Seemingly disparate thoughts

• October 29, 2009

By Linda Forrest

Last week, my family went on a quick trip to the States to do some shopping. As with any good roadtrip, we brought along handfuls of CDs (we’re old school like that) and listened to quite a few different albums on our trip there and back. One of these was the fabulous new record by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson, the latter better known as an A-list actress than a singer. The album is doing quite well; at the time of writing, it was sitting at 80 on the Billboard Top 200, having peaked at 41. Entirely respectable for an album from a largely unknown entity (Yorn) and starlet (Johansson.) They’ve been making the rounds on a full-scale publicity campaign, and I caught a minute or two of them on Ellen a few weeks ago. It turns out the album was recorded several years ago, that Yorn and Johansson just happen to be friends, and that when Yorn decided he wanted to record an album of duets, he contacted Johansson and asked her to be the female singer, not really knowing whether she could sing or not. Ellen said what most of us were thinking when she asked — and I’m paraphrasing — what made you think she could sing? And Yorn responded that he didn’t even know if she could sing, then in an AP article he said, “I figured, you know, most actors are multi-talented. They’ve got to be able to do a lot of things and they probably have some ability to sing.”

He’s absolutely right. It used to be that actors did indeed have to be multi-talented: actor, singer, dancer, and potentially more. Gene Kelly comes initially to mind. Sinatra. John Travolta. Jennifer Lopez. On and on… More recently it seems that successful actors are talented in more technical areas like writing, producing and directing, in addition to their skills in front of the camera. Arguably the most talented of Hollywood’s current line-up that can do it all is Clint Eastwood – actor, writer, director, producer, songwriter, singer, dancer — and incredibly talented in all of these areas.

Point being, in today’s competitive marketplace, marketers, like actors, need to be multi-talented. And while a PR company like ours might not immediately spring to mind as the proper service provider for some of the more strategic marketing communications disciplines, we’ve been reminded more often than once recently that our skill set and experience lend themselves well to providing counsel on bigger picture marketing strategy issues. Our fearless inmedia leader has recognized and identified this opportunity and as a result, our business is gradually moving up-stream. His post yesterday not only details the beginnings of this transition and the reasons for it, but also points to exactly the issues I’ve mentioned here.