INDUSTRY RELATED: World Cup Special

Industry Related is a weekly newsletter to unmask and straight-talk brand comms, from a multi-national, award-winning team that has worked with Airbnb, Diageo, The Eames Institute, Harry’s, iF Design, Kartell, and Savile Row, to name just a few.

Casey reporting here from New York where it’s a rather sticky 88F/31C and my vocabulary has taken an unexpected turn over the past fortnight. Apparently I’m supposed to be calling football “soccer” now, although after 33 years that ship has definitely sailed.

For most of the year I’ve simply been “the Brit in the office” since relocating to New York City last autumn from my native London. For the past three weeks, however, I’ve become England’s appointed spokesperson, expected to explain our tactics, justify our optimism, and reassure everyone that yes, penalties are still a slightly traumatic subject. Before we go any further, I’d also like to acknowledge Jude Bellingham. Unrelated to the rest of this piece, but it felt wrong not to as he’s so pretty. And, I guess, also kind of good at “soccer”.

Watching this World Cup from New York has reminded me how terrible we all are at predicting what will actually become the story. Before the tournament started, the conversation was exactly what you’d expect. Can England finally do it? Will Argentina go back-to-back? Was this France’s to lose? All perfectly sensible questions, and as it turns out, pretty accurate ones. But they weren’t the stories everyone ended up talking about.

Last weekend I was watching the England v Norway match at an Irish bar in Brooklyn and realised all of the Americans in the room had somehow become Norwegian. Every time Erling Haaland got on the ball, people were enthusiastically doing the Viking rowing celebration, despite the fact I suspect very few of them had watched Norway play before June. Somewhere along the way, everyone had decided they wanted Norway to do well.

Then there was Cape Verde, a country smaller than the state of Delaware. They didn’t win the tournament, but that was beside the point. Their goalkeeper became one of the breakout personalities of the competition and suddenly, millions of people who definitely couldn’t have found Cape Verde on a map a month earlier were cheering every save.

And then, of course, there was the USA red card. Within 24 hours, we’d gone from talking about one play - a messy tackle - to debating referees, VAR, FIFA, politics and presidential phone calls. Football itself had almost become secondary to the stories swirling around it.

It struck me that this is exactly what happens in the PR world. We spend weeks trying to predict which announcement will land, which launch will dominate the conversation, which product will become the story. We naturally gravitate towards the biggest budgets, the biggest brands and the biggest names because they seem like the safest bet. Except they often aren’t.

Some of the best coverage we’ve secured over the years has come from the thing nobody expected to take off. A throwaway quote in an interview that becomes the headline. A small design detail that suddenly captures everyone’s imagination. A founder’s perspective that resonates far beyond the original pitch. An unexpected collaboration that people start sharing because it feels fresh, not because it had the largest media budget behind it.

That’s the frustrating, and frankly brilliant, thing about PR. You can shape a story, you can position it, you can give it every opportunity to succeed. But the moment it leaves your inbox, people decide for themselves what they care about. Sometimes they’ll latch onto the thing you spent weeks crafting, and sometimes, they’ll all decide to support Norway.

Personally, I’ll take that unpredictability every time. It’s what keeps football interesting, and it’s what keeps this industry interesting too. If we could predict exactly what people were going to care about every single time, our jobs would be considerably easier. They’d also be considerably less fun.

Also, It’s Coming Home. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Thanks so much for reading, dear Relatives! Isn’t our Casey an INCREDIBLE writer? As it’s summer, who knows what next week will bring, but we’ll keep dropping the Industry Related on the regular.

With love from Alpha Kilo ❤️