The Scale of Modern Communications
By: Chris J. Bennett
Tags: Communications, Marketing, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Social Media

Why stop with the numbers here?

Google sees 1.2 trillion searches each year, and there are over 3.5 billion internet users.

Advertising spend worldwide in 2016 was almost $500 billion.

To put this into context, the entire GDP of India is $2.25 trillion, and the total workforce of South Korea is 26.6 million.

Too Many Disciplines

Let’s get back to communications.

I want to give you an idea of what is actually involved in this work today and just how wide-ranging the disciplines are within it.

I’ll break down the field into sub-fields, and then looks at the disciplines within each of those.

To start with, we can look at communications as separated into the following:

Corporate Communications

Traditional Marketing

Digital Communications

Creative Production

Data Analysis

Communications Technology

There are many ways to segment communications activity, and I’ve chosen this one for simplicity.

Every single one of these sub-disciplines is it’s own full-time job, with distinct career paths all the way to the most senior levels.

Corporate Communications

Covers all aspects of an organisations communications at a strategic level, with a focus on aligning any communications strategy with business goals.

Disciplines in this field include:

Crisis communication is a sub-field of the public relations profession involving responding to potential threats to your brand and organisation from a communications point of view. This is part of disaster recovery strategy.

Communicating within an organisation, such as between employees and management. Important for clear dissemination of information, team-building, developing a positive internal culture, increasing job satisfaction etc.

Stakeholder Communications

A focus on communicating to key partners and stakeholders, such as investors, funders etc.

A large amount of work goes into developing an effective approach to making communications work for an organisation. Most senior communicators do only this, full-time. It mostly focuses around aligning organisation goals with the communications function. What of the many disciplines covered in this article will contribute towards driving the organisation forwards?

Brand

Brands are everything these days. Apple’s brand is valued at around $170 billion, and it’s their brand that drives their eye-watering sales revenues. Branding work covers many of the disciplines in this article, costs a small fortune to work on and can take a long time, as it affects everything to do with an organisation.

Traditional Marketing

This is what most people think of as marketing. It includes working with the press, printed media, advertising on TV, radio, events and many others. It’s called traditional because many of these disciplines have been in existence hundreds of years (when was the first poster advertised, I wonder?), as opposed to digital communications, which has only been around since the early 90's.

Some of the major elements include:

The press release has been a staple of communication since newspapers were a thing (the first release was made in 1906). These form the backbone of many communications teams around the world, much to the annoyance of colleagues who are regularly prodded into providing quotes and speaking to journalists.

Some key parts of a good PR function include:

• Building and growing relationships with the media, journalists and other PR teams in your sector

• Writing press releases (the sign-off process alone takes significant time here)

• Distributing the press release to press contacts

• Measuring the performance of press releases (involves 15–20 metrics, several KPI’s, tracking and logging coverage, calculating Return-on-Investment, or ROI and much more)

• Newsjacking (hijacking current news around the world to insert your own brand, product or services)

• Often acts as spokesperson for company

• Dealing with journalist requests (such as comments on a story)

Newsjacking is a challenging, complex, but highly rewarding approach.

Printed Media

Working with posters, flyers, banners and anything that can be printed out physically. Strong link with creative production fields as marketing professionals rarely have design skills.

• Coordination of brand assets and copy (text)

• Liaising with designers and printers

• Organising distribution

TV and radio

Still the largest slice of the GDP generated by the creative industries, TV remains a dominant platform for modern communications. Radio is still relevant, but nowhere near as strong as it once was, although access is easier to both platform with the proliferation of the internet — particularly over the last 5 years with the rise of mobile as a way of consuming content.

A major success in this field is that of Netflix, as well as Amazon and BBC iPlayer, whose digital video services are massively popular worldwide.

I would need a whole other article just to cover the disciplines involved in TV and radio, but here’s just a snapshot:

• Production, from set design, to project planning and organisation

• Writing screenplays, scripts etc

• Advertising, commercials

• Camera and audio capture

• Editing

In the science communications field, such programmes as Planet Earth, COSMOS, and Wonders of the Universe are excellent examples that attract huge audiences.

Events

There’s nothing quite like getting out there and communicating with people in person. This isn’t always possible, given events can be one of the most expensive ways to communicate and often have small audiences, but the levels of engagement you can get from attending or hosting an event are some of the best of any method of communicating.

If you’ve ever had or attended a wedding, you know how much work can go into planning just a single day, let alone an event which involves hundreds or even thousands of people, perhaps in another country.

To give an example, when Earlham Institute’s communications team went to the Plant & Animal Genomes Conference (PAG) in San Diego, USA in 2014, it took over 3 months of work to organise and cost a large chunk of the yearly budget.

Don’t even get me started on arranging for 10 large boxes of merchandise and stand equipment to be shipped.

The event paid dividends, however, with one of the busiest stands of the event, seeing well over 1500 people in five days.

Digital Communications

With roots in the mid-80’s (something to do with floppy disks and car advertising) and exploding in the 90’s, communicating in the age of digital now covers an astonishing number of disciplines and has permanently changed how all the traditional and corporate approaches listed above.

Like it or not, digital is here to stay — and it’s very much leading the way in practically every area.

Digital is my specialism, but this doesn’t really clarify any of what I actually do. Here are some of the more prominent disciplines within digital — bear in mind that every single one of these areas has a career path attached to it.