I suppose the answer to this had better be yes they are worth hiring, or I’m out of a job.

My point here though is that there is a growing danger that in-house marketing teams don’t really know what they’re buying when they’re considering taking on external PR support. And the main reason for that is that PR has changed, and will continue to change, so dramatically.

That’s all because of the digitisation of media.

Yes PR is changing, but everyone is banging on about that so let’s be pragmatic and make a stand on it
As I covered in the last of these posts before I ventured south for sunburn and saddle antics, the media looks very different now to how it looked when I first joined the Beano Fan Club. It even looks very different to how it was five years ago. By the end of this year, it will have changed further.

It can be dizzying. The advent of television changed the nature of media in this country: newspapers had to compete with its relative immediacy and ability to communicate news