Jamie Cordwell arrived at Edelman in 2021 with a load of creative agency experience in his backpack. He’d held creative roles at Ogilvy & Mather, 18 feet & rising and Cossette, and worked on global campaigns for AMEX, Dove, IBM, Unilever, General Mills, P&G, and McDonald’s.
He leads with the belief that “big ideas transcend discipline and medium, a creative should be as comfortable writing a script as they are crafting pixels,” and that has helped him to oversee work that has won nearly every award that matters, including a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions for Eternal Run, ASICS, and Code My Crown for Dove for Edelman. His campaigns have also been featured in high-profile publications – Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, BBC, CNBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, and HuffPost.
The Stable: What do you think makes a great PR campaign, one worthy of awards and its audience’s attention?
Jamie Cordwell: I think what makes a really great PR campaign is something that drives news and headlines straight away. Ultimately, it’s something that earns people’s attention, something that goes out there potentially without any paid (although that doesn’t always have to be the case), but something that travels of its own accord because it’s the nature of it being interesting, versus us having to promote it to make people care about it. That can travel through headlines or it can travel through social media – I think the definition of earned and PR doesn’t have to be restricted to traditional platforms. If I was to summarise it, great PR is a piece of work that will travel without pay behind it. It’s not to say that PR campaigns can’t have paid behind them, but really great ones automatically pick up and go with minimal paid or traditional promotion behind them.
The Stable: You’ve covered. A lot of creative bases in your career. How did you come into PR and what qualities or skills have you transferred across all?
Jamie Cordwell: I came from a traditional agency model. Before I moved to Edelman and into PR, I was working at an agency out of Canada. They had a very different approach to things, which was looking at what was the best way to solve the problem in the brief. It didn’t always rely on the traditional “here’s the TV advert, here’s the print”, and I think I really got addicted to trying to solve the problem and trying to reach that consumer in whatever was the best way. When I moved back to London, I met with Edelman and they put briefs in front of me showing the sort of approach that they went for – how do you capture people’s attention; what was the best way to capture people’s attention? It just seemed like a more interesting problem. We’re coming into this new era right now where advertising agencies are doing PR and PR agencies are doing sort of advertising. There is this merger of the two worlds. I think that coming in and learning the way that a PR agency works, learning how to drive and capture audiences’ attention and media attention without traditional paid methods behind it, only sharpens a creative skill set. Because if you put those two things together, then we end up having really super-powerful campaigns. Together, you create an almost unstoppable beast. I think those two coming together are a perfect fit.
Ultimately, the one thing that I think all companies are recognising right now is that it’s harder to reach consumers than ever, and actually, you’re no longer fighting against other adverts. You’re fighting against other entertainment forms, whether that be TikTok, Netflix or anything that they’re being distracted with. So it’s more important than ever that we be interesting – whether that’s with a paid model, whether that’s with an earned model. And I think that learning PR has really taught me to be more interesting.
The Stable: How do you see the evolution of PR and advertising, and this coming together?
Jamie Cordwell: I do think it’s actually a world in which we learn a bit from both. PR agencies are, and have had to be almost from day one, interesting. Traditional creative agencies know how to get and simplify a message and get it out there. And I think those two are already coming together in various ways. PR agencies are learning the traditional creative model, and creative agencies are learning the PR model. I think that’s only going to make this superpower in the middle that’s going to really help us in what is becoming an attention-based economy, where we are fighting more than ever to grab attention. And it’s only going to become harder now AI is into the scene; it’s only going to become even more important for brands and agencies to be more interesting.
The Stable: What has stood out in the work that you’ve judged so far?
Jamie Cordwell: For me, coming from Europe and even having experience in the States, what was been really interesting is the load of new insights and problems that I’ve never seen before. In other some international shows you see a sprinkling of that. But what is fantastic about MAD STARS because of where it is in the world, is the number of insights that are just so new and fresh – to me anyway – that I’ve never seen. There was a piece of work that has been awarded, that just lit up the jury room because it was something that everybody felt that they’d grown up with. The idea was something completely new and exciting. So, I think the best thing here is the new cultural insights that really do come from this part of the world that you just don’t see at any other show.
