Creativity in PR

Over the past decade, we have helped thousands of PR pros and brand teams to become more creative and generate better ideas in the workplace. We can help you, too.

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Creative training for over 200+ companies worldwide

Develop your creative thinking

Our creative courses for PR teams have become the gold standard for the industry. We have worked with individuals and teams from more than 100 of PR Week’s top 150 consultancies – as well as hundreds of in-house PR and communications teams.

PR can lead creative

For more than a decade now, we have been examining the state of creativity in PR (with PRovoke Media), and our annual poll data repeatedly shows that PR agencies want to be considered as the lead agency when it comes to creative ideas. We can help you to develop creative PR and integrated ideas underpinned by rigour.

Creativity is a core skill for PRs

Our How To Be A Creative Ninja workshops will equip your people with the ability to think flexibly, quickly and ‘outside the box’ whatever the brief. Suitable for all levels from the intern to the MD, you can continue to build your creative toolkit. This is the rocket fuel for a massive imagination-boost. Recommended as essential for Account Managers and Account Directors and budding Creative Directors.

PRs are natural problem solvers

Problem solving – this is the realm where PR teams can contribute most directly to the bottom line and business objectives. Being equipped with the know-how and capabilities to help your business to solve the big issues is invaluable to PR professionals. Our SCAMPER workshops and problem solving training course will give you the tools to help.

Creative courses for PR teams

If you or your team are looking to up your creative game with your earned media, we can help.

It’s our aim to give you the tools and confidence you need to:

Generate ideas individually and in groups, and collaborate for creativity
Challenge the need to even hold a group brainstorm, and teach you a raft of proven methods to generate ideas for media, influencers, social and dare we say, it challenge the advertising agencies in the battle for the lead creative idea.
Ditch the tried and tested routes in favour of braver, more daring ideas that will cut through.
Breakout of your habits and go-to routes.
Argue for your ideas having thought 360 degrees around the subject matter.

Anyone working in PR can become significantly more creative – it is a skill that can be developed. We train individuals, teams or your whole marketing and PR group so that everyone is equipped with ways to generate impactful and effective ideas.

Our courses are designed to give you every possible chance of transforming not just your brainstorming sessions, but how you approach all aspects of the creative process.

Thus armed, you’ll be able to come at everything from press releases to content marketing to social media management and beyond with a new lease of creative life. All aspects of your public relations work can benefit.

Why creativity training in PR is important

We all know that we’re living in a fast-paced news environment, and a lack of time is often cited as a barrier to generating ideas. The lines between corporate and consumer messaging have become increasingly blurred too with increased scrutiny and consumer demands for transparency. Influencer marketing has seen hundreds of new companies popping up to grab a slice of the action. However, the opportunity for PR professionals has never been greater.

The highly respected industry bellwether, the WARC 100 report, states that “…creative platforms need to work increasingly hard to maximise earned as well as paid media, and having a highly PR-able idea is one way to achieve this.”

A glance at some of the most successful campaigns of 2022 includes The Breakaway, the first e-cycling team for prisoners. The Decathlon project allows prisoners to go on virtual rides alongside cyclists in the outside world and the Grand Prix for PR and Creative Strategy at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in 2022.

Increasingly the work that is cutting through, making a difference and winning awards, is based on creative problem solving, a subject in which we are experts!

All of our courses are created and delivered by experts in this field. Now Go Create Founder Claire Bridges is an ex-WPP Consumer Managing Director and one of the first female Creative Directors in the sector. Claire worked with some of the world’s biggest brands during her 20-year career, including Starbucks, Kellogg’s, Unilever, P&G and Danone.

The best in the business!

“Claire is the best creativity trainer in our industry, please do quote me!” Annouchka Behrmann, MD, Edelman PR, Hong Kong

Unparalleled in her sector

“Claire has produced an offering which allows professionals of all levels from the most junior to wanna-be creatives right through to industry recognised Creative Directors.to hone their creative approach. The Now Go Create training programmes allow them to access the best creative solutions for their clients and this work has built her a following that is unparalleled to anyone else in her sector.

