A New Perspective

There was an interesting post today on the Ogilvy 360 blog discussing an article in Adweek that suggests in five years, advertising companies will have employees that seamlessly work with digital, broadcast and online media.

It’s not too far of a stretch to see PR going the same way. Even as a new PR practitioner I can see the field headed towards a time when a PR pro needs to generate content that needs to be search engine optimized, have digital media (pictures, videos, podcasts) embedded, and are prepared for journalists and bloggers alike.

Many would argue that this is already happening, as can be seen with the increasing popularity of the Social Media News Release (SMNR). While there has already been a lot of discussion regarding the pros and cons of a SMNR, it’s possible that it’s only a matter of time before even more media is consolidated and it becomes standard.

I remember my freshman year of college (Summer 2003) I purchased a refurbished first generation iPod from Apple and all of my friends thought it was the coolest thing. The funny thing is, when I bought it, students were still carrying around CD-Players with a bunch of CDs in their backpacks. (Unfortunately, I lent my CD-Player to a friend when I got my iPod, and never saw it again.)

By the time I graduated from college, I had upgraded to a 30gig video iPod and pretty much everyone walking around campus had a Nano, Shuffle, or something of the sort. Then you consider that now podcasts and video have become much more prevalent with things such as GarageBand and Flip Cameras – it’s pretty easy to see how in 5 years professionals in the communications fields will need to be familiar, if not experts, in all of these types of new media.

I suppose saying we will need to be experts in the field may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but I’m sure you can see how quickly new media is being consolidated and how that can have implications on our careers as PR professionals.

So what do you think? Will we all have to be experts in these different types of media in the near future in order to truly be full service agencies?