The Connection Between Teen Pop Icons and Technology PR

If the above heading left you pondering the correlation between the teen pop icon and the job of making technology interesting to the world at large, congratulations: you’re not alone.

It was a test, you see. I spent days mulling over how the two were related, until it suddenly dawned on me. They’re actually not related at all.

And herein lies the magic of PR. One of the often overlooked functions of PR is to make the connection between two elements that don’t naturally connect – and not only link the two together, but create a bond that is able to tell a story. From this story, conversations start, and so the news cycle begins.

Intel employed The Black Eyed Peas’ frontman Will.i.am as Director of Creative Innovation, and had him travelling the globe as part of the company’s Ultrabook Project. This concept was a huge success. Not only did it encompass the artist’s vision of making music the focal point of social media, but it gave Intel just the right amount of ‘swag’ in the eyes of consumers around the world to set it apart from its competitors.

In his book ‘Dancing with Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity’, Phil Beadle says: “We create the new not generally through some mad moment of inspiration in fictionalised accounts of ancient Greeks in baths (though the conditions for this can be forced into existence), but by putting things together that do not normally go together; from taking disciplines (or curriculum areas) and seeing what happens when they are forced into unanticipated collision.

“The mind, at its best, is a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order on to chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas on order to better understand either or both. It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the person who is truly creative.”

Bottom line is you don’t always need an obvious connection to make PR work. This doesn’t only apply to PR, if you dig around well enough, you’ll probably find that you can apply this theory to most situations in life.

Written by Meagan Cooke