There can be few more contentious issues in PR than salaries.
I did a quick search on what bloggers have written about the topic and found nothing. A few bits and pieces on the debate about work experience slavery morals last year, including something I wrote, but nothing that tackles the guts of the topic – do we get paid the right amount?
I could make this a very lengthy post. But in the interests of my time and your sanity, here are what I see as three major salary factors in the PR industry at the moment:
The money must be there
If you work for an agency, that agency must make enough money in order to be able to pay more in salaries. This is blindingly obvious. Yet so few agencies, despite being in the communications business, seem to do a good job of getting their teams to understand that. There are essentially three levers in a PR agency: staff costs, overheads and profit. That is it. These aren’t complex businesses. The greater your income, the more you can increase staff costs. And those income increases can come both from growing your client list and increasing your fees. A good starting point for anyone wanting to increase their salary might be to demonstrate consciousness of ways of generating new client income and ways of charging more for services, where there is a market demand and where the market will accept that pricing.
It is a similar picture with in-house positions. A growing, thriving business will typically have ever-larger and more sophisticated publicity needs as its reputation develops. A stagnant or shrinking business will not.
Agencies must benchmark better
Most agencies will tell their staff that they pay reasonably well. They’ll use phrases like “in the upper quartile” or “aim to be industry-leading”. In an age when most are advising clients on the commercial virtues of truth and the challenges of maintaining credibility across diverse media, this does seem to be wearing a little thin.
Agencies should be benchmarking their rates and their salary brackets versus the market at least annually. Speed does it twice a year. We’ve just done one actually, taking data from recruiters and competitors (don’t worry, we won’t reveal any specifics!) and comparing that with what we offer. This is not a foolproof approach as job titles vary, some figures are given as broad ranges and sector specialisms come into play. But without blowing our own trumpet too much, we’ll be showing this information to all staff. No spin, no massaging the figures, no rushing it before the eyes so it doesn’t sink in. I doubt many agencies are that transparent.
If your specialism is media-linked, watch your earning potential erode
Ah, the digital divas. The above stuff about benchmarking currently has one fly in the ointment – that fear is forcing some agencies to pay unsustainable salaries to digital specialists. I don’t know why, but my guess (and, as I tell my wife, I am not often wrong) is that the agencies paying them are fearful of missing out on the modernisation of media and its implications for PR, so are chucking money at it rather than taking a more commercially grown-up approach.
If we had had such a developed PR industry 50 years ago, we would probably be in the same boat over the development of TV. People would have set themselves up as small screen specialists, touting the end of print and charging a big premium for their services. Only the sector wasn’t even in its infancy then, and the development of TV as a medium was far slower than the internet, hence the lack of a panic factor.
A far better approach is for agencies to train all staff to be able to handle all sorts of media. Conventional PR operators must master digital. Digital PRs must do the opposite – all media may eventually be digital, but understanding the fundamentals of journalism must be meat and drink to all PRs.
Media is changing fast, but whatever we call it today before long it will all just be media. A new, exciting, challenging and diverse media that can both move in the blink of an eye and pause to think shrewdly.
If you tie your earning potential to just part of that media today, do not expect it to keep on growing. And as a client if you’re being charged an unfair premium for what amount to niche media services, perhaps you should question that.
