I had a great chat with PRCA chief executive Francis Ingham the other day to gather thoughts for the book I’m writing with occasional blogger and perennial shy-boy Stephen Waddington about PR modernisation, brand risk and reputation control.

Without giving too much of the game away, and because I’ve yet to transcribe the 100wpm Teeline into something legible, here are a few of the points Francis made:

- Knowing the audience: we as PRs are deluding ourselves if we think what we do will ever be as sophisticated as ‘marketing’ or communicating to one en mass. Yes we must be far more clever about how we target people as groups or networks or even as individuals, but there is a need for pragmatism rather than fantasy here

- Media change: there will continue to be less and less media produced in print (no shock there) but online media will exploit ever-tighter niches and need to be far more valued in doing so. This is fairly central to making people pay for content. Overall, there is a misconception that media is now weak and feeble, with its golden years behind it, as there was no golden age of journalism. What’s happening is rapid fragmentation because of digitisation. The likelihood is the media will ultimately be stronger for it

- Evaluation: clients still don’t want to pay for greater sophistication, and that will remain a challenge. Yes business outcomes need to be the end game rather than just publicity output, but assessing attitude and behaviour is a different kettle of fish and probably needs to be distinct from evaluation of the value of editorial influence

- Planning: yes agencies need to get much. much better at it but it is just one of the things they they need to improve markedly. Media change makes better planning imperative, it can no longer be woolly. But agencies also need to tackle fundamental commercial problems like overservicing that they have not really addressed for years

- Value: PR firms need to be brave and charge more. We need to be higher up the food chain, rather than forever in the shadows of advertising. Doing so means modernising and working out how we can make our commercial value greater, more measurable and becoming expert at communicating to many niche audiences rather than general publicity merchants

Thanks for Francis for spending the time. More in the book in due course.