• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 11, 2018

You might think of Edelman as a PR giant and that’s true but over the last several years the company has aggressively moved more into the broader marketing communications space, adding hundreds of creatives (taking creative agency lead on some campaigns) as well as a paid-media business that manages over $200 million in measured media expenditures.

The firm has hired loads of creative, strategy and client management talent from a roster of blue chip ad agencies like BBDO, McCann, DDB, R/GA and others. And it’s been honing its social and digital chops for a while.

The firm’s media practice includes full-scale digital media planning, buying and analytics. It also has planning and buying capabilities across OOH, print, radio and TV.

Edelman also just launched an advisory practice that works with C-Level executives on strategic communications issues across areas including brand, purpose and reputation. That’s being run by Richard Wergan, former Chief Marketing and Brand Officer at Royal Phillips.

Now, just in time for the Cannes Festival of Creativity, Edelman is out with new campaign to remind the industry of its ongoing transformation called “Act With Certainty.” There’s an anthem video and print ads that will run across various trade publications. The campaign will have a presence in Cannes, with ads posted at various events as well as in publications on site. A digital version of one of the ads is running on a marquee outside the hotel along the Croisette where the company is based for the festival.

The firm has close to two dozen entries at this year’s Lions festival for clients including Dove, REI, Adobe, Samsung and Mars Wrigley Confectionary.

The campaign video opens with lots of quick cuts to chaotic scenes representing a number of broad ongoing industry issues including distrust, disinformation and disruption. A voiceover intones that consumers demand that companies “take charge,” and that they need a “partner who tells it like it is, cuts through the chaos and sees ahead.”

In today’s world, the voiceover is heard concluding, “The words you use are only as powerful as the change you make.” The film ends with a graphic, “Act With Certainty,” followed by the Edelman logo.

Company chairman Richard Edelman said that timing was in part tied to Cannes but also to the fact that the firm has amassed a large enough body of work outside of its traditional PR wheelhouse “that it made sense to talk about it now.”

The firm he added has made the transition from PR company to “communications marketing,” and the campaign is designed to “make clear what our abilities are.”