This new survey should scare the shit out of you

The 2019 JOTW Communications Survey is out, and if you work in public affairs, the results should scare the shit out of you.

The. Shit. Out. Of. You.

Yes, I said that.

Read on and tell me if any of this rings a bell.

Corporate communications departments are taking more work in-house.

According to the survey, the top five reasons for hiring an agency are:

1) execution (64%);

2) niche or vertical expertise (58%);

3) strategic projects (38%);

4) transactional or short-term help (38%); and

5) planning and strategy (37%).

[…]

The survey identified the top five reasons for firing an agency as follows:

1) cost (81%);

2) poor client service (47%);

3) inability to measure ROI (41%);

4) too much “hand-holding” (32%);

5) taking more work in-house (30%)

“Too slow or suggests stupid ideas just to make money off of me or bills creep up over time. I once asked for help in an emergency and the agency I was using ($1M a year) wanted to charge me $800 for a poster. Their contract came up at the end of the year and I didn’t even consider them. They had an opportunity to help me and they took advantage. Bye Bye.”

“Journalists are increasingly strident toward, instead of partnering with, PR professionals. It’s virtually impossible to have an actual conversation with a writer.”

“Journalists are no longer objective, they are much more subjective and if you do not fall within their lane or their bias, they are not interested and you are left by the wayside. The days of objectivity are gone and the days of combative, aggressive, argumentative ‘in your face’ journalism has taken its place.”

“It’s harder to know who is media and who isn’t. And there used to be rules of engagement – behavior, fairness. Now, it’s say whatever you want about whomever you want.”

This is all true, and fair. The problem is, what we have here is a series of trends culminating to create a perfect storm for big companies and trade associations in which they will absolutely become unable to handle public affairs—often a subcategory of PR and communications—well.

That will gradually and adversely impact their underlying businesses, because while a feelgood story about this customer here and another there may not drive massive revenue to your business, a crisis that is handled badly from a communications standpoint will crater it, especially if a “government investigation” is involved—and public affairs communications handled badly could make you wind up with a deeply punitive or even inoperable taxation or regulatory environment.

Good communicators with backgrounds in business—for example, I used to work extensively with the private equity sector, my Vice President has an MBA and a Director is working on an MBA—understand this.

But that’s not most communicators. Here’s what you need to do to stop following the trend, and make your communications operation work for you again. Even in these difficult times.

1.    Quit with the in-housing.

I know, it looks great from an accounting perspective. “I could hire these four consultants and end up spending twice as much on fees as if I brought a couple really good people in to work in-house.”

The problem here is, you actually need the awesome, in-house rock star and awesome consultants, and as great as accountants are—hey, I’m married to one—they know sweet f*ck all about how communications can add or subtract revenue from a firm’s bottom line.

Only communicators, and communications-savvy CEOs or COOs, really know that.

Here’s why you need a great in-house and agency team: There are only 24 hours in a day, and if the communicator is reporting to the CEO, guess what they’re not doing? Spending the requisite number of hours a day on the phone with reporters, making sure your media coverage actually looks right and that zero opportunities are being missed.

Here’s another reason why: Your communicator is there to set strategy, and probably to issue an on-the-record comment from the company when only that will do. They are not there to execute. Executing takes too much time, and it can be a very specialized skill set.

Trust me: I run a firm that focuses on engaging with ideological and investigative media. How many in-house communicators do I know that can get the spread of stories I can in a week for a given client out of right-of-center or left-of-center media? That’s right: Zero.

And that’s fine. Your in-house team is there to set the strategy, ensure the CEO’s values and priorities are reflected, and be the on-the-record people when a company voice is the only thing that will solve your problem. Your consultants are there to actually get shit done. Getting shit done costs money. It simply does.

You’re not going to save yourself money by trying to entirely in-house the communications function—among other things, there are conversations that people who are in-house simply cannot have by virtue of the fact that they work directly for the company (Again, trust me: I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve placed over the years that if they’d been pitched by the client directly would have been shot down instantly by reporters).

Why save money to lose money, and wind up with fewer clips to show, a more pissed off CEO, and more pissed off shareholders (if you have those)? Don’t do it.

The only way to work this is to hire shit-hot in-house communicators, and then hire shit-hot agencies that actually execute. Which, by the way, is not most of them. And that leads to point #2.

2.    Shop better

The simple reality is that in the public affairs world, people tend to hire based on word-of-mouth or “who the really big firms are” rather than any actual assessment of value. How often have you heard a statement like this “X Fortune 500 company uses them, so I’d better use them, too?” My guess is, a lot. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good hiring instinct.

Partly, clients gravitate to consultants this way because it’s hard to assess value until public affairs work is actually underway—and usually it’s tough until it’s been underway for a couple of weeks. Partly it’s because it’s just harder to assess the quality of what you’re buying when you’re buying public affairs than it is when you’re buying strawberries. Partly, it’s because public affairs—like other politically-oriented industries—tends to function off the back of personal relationships not professional assessments of value. Partly it’s because when we don’t know what we’re buying for, we assume big or “big name” is good.

Tell me how many times you’ve seen this: X gets hired not because he has the lowest fees or the best reputation for the work a client is contracting for, or is reasonably inexpensive for the value he delivers. He gets hired because hey, he drank beer with some other guy doing the hiring who he worked with on a presidential campaign when he was 24 and he’s been a partner at this firm with lots of junior minions and an office on K Street for 25 years now. And he’s a big donor to X political campaign!

