And so the real age of austerity dawns. Swingeing Government cutbacks, practically half a million jobs to go and the majority of Britons having to focus on tightening their belts.
Much has already been written and said about the impact of the cuts on PR. Public sector PR spending is clearly in the line of fire, but there may be broader impact beyond.
This is all pretty obvious. Moreover, this is not the first time that money spent on PR and the value that the investment delivers has been under the microscope. For a service that is constantly under pressure to prove its worth clinically and commercially, the spending review adds to the existing challenge, whereas for many sectors it creates entirely new ones.
So should PR agencies groan, tut and sit back waiting for the impact of the spending review on them to become apparent? A better way to spend a bit of time would be to look at one thing that they can cut back that will help them deal with the tough few years ahead – overservicing.
Yadda yadda, yawn yawn, heard it all before. Yes overservicing has been a factor in PR practically since the first agency invoice was sent. Yet it remains one of our worst traits, and one that has to be tackled better if we’re going to make this whole industry more professional, commercially mature and able to put pound signs into measurement models convincingly.
We’re always under pressure to prove our value, and budgets will be tighter than ever. So we need to ensure that in proving the value of every bit of money spent on PR, we can run profitable, sustainable and responsible businesses that charge fairly for what they deliver.
If we consistently give clients 50 per cent more than they’re paying for, we may be loved by them for it but in doing so we’ll devalue our value. I don’t have all the answers yet (and if I did you wouldn’t be reading about them first here) but if we’re going to crack the value/measurement challenge then we need to confine widespread overservicing to history at the same time.
If we’re going to be utterly confident about tying pounds invested directly to pounds gained, we can’t then have overservice fudging our future.
