrated marketing author, lecturer and consultant with a background in the creative indus- tries, particularly those organizations embracing digital transformation. Ze has also helped many innovative start-ups in the UK, and in particular through partnerships with brands such as Microsoft, Sainsbury’s and The Prince’s Trust. More recently Ze has worked with ZenithOptimedia. Ze has worked with Paul over the past 25 years, firstly launching the award-winning, first three- Screen TV video explaining how public relations works. Since then, Ze and Paul worked together developing the world’s first digital marketing course delivered electronically (originally CDs, then online).
These original multimedia courses sold into 66 countries around the world and were adopted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, blue-chip organizations like IBM and third level educational institutions around the UK. More recently, Ze’s consultancy has focused on the health and well-being sector, assisting clients through his agency, KD7, both strategically and tac- tically, helping them grow primarily through inte- grating their digital channels. Ze is also a visiting academic at the Grenoble School of Management, guiding students on an innovative and multichannel approach to business and marketing. His written insights on the nature of digital, branding and web entrepreneurship have appeared in publications including IGI Global and UK Public Health, where he was recently commis- sioned to explore the structure of their social media strategy. He is also a writer contributor to the Native Advertising Institute on some of the latest topics on digital marketing. Ze also has a passion for photography and lives in London and the South Coast of England with his wife and daughter. The family also spend a lot of time in France.
I was playing golf with a friend, who asked me what was the latest book I was working on (ex- cuse his terrible grammar). When I told him it was the seventh edition, no less, of our best-selling mar- keting communications book, he replied, “Well I hope you get it right this time!” I think we have. Ze and I are delighted to have gathered an array of in- triguing, cutting edge examples of marketing com- munications in action, underpinned by academic theory, all written in a very practical way. In fact, we hope you enjoy it as we really want to ‘edutain’ you and perhaps even ‘wow’ you occasionally. As we know, having to read through volumes of books can be fatiguing, so we try to lighten your load with the occasional intriguing, controversial or even mildly humorous examples. Something that has become screamingly obvious is that tactical communications tools never work in isolation.
For many years now, we have been push- ing marcomms integration, ie integrate everything in order to leverage and maximize the impact of each tactical marketing communications tool. In fact, we’ve been saying this for a quarter of a cen- tury (the first edition in 1993 was Marketing Communications: An integrated approach). Today, it is impossible to isolate any tactic, as marketers today think in an integrated way – whether it is a microsite built for an ad campaign with a contact strategy of an email followed by a tailored landing page/microsite followed by some remarketing, mar- keters today think integrated, which is great. You’ll see this in all the mini cases at the end of each chap- ter in Part Two. Even this is changing, as AI-driven chatbots can shorten this sequence and deliver far better leads, as we show in Chapter 11. From time to time, you will think, ‘Hang on, shouldn’t this case study actually be in another chapter?’, because it will feature other tactical tools almost as much as it does the tool being discussed in that chapter. Personalized videos at scale appear in several places. Pedigree’s AI-driven app is in the packaging chapter (Chapter 19), but it could have featured in content marketing and sales promotion. You will see a lot of this.