She is also a staple on PR industry and judging panels and her expertise is called upon to seek out the best examples of creative attainment. I would not hesitate to recommend working with her and her team, she is a shining example to the industry and all of those she works with. ” Rachel Bell, Entrepreneur in Residence London Business School

Who are our PR training courses for?

Everyone can benefit from developing the key skills for the future – from the MD to your graduate cohort, and so we offer a number of different PR training options.

For relative newcomers to the sector, Our How To Be A Creative Ninja courses will help PR professionals to develop their creative thinking skills and start recognising the true potential of what they do in the media mix.

For more experienced practitioners, we run Creative Strategy Training and Pitch Ninjas. These are packed full of tools and techniques that will help you to generate ideas and boost your confidence when pitching and presenting. After all, a great idea is often only as good as the person who is selling it.

For Public Relations leaders and senior team members, meanwhile, our options include our Creative Leadership programme. As well as in-person training courses, we offer online courses, too

Build the creative capabilities of your whole PR team

Build your creative thinking toolkit – our How To Be A Creative Ninja workshops will equip your people with the ability to think flexibly, quickly and ‘outside the box’ whatever the brief. This is the rocket fuel for a massive imagination-boost for the whole PR team. We’ve worked with M&S on Christmas food, the Jamie Oliver Group and Krispy Kreme in-house and agency PR teams on their projects.

Problem solving is a core skill for PRs – being equipped with the know-how and capabilities to help your business to solve the big issues is invaluable to PR professionals. Our SCAMPER workshops and problem solving training course will give you the tools to help. An essential course for product innovators and PR teams working in retail and product development.

Strategic thinking – whatever the discipline, PR pros need to be able anticipate of threats and vulnerabilities and opportunities to pursue. Our highly regarded How To Be A Strategy Ninja course enables people to understand how to shape strategy – whether it be a PR, communications, digital or media relations strategy – and what steps to take to ensure the thinking is robust and an rigorous interrogation of the topic at hand. Recommended as essential career development for Account Directors, Associate Directors, Communications Directors and budding Creative Directors.

How to research and develop insights – it isn’t enough to base your ideas solely on ‘gut feel’. You have to be able to justify your ‘wild ideas’ and hunches to turn them into commercially viable and effective PR campaigns. Award-winning PR creative ideas now begin with data, information and insights. We teach PR teams where and how to search for insights to build an idea from a robust platform with our new course – Insights and where to find them. We recommend this course as essential career development for Account Directors, Associate Directors, Creative Strategists and anyone working in Planning for Earned.

Creativity in PR Global Study

Back in 2012 Now Go Create and Provoke Media set out to explore creativity in PR. We wanted to know how the public relations industry was approaching creativity and whether the industry was set fair to tackle client demands and needs in a fast-changing environment.

Our findings since that first year have shown a significant gap between rhetoric and reality, between an industry that often talks about creativity, but has found it more difficult to ensure that it is paying more than lip service to the notion.

We started the Creativity in PR study in 2012 and were interested to try and initiate some research into creativity in PR industry, its practices, the attitude and confidence of practitioners.

We teamed up with Provoke Media to co-author the study and have since written eight in-depth reports on the evolving state of the nation for the creative industries and specifically PR teams, in-house and in PR agencies.

For 2023, the ninth edition of the Creativity in PR study explores the sector’s creative evolution as it emerges post-Covid against the backdrop and potential impact of AI on creativity. Read our findings on the blog.

Find out more

Our training courses

Employers now consider creative thinking to be a core capability, and for brand and agency teams it's essential. The good news is that thinking more creatively is a learnable skill! We've trained thousands of people in practical ways to improve the way they think and solve problems – explore our courses below:

6. Creative leadership

7. Brainstorming

8. Insight

9. E-Learning

Frequently Asked Questions

This is where all the answers to your questions are.

