PR, What Is It Good For? (Part 1)

Before making the leap into the wild world of B2B tech start up marketing in 2003, I spent the first two years of my career earning my blue belt as a “Media Coordinator” at UBS, the Swiss banking giant, in the old Paine Webber building across the street from Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. I’m putting air quotes on the title cause my unofficial but more accurate title was “Clip Boy.”?

The job entailed getting into the office at 6am, arriving to a two-to-three-foot pile of newspapers and magazines at my desk, and scouring media monitoring tools like Lexis Nexis and Factiva to find instances of “UBS” in the news that day. I’d then find which periodical, section, and page in which to find such mentions, clip them out with scissors, paste them to pieces of loose leaf, and rinse and repeat the process until I ultimately ended up with a carefully curated table of contents and a book that was usually 100 – 150 pages long by 11am.??

Dressed to the nines (it was still a Wall Street job, after all) but covered in glue and newsprint, I’d run the sticky tome down to the mailroom, which also doubled as the “mass photocopying center” (think of the basement in "The Hudsucker Proxy"), and have 300 or so copies made, which were then delivered to the top brass of the bank by lunchtime.?

The clip book was an obsession of our venerable Managing Director of Marketing and Communications, the legendary, inimitable -- and quite intimidating, if I’m being perfectly honest -- Donna Peterman. Donna held responsibility for the entirety of UBS’s marketing programs in the Americas region, spanning brand advertising, events, roadshows, sponsorships, investor relations, you name it. But media relations and PR was clearly what she held closest to her heart, and it was reflected in the layout of the office, with us PR folks situated closest to her, with my little media monitoring desk right outside of her door, right next to her EA’s.

That experience made an indelible impression on me that would stand the test of time: As far as Donna was concerned, there was nothing as important to building and maintaining a global brand as earned media – both the quality and quantity of coverage. And you were either in the news, or not in the news. And not being in the news was a dark and lonely place to be.

Over the course of the next two decades, much has changed in the world, of course. Donna is long retired (well deserved). And instead of being a 21-year-old cock eyed optimist clip boy, I’m now a [kinda] grizzled, battle scarred, 42-year-old (oy!) “CMO-type”. And the value and utility of earned media (and marketers’ opinions of it) has changed drastically.

One thing I’ve observed in recent years is that the majority of my B2B tech CMO contemporaries don’t value PR anywhere close to the way that Donna did. It either is low in their list of priorities, an afterthought in the overall “marketing stack”, or isn’t a piece of the puzzle altogether (as in, they don’t have a PR program, a PR agency, an in-house comms person, nothing, zip, nada).

I’ve had a running, well natured (I hope!) argument with a CMO who I really adore and admire for years now who doesn’t do PR, period.??She has told me time and again “press hasn’t yielded a single deal for me”.??When she did dip her toes into PR (which she quickly undipped) she showed me a slide she put together for a management presentation that was titled “PR: Lots of Outputs, No Outcomes.”??Ultimately, when she looks at the chess table and looks at all her pieces on the board, she just doesn’t see PR yielding results compared to other marketing channels. And her marketing analytics and attribution software confirms her belief (and possible bias? hmmm).

Despite all that – especially the proliferation of digital marketing channels at my disposal since I started my marketing career, and their inherent trackability relative to PR – I remain a steadfast believer in the power of PR to make or break organizations, to help start-ups scale with incredible speed, and to become category leaders and winners in their industries.?

From Bigfoot Interactive and Epsilon, to Movable Ink and Fluent, all the most successful companies I have ever worked for benefited enormously from getting tons of great press, and I am, without a shred of doubt, certain that PR was in fact?the?X factor that helped propel these companies to win in their respective competitive quadrants.

But PR is a heck of a lot different today than it was back in my days as the clip boy.??Even having spent the bulk of my career in or around digital marketing, and witnessing all the changes in that field, I’d wager to say PR has evolved much more than any other marketing channel out there. From how decision makers and influencers consume press hits, to where they find them, to how they impact their decision-making (purchases, strategies, etc.) – it’s a radically different playing field.?

I conducted a poll recently to find out how execs (especially marketers) get the “news they use” recently, and also spoke to 3 of my favorite brand marketing leaders to find out how they get their information, and how they perceive the value of PR to be in their own decision making.?In my next article, I’ll share the results of that poll, insights from these brand gurus, and key takeaways and learnings for marketers.

In the meantime, good karma for your thoughts! Please leave a comment with your thoughts on PR, or drop me a line at?[email protected]. Also, check out The Fox Hill Group at www.foxhillgrp.com. We do PR (and a bunch of other stuff) to help the most innovative tech start ups in the world kick some...