PR and comms agency, Wild Card, has launched ‘The Future of Comms’ – an insights-based take from its senior team on what’s next for strategic and creative thinking, plus all key comms channels from social and earned media to influencers, sampling and experiential.
Key findings from the Report include:
1. The rise of adaptive, cross-channel strategies that never stand still will be fueled by an ever-changing world, continuously living and breathing, reacting, adapting and pivoting
2. Creatives will combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence tools, such as Chat GPT, to change the game – only the two working together will deliver head-turning creative
3. Social media goliaths will dominate, but challenger platforms will keep driving change, sparking content outputs to shift from over-polished styles and authenticity to emerge as key, all with a trial-and-error approach leading to greatness
4. Editorial storytelling will thrive, with benefits such as third-party endorsement, relevance and reach carrying with them even more clout in future as consumer trust is prioritised
5. Influencer marketing will continue to grow, but brands will need to relax their guardrails and let creativity fly to cut through the sheer volume of future partnerships
6. Multi-purpose, multi-channel and multi-discipline are imperative to future brand-in-hand activations, both sampling and experiential, achieving consumer resonance.
Wild Card Managing Director, Georgie Upton, said: “The future for communications is packed full of potential. Society’s hunger for information will always exist, but channels have transformed and our audiences have evolved. That’s given us a bold new comms landscape to plan for.
“Our industry must adapt. That’s why we’ve jam-packed our Future of Comms Report with thoughts and views from our superstar senior team. Our message is this: we cannot repeat the tried-and-tested marketing formulas of years gone by.
“The future has created an opportunity to combine the old with the new, and throw it all up in the air. Seeing where it lands in engaging audiences, like Gen Z, in bold new ways is half the fun.
“We all need to let go a little while change is in the air. Be brave what’s new. Afterall, the future of comms is so bright, we’ll have to wear TikTok coloured shades (pink, aqua and black, of course).”
The Report concludes by suggesting that evaluation will be re-imagined in years to come – moving even further beyond familiar metrics such as reach, engagement, key message penetration, image inclusion, sentiment tracking and sales – towards a triple-bottom-line perspective. Giving equal weighting to People, Planet and Profit is a business model that Wild Card, as part of the B Corp community, has committed to. It is now taking a bold stance of recommending against any future comms campaigns planned for cut-through alone, if they mean nothing beyond profit.
The report can be viewed and downloaded here.