This literally happens all the time, and while I’m not going to say my firm doesn’t occasionally benefit from the friends-hiring-friends trend (though it should be noted that I haven’t drunk any alcohol since before I got into politics), it’s a bad method of shopping and hiring. If you wouldn’t buy a diamond ring from some dude you drank beer with when you were 24, or automatically go to Jared because hey, everyone’s heard of it, you shouldn’t do the equivalent with your public affairs communications.

Somehow, you have got to cast a bigger, better net.

Not to sound like a reverse sexist, but one way to do that is to stop talking exclusively or primarily to the big, legacy male-run or male-dominated firms. As a female consultant who founded, owns and runs a majority-female staffed agency, I will tell you straight up that we don’t get thought of as frequently as the male-run, “established” agencies. That’s not a complaint, that’s a free—and extremely valuable— tip for you: If we’re not getting the same volume of people begging us to take their money every day, you can bet we are going to work harder for every dollar.

And we do.

While I am obliged to say don’t you dare pay us less than you pay the boys, the fact is, we’re very price-sensitive because we know we do not have the market position to demand mid-range five-figure-a-month retainers. Emails do not go unanswered for days at a time (you won’t forgive this of me because we didn’t drink beer together). We measure ROI in a much more concrete and meaningful way (Spoiler alert: We have ways of doing this that literally no other DC-based firms do!) Our thinking caps stay on, all the time. We don’t just do what the client tells us to do. We tell the client what they should be doing, based on what we see in the overall political and commercial space, and we ask questions.

Guess what the top four reasons companies fire agencies are? Cost (81%); poor client service (47%); inability to measure ROI (41%); and too much “hand-holding” (32%).

That leads in turn to the fifth: Taking more work in-house (30%).

The issue is this: You don’t need to take more in-house, and you shouldn’t; it will hurt you long-term.

But you do need to hire better consultants and not tolerate dicking around on your time, or your dime.

3.    Ask these specific questions when you’re hiring

How do you find better consultants? Cast a wide net, and then ask the right questions. Yes, partially, you’re asking about cost (that’s such a no-brainer I’ll leave it off the list). But more, you’re asking about work, experience and work ethic.

Here are some examples:

·     Can you get stories written by this specific publication or writer? How? Can you show me clips from your prior outreach to that publication or writer? (Hint: Most of them won’t be able to do this; what they’re selling you isn’t clips they generate or actual execution, they’re selling you an email service that’s dressed up nicely and looks like a human being).

·     Can you show me a sample pitch? (Hint: Most of them also won’t do that because they rely a lot more on reporters passively stumbling across information and writing about it than they want to admit).

·     How much do you use press releases and white papers? (Hint: If the answer is “a lot” or “we’re experts at press releases and/or white papers” do not hire them because press releases and white papers do not work and communicators surveyed by JOTW said so).

·     How many of you are former reporters or currently write columns or articles—and not as client surrogates— regularly? (The reason you ask: If the answer is “none,” they don’t have as solid of media relationships as you probably want).

·     How many of you have advanced degrees like MBAs, or actual business—not politics, public affairs or journalism—experience? (Hint: if the answer is “less than 50 percent of the firm as a whole,” they are unlikely to provide you with the strategic advice you need because they simply won’t understand what’s driving decisions and priorities—also, if you’re a communicator who does report to the CEO directly, you’d better have business-savvy people around you).

·     How do you measure ROI and how can you report that so I can demonstrate value to my boss? (Hint: If the answer is just “we always report the daily circulation of the paper” or “this is the monthly viewership/readership” talk to more firms, including ours).

·     How often are you going to want to talk on the phone? (Hint: If the answer is “we like to do a weekly call,” they’re selling you a call as “execution.” That means they’re not spending the full amount of time allocated to your account on actual execution. The more calls or meetings, the less execution; fire your consultants who demand daily or weekly calls—they’re trying to trick you into thinking they’re working when they’re not working, they’re talking—to you, while billing you).

·     How fast do you typically reply to emails? (The reason to ask this is obvious, and the answer should without hesitation be “worst case, in a matter of hours”).

·     How do you structure your team? (Protip: This one is really important. Some firms adopt a structure that inherently creates lag time between a client request reaching the executor and, in the inverse, an executor’s question or request reaching the client. Time is money. Waste time, waste your money. I can’t tell you how many awesome pitches I’ve seen never be sent or land because it took too long to get ahold of a needed piece of information).

·     How do you contract? (Hint: If the answer is “annual retainer,” start shopping around. Sure, you can always give your 30 days’ notice and go elsewhere if they suck. But let’s be real, you probably won’t because firing people sucks. So hire on a project basis—most firms hate it, but you’ll be a better steward of your money and function more strategically that way anyway; also the consultant will bust their gut much more to get re-upped).

·     How is your business set up—are you all in an office, multiple offices, are some employees remote? (Hint: We’re an all-remote business and as crazy as that sounds, it means we can keep our client retainers lower. Our staff also does not burn time gossiping at the water cooler, instead of doing your work, every day).

Go read the whole write-up of this study here—seriously, do it. And then start adjusting your communications decision-making accordingly. Unless you’re one of those “other firms” I talked about, in which case, keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Really. I mean it.