OK, OK. I had planned to start this on Monday, but got diverted to other more fee-earning activities. So here we are. Probably four or five posts, and they’ll have to be over the course of a couple of weeks as I’m not around next week.
So, these posts will look at why PR departments became a function of many businesses, how their relationship with agencies works and what the future may hold for them.
First off, why PR departments were set up to do, and the role they should be playing for a business or organisation. It’s no small topic, particularly given that the PR needs of organisations and the media they seek to work with vary enormously. Worse still, gazing into the history of PR produces a picture that is at best hazy: you’d have more luck getting a standard definition of what PR is, and that’s tough enough. No wonder my mum still has no idea what I do for a living.
Memory lane
So let’s do some sketchy history instead. Some things some people did in the Victorian era could be classified as PR, possibly. But PR really only emerged in its infancy in the early part of the last century, often associated with war-time propaganda. By the 1950s, businesses had begun to gain a better understanding of how PR could benefit their bottom lines, and although the media was far more simplistic back then and it was probably seen by the board as something of a mystic art.
By the 1960s, in the UK at least, PR agencies began to evolve, as distinct from advertising agencies. The 70s was something of a transitional decade for the PR industry in the UK, like a very confused puberty. The 1980s was when, realistically, it really became a recognisable industry in this country.
Then again, that last paragraph is all about how agencies became viable commercial entities. The internal PR department is longer in the tooth, although the history varies across different sectors. For me, it looks something like this:
- Organisations that needed to convey information to the media: think police, local authorities, politicians of course. They had internal PR teams first
- Organisations that saw the potential of using the media to deliver influence through editorial: on the commercial side, they had a pioneering attitude to increasing sales or shareholder value through PR
- Organisations that wanted to use PR as an asset but also wanted to protect themselves from the media. They invariable hired dedicated PRs later, and had different motivations
Basic functions
At their most basic level, internal PRs were paid to be messengers: delivering statements and facts to the media, devising campaigns that allowed a brand or organisation to improve its standing or adopt a more competitive position, and introduce new things to markets.
You might say that remains the case today and that’s true, but it has got a whole lot more complicated.
As the practice of PR evolved in line with both the rapid proliferation/diversification of media and the growing sophistication/competition amongst brands using PR, so did the scope of the PR department. It was still the intermediary between the organisation and the media, but as the scope of the function increased, so did the workload. Departments became more occupied with planning, internal relations, extracting content from colleagues and monitoring competitors’ activities. Cue the rise of agencies, who could not only provide a greater pool of knowledge, contacts and skills than some PR departments could muster on their own, but also offered the additional and more flexible resource that organisations did not necessarily want under their own rooves. At least that’s the theory.
Where it sits
Asked where PR departments sit in organisational hierarchies, I know a few people working in them who’d say “at the crappy desks, by the loos”.
In my experience there are two approaches. Either PR is a function of the marketing team, with overall responsibility belonging to a marketing or sales and marketing director, or PR is a standalone communications function that is ‘wired in’ to frontline operations and reports directly to someone with overall operational control. The police is a good example of the latter.
I’ll come back to the latter shortly, but suffice to say that being that close to the heartbeat of the organisation and being in a position of having to speak directly to the media in persistently difficult circumstances has made the likes of PR a clinical model for delivering results through the media. The question is whether that approach is right for business, where PR is – operationally at least – best undertaken as a joined-up part of marketing. Again, that’s the theory.
So PR in most businesses is part of marketing. One of its challenges has always been, and is now more than ever, the fact that the editorial side of media moves much faster and is much less predictable than all other types of marketing. That’s a fairly bold claim, so if you disagree then challenge me.
What PR departments need, in order to meet the demands of a futuristic media that can both provide reputational integrity through editorial influence faster than ever, and can fuel word-of-mouth with greater gusto both online and down the pub, is a new kind of agility.
So let’s leave this post with a thought. The PR department of the future will still play an intermediary role, but it will need to be structured differently and make different use of agency resources. If it is not agile enough to meet the content needs of a broader and more demand conventional and social media landscape, it will hamper brand reputation rather than influence it.
More tomorrow, after which this’ll take a break for a week and then rise again. How seasonal.
