Zeno Thinks: The Prince of WaleZ (or how Kate and William are winning Gen Z hearts and minds)
Even by recent standards, last week was a surreal week for the Royal Family. While the Princess of Wales was throwing rugby balls around with the England squad, 30 miles down the road her brother-in-law was giving evidence in the High Court.
So much for the Royal tradition of “never complain, never explain”. Prince Harry spent eight hours under cross-examination – and 48 hours being excoriated by a furious British Press. It was, even for the most optimistic of judges, a mixed performance.
For communications professionals the message is clear: it is very difficult for the Royal family to win with traditional media these days. Their old policy of stoic silence has been punctured by the huge negative attention accompanying the fifth in line to the throne.
So, what’s a Prince to do? Well if you can’t control the narrative in the mainstream media, switch your focus to the digital world. And this, ever so quietly, is something the Prince and Princess of Wales have been doing to great effect.
If the monarchy is to survive, the Wales family have realised you need to engage with Gen Z – and have doubled down on digital.
Every digital marketeer knows that audiences now have an attention span of 8.25 seconds, with Gen Z being the hardest to entice. Wills and Kate have embraced this challenge.
The Coronation was the perfect platform for the Prince and Princess to launch their offensive, after polling revealed a worrying generational divide. A Daily Mail survey showed that while 74% of those aged 65 and over would vote to keep the monarchy, that support plunges to just 28% of 18 to 24-year-olds.
Who’d have thought we’d be getting an ASMR-style teaser reel for the Coronation? But that we did, with the caption “Today’s the day!”. No hashtags, no emojis, just simple, clean copy. This is one of the most marked changes to Kate and William’s social media strategy, moving their captions from mini, pristine press releases to short and snappy copy to capture attention.
Another significant change is the prioritisation of video content. Candid has never been a word associated with the Royals, but their ‘wrap’ reel of the Coronation, which amassed over two million likes on Instagram, gave us all a behind-the-scenes look into the day from the Wales family’s perspective.
No matter what people say, everyone has an innate nosiness that makes behind-the-scenes content so successful on social media.
Their video strategy centred around the freelance filmmaker, Will Warr, who has worked with brands including Puma and Red Bull, and produced arguably the most anticipated wedding video of the year in 24 hours for Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo last month.
This shift to outsourcing young and upcoming creatives, instead of relying on the familiar pool of Royal photographers, is a clear strategy change. Maybe there will be a day when we see a Royal TikTok executive, who knows.
On this topic, they also expanded their internal digital marketing team from one to three, recently hiring a new ‘Digital Content Creator’ and ‘Head of Digital and Social Media’. No doubt this team will have been on a well-deserved break since the coronation, and I’m sure we’ll see their digital bench expand in the months to come, as Wills and Kate develop their digital marketing strategy further.
Looking to the future, it has been reported their team have had talks with TikTok to plan their entry on to the platform (though it’s understood there are no plans to start their own account quite yet). Undoubtedly our future King and Queen will be walking the tightrope between royalty and celebrity as they develop their digital strategy. But their recent content goes to show how even ‘brands’ with the tightest of restrictions on what they can share, are capable of making an impact with a Gen Z audience.
