PR essentials for global campaigns

Every day my colleagues in Boston are both amused and bemused by what would be commonly used idioms back home in Blighty. (Cue hysteria and a riot of “Mary Poppins” chimneysweep-esque mimicry.) Fortunately, with our sophisticated and highly evolved self-depreciating sense of humor, we Brits have developed thick skins, not to mention stiff upper lips.

As the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice wrote, the world is incorrigibly plural. In PR, that extends beyond simple language barriers. Running a global campaign is fraught with complexity, cost and cultural confusion. Increasingly, most of our clients (from plucky startups to major global corporations) operate across borders and often in many corners of the world.

Here are some key lessons that we at Shift Communications have gleaned from working with our clients on global campaigns:

Be methodical about spending.

Do not try to calculate spending projections based purely on your U.S. spending. The population of the U.S. is roughly equivalent to that of the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain combined. But you cannot expect a U.S. sized spend to cover all of these territories together.