PR Right in Front of You
Barbara Emodi // September 29, 2011
You know what I’m talking about. How could you miss it? The lawn signs, the website, the billboards, the iconic Bluenose on the face of the Canadian dime. And three simple words: Ships Start Here.
Right in front of us, directly in our faces, excellent public relations in practice. It’s something to learn from.
Let’s deconstruct this.
First, what’s this campaign about?
It’s about the $30 billion dollars that could potentially come to the Halifax Shipyards. The outcome depends on the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy deciding Halifax, not Vancouver, and not Quebec, is the place where the next generation of Canadian combat and non-combat ships will be built.
The successful bidder for that contract, for one or both categories of ship construction, will be announced in a few weeks. The stakes are high. An investment of this kind in any community translates into an economic boom that will roll out over the next 30 years, and will create 4,000 direct, well-paying jobs – a generation of lifetime careers in fact.
Obviously anyone with a stake in this region and this economy would like to see the contract come here. The question is, how does anyone make that happen?
It’s a classic public relations challenge.
First, what are the objectives? That’s obvious: bring the contract here. In a traditional world, acquiring the contract would involve fairly routine publicity, political lobbying, and promotion. In fact, that is exactly the kind of communication campaigns being conducted by the other two locations in the running. The other choice, and the one being made here, has been to develop a much more sophisticated strategy that aims to create an atmosphere where choosing Nova Scotia appears to be overwhelmingly the only logical choice. I believe the intent of the Ships Start Here campaign is to create an environment where awarding the contract to anywhere but Halifax will seem unexpected, unpopular, and in fact suspect.
It’s a big communications brief. To meet this challenge, to make this campaign work, requires the creativity to create not just an argument, an image, or a brand, but to create a wave, a flow of inevitability that will make any choice but Halifax feel to the decision-makers like fighting against the current.
So how does a communicator do all that?
First, by using resonant messaging.
Ships Start Here (the lawn sign message aimed at the internal public of federal voters) and Built to build (targeting the external, national audience) both meet the tests of potent messages – they connect with what people are waiting to hear (internally we have a future, our kids can come home) and, according to framing theory, connect with what people already believe to be true (nationally as familiar as pocket change).
Second, the message must be conveyed in as many channels as possible. In this case that means a clean clear website,( no accident that the lawn sign is a url), to connect and inform, and highly active traffic on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr . It also means interactive media that make it easy for the most active publics to transform themselves from receivers to broadcasters and to re-broadcasters. This is done using downloadable posters, PowerPoints on Slideshare, and invitations to share and submit personal stories on what the region, the port, the shipyard, a job, and a future means to you.
So far, from a communication standpoint, it appears to be working. Folks in government tell me that when they walk into meeting rooms across the country, no matter what’s on the agenda, the first thing they hear is “Yeah we know, we know. You build ships.”
And don’t you forget it.
