PR doesn’t have a problem; poor communicators do.
Wasting an opportunity and shooting yourself in the foot
This morning, a (self-appointed) PR industry expert emerged from his ivory tower and questioned whether the PR industry has a PR problem — doing so from no lesser a platform than the BBC’s widely read, and influential Viewpoint section; a platform not to be taken lightly, nor to be wasted.
Sadly, it transpired that this was precisely what happened — the resultant article being a vapid, meandering, cliché ridden, and archaic ramble about, well, not a lot. In being published I’d argue it has done more harm than good — if those working outside the PR industry think that this is how good we are at publicising ourselves and our sector.
So where to begin? Well for a start, it seems the author dislikes PR, “My heart always sinks when I meet new people and the inevitable urban question pops out: “So what do you do for a living?”..”. If you hate it that much, why have you set a company up in this market?
He says one day he’d like to hear someone praise PR the same way people praise advertising — yet advertising is obvious and in-your-face; it demands attention there and then and the skills behind clever advertising campaigns are as unique as those behind clever PR. However, in wishing someone praises clever PR, Benjamin is missing the point of the practice; PR is nuanced and subtle and now far more broad in its spectrum than it ever has been — in this regard, surely not knowingly being influenced by PR activity is better? People behind the science of nudging don’t whinge about not being given more credit; why should PRs?
He then asks “..why does this, the worst-paid of the marketing disciplines, engender such disdain?”. Where disdain (does) remain, it’s mainly down to the perception of (increasingly obsolete) ‘spin doctors’, a perception Benjamin himself uses, albeit without irony, citing the example of Malcolm Tucker as one reason PR has a bad image; a reference akin to suggesting priests have a bad reputation because of Father Ted (chapeau @philcorfan for the analogy).
We then have a few paragraphs on the History of PR — interesting to those outside the industry, if flawed by its brevity and what it misses out of the story, and also not entirely necessary given the BBC isn’t a platform for university PR degree essays.
Throughout this, the author fails to address the modern issues affecting the industry — he touches only briefly on issues such as measurement (and then only doing so around the long-since departed metric of Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE)); suggesting duplicity in the process whereby PRs ‘hoodwink clients with peculiar algorithms’. AVE maybe archaic and indeed banned by industry governing bodies, but I’d hardly say the maths behind it is a peculiar algorithm.
At no point does Benjamin discuss the role PR plays in the integration model — the real movement in recent years as the sector has emerged from a silo the author seems adamant to keep it in, nor the digital and social aspects of relating to your publics — the very nature of ‘Public Relations‘.
Benjamin is locked into the PR = media relations mindset; a mindset no modern agency adheres to as its sole purpose. Indeed, he talks about PR as if it were a silo outside of other marketing disciplines, as opposed to one of the central facets of integrated campaigns alongside Planning, marketing, advertising, social media, and digital to name a few.
This article could have been written ten years ago and been relevant, but not today. He talks about “the changing nature of the media that will fundamentally alter the PR industry”, but Benjamin — this has happened, and it happened a few years ago.
This whole piece was timed to coincide with National PR Awareness Day, itself one massive irony vortex that might have been conjured up by the (superb) PR stereotypes from the comms team in the Beeb’s London 2012 spoof ‘Twenty Twelve’. To further increase the irony, such an Awareness Day is the kind of cheap, feeble awareness stunt that Benjamin himself rightly vilifies in his article.
What really irks about this whole piece is that it’s a massive opportunity wasted, and far from addressing the issue in point it actually exacerbates it — for those not in the know, and who assume Benjamin is indeed an industry figurehead, they’ll think the PR industry can’t communicate properly.
It’s important to note, I have nothing personal against Benjamin and hope this does not sound like a character assassination — I just feel this opportunity has been utterly wasted, and instead the PR industry is shown as out-dated and with an inferiority complex against other marketing disciplines. It’s just a massive, frustrating shotgun shell to the foot.
