What Scares Me About PR

PR has changed. I spend a lot of time talking to anyone who will listen – my team, clients, prospects, strangers at cocktail parties, Twitter friends – about how and why. Firms that cannot deliver on the new needs of their clients are falling behind.

Does the industry need a unified voice about how PR should be practiced, professionals should be trained, results measured, and ethics defined? Is that even possible? While there is no single approach to PR, consistent conversation points continually arise.

The debates are healthy I suppose, but if I had any ability to be objective about PR, the dissonance would strike me as seeing an industry that still does not know what it is and what it can accomplish. While I know this isn’t true given the smart people, innovative firms and great PR programs I see and work with, that there is recurring discourse about certain themes scares me. Read on to see what keeps me up at night.

PR is dead. Guess what? This week there was an article proclaiming PR is dead. Again. Really?

Public relations is an estimated $13.5 billion business globally according to the 2015 World PR Report produced by the Holmes Report and ICCO – and those are just agency numbers, no in-house corp comm numbers included. There are 7,000 PR firms in the Unites States. 7,000! That averages out to 140 firms per state.

There is significant spend on PR, more PR professionals than journalists, thousands of firms, including big, publicly traded companies that must satisfy shareholders, and the industry is dead? It scares me that this perspective continually rises. Then again, there is constant noise that marketing is also dead, along with SEO, and content and social media. That’s a lot of dead.

Press releases are irrelevant. As maligned as it may be, the press release remains a trusty corporate communications asset. Google has an impact on press release reach and the release itself is not really a path to coverage (and hasn't been for a while). So what? This is not the death knell of the press release. Honestly, there’s hardly a journalist today who eagerly anticipates a press release before coming up with an article idea. If there are journalists out there waiting for releases, please let me know; I’ll start a list.

But releases are still an effective storytelling device, and as clients repeatedly tell us, provide credibility to their companies.

For my friends at wire services, however, I am scared. They’ve built healthy businesses, first by getting releases into newsrooms, and more recently by driving website traffic and helping stuff Google Alerts. Even disclosure and earnings reports can happen through media other than wire services now. What’s next for the wire service, and what impact will their services have on press releases?  

There is no creativity in PR. How do you define creativity? Is it a great pitch letter or turn-of-phrase in a speech? Businesses must act like media companies. While this concept encompasses the distribution, creation and consumption of content – and building community around the content – the content must be visual, or at least supported by visual elements. But this does not happen consistently enough in PR, and leads people to think that there’s no creativity. Even if it’s a post for a corporate blog, create an image that communicates the story through the graphics. Ignoring the power we have to communicate through multimedia assets is scary… and an opportunity for those of us who keep the creative juices flowing and earn the media hits as a reward.   

Who owns social media? Why does this industry make such strenuous arguments over ownership? Does it matter? Social media and community-building – more often than not moving in-house these days – is not about ownership. It’s about story and process and company-wide philosophy, and how to embrace social and community within an organization. “Owning” such a social component of marketing is not good practice, and the debates over ownership scare me.

What about a great idea? I suppose this scares me the most. Great ideas rock. The right idea can be supported by PR, marketing, digital, social, whatever. That idea can power an entire company’s brand platform, inspire its rallying cry, infuse every piece of everything that it does. The best ideas don’t fall neatly into one aspect of marketing or another; they move an organization ahead powerfully because the idea is powerful. So what’s scary about a great idea?

This is: who funds it?

Marketing budgets are often still compartmentalized. PR gets this much, branding this much, etc. Buyer behavior is scary. It’s not the buyer’s fault, as PR and other marketing disciplines have worked so hard to create their own silos. Buyers are doing only what we trained them to do for years, ignoring the changes that were coming. And that was not buying the big idea in many cases.

It’s not as bleak as I make it out to be, of course. The PR industry is doing just fine. Some businesses get it when we talk about these topics and others don’t, and some can fund it and some cannot. That’s OK. There are choices out there. 7,000 of them! Wanna see what’s really scary?

To overcome my fears, I take comfort in knowing that:

• PR is alive and well, and done differently at different firms.
• The industry still has a ton of room for innovation.
• Press releases must tell the company story, and search results do not dictate the entirety of a PR program; the best firms know how to address search and where it fits in a program’s content.
• Creativity is subjective – clients and prospects – and their audiences – know the right creative for them when they see it.
• Social media is part of the fabric of progressive companies.
• Buyers are listening more to idea-driven marketing, and we will see change in how marketing and PR initiatives are funded.

What scares you about PR?

This post is a revised version of a former blog post I wrote for HB Agency, updated and shared for this 2016 Halloween season.