Can you tell me more about the Creativity in PR study?

We started the Creativity in PR study in 2012. Now Go Create founder Claire Bridges had left agency life after 20 years and after studying for her MSc in creativity, innovation and leadership she was interested to try and initiate some research into creativity in PR industry, it’s practices, the attitude and confidence of practitioners.

She teamed up with Provoke Media to co-author the study. They have since written eight in-depth reports on the evolving state of the nation for the creative industries and specifically PR teams, in-house and in PR agencies.

Global Study 2022 topline findings

The eighth edition of the Creativity in PR study explores the sector’s creative evolution as it emerges from the unique challenges of the past two years.

The 2022 Report, co-authored by PRovoke Media and Now Go Create, in partnership with FleishmanHillard, is based on a survey of more than 200 agency and in-house executives from across the world.

Topline findings: While we’re still not out of the Covid woods just yet, many of us have been able to draw something of a line under the past two years and return to something more stable – but what does that mean for the industry? Has a much-hyped ‘new normal’ emerged, or has everything settled back to where it was pre-pandemic?

That’s what we set out to discover with this year’s survey which builds on last year’s poll that painted a truly remarkable picture of an industry coping extremely well under the circumstances.
“Creativity has always been the way out of a crisis.” Dan Margulis, Executive Creative Director, FleishmanHillard

For the most part, PR professionals working from home in 2021 told us that both their own and their agencies’ creativity had been operating at a higher level than it was before the crisis. In fact, the industry seemed to be firing on all cylinders, keen to rise to the challenge for bigger and better ideas.
A third of beleaguered creative directors told us that they actually led their teams better during the pandemic.
Flexible working has gained a significant foothold and many of us are not quite as tied to the office as we once were, so what does it mean for our collective creative output?
We felt it was important that we took a snapshot of creativity in PR for 2022 – to find out whether the creative energy that emerged during lockdown was still alive, or if we’d fallen back on old insecurities about PR’s seat at the table.

Those old tropes are hard to shake off. The good news is that our survey results contain… lots of good news.
Read more of our commentary about the findings on the blog

Do you do Keynote speeches about Creativity in PR?

Absolutely. Claire has travelled far and wide to talk about creativity in PR and can work with you to tailor a Keynote speech to your audience, just ask us!

Which creativity training course is right for me?

We have many different creativity and innovation training courses and workshops which each help upskill individuals and teams in different ways. Idea generation requires tools to unlock the imagination and inspiration to feed fresh thinking – How To Be A Creative Ninja is where to start. Creative strategy requires research skills, analysis, the ability to synthesise information, interpret, find insights, learn and communicate your thinking – our How To Be A Strategy Ninja series is for you, along with Where To Find Insights.

If you are a creative leader or building a creative team then our creative leadership traning intensive will give you the knowledge, skills and action plan to move your business forward. We also offer ongoing creative coaching to help you further your career.

Who are the courses for?

We firmly believe that creative people are made, not born. Whether you are a marketer, a designated ‘creative’, an intern or the CEO, our creativity training workshops cover everything from where to begin, unravelling the brief (and writing a good one), where to find insights, how to generate ideas and how to sell your brilliant ideas once you’ve had them.

Are your creativity training programmes built for hybrid and wfh?

Many of our most popular creativity training courses offer online and blended learning options. Join our webinars, virtual classroom sessions and open online training sessions. Or try our new stand alone e-learning programme which has won industry praise.

Can you help me to build a creative culture

If you want to develop a more creative culture in your organisation and enhance your leadership team’s creative capabilities we can help you to navigate. Creativity is most definitely a leadership issue – the charge for creativity and innovation must come from those at the top or it will fail. Find out about our Creative Leadership training programme running in Spring 2023.

Where do the training courses take place?

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Do you run courses for individuals as well as companies?

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Join the 30,000+ people who have improved their creativity skills with us.

Get in touch to have a chat about how we can help you today.

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