Duncan Wardle Makes Disney Dreams Come True

I attended Bulldog Reporters’ PR Summit 2008 earlier this week and had the opportunity to listen to some PR visionaries, like Duncan Wardle, VP of Global PR for Disney Parks. I’ll be sharing what I learned in the other sessions over the next few days so stay tuned!

Duncan is a phenomenal speaker, with a great accent I might add, and spoke about the Future of PR, the communication revolution if you will. He started out by showing the EPIC 2014 video (Evolving Personalized Information Construct by GoogleZone) which predicts that the press as we know it will cease to exist. Check out the clip below if you haven't seen it before - it's kind of creepy to see the early predictions come true. I think the video was made in 2004.



Duncan’s message was about being authentic and using real people to start that two way dialog with your customers. We’ve all heard Duncan’s message before, it’s by no means a new concept, but how many of us our tapping into our brand evangelists and leveraging their enthusiasm for the brand? According to Duncan, the only way to reach consumers in 3-5 years will be through our evangelists. We’ll have so many tools at our disposal to filter all the content out there in order to get what we really care about that it’s going to take our brand evangelists to help us reach the people we can’t.

It's about letting go and not trying to control the message at all times. As a result of this Disney created some really great social media programs like Disney Dream Job Experience and created a panel for Moms called Moms Panel where Mom's can share their experience and give their $.02 on what they want to see at Disney Parks.

The Disney Dream Job Experience turned out to be a huge viral success, generating thousands of consumer generated videos where brand evangelists had the chance to tell Disney what their dream Disney job would be. The ‘real people’ they used to kick off their campaign were their own employees! They found that their employees were just as passionate about Disney as their fans were and this was a chance for them to show it. By the way, this was one of Duncan's favorite videos that was submitted for the program.



One of the biggest challenges that Duncan admitted to was one that we can all relate to....legal interference. Again, it's about letting go of the message - that's what social media campaigns are all about!

According to Duncan, one of the biggest contributing factors for making this campaign a success was working together with all teams, including PR, Brand, Marketing and Advertising. By working together you accomplish great things for your campaign, like working with bigger sites (yahoo) and striking bigger deals. Creating programs like these is something that our team is focused on this year with clients like Coinstar and Wizards of the Coast, and we've already seen great things come from working together with everyone at the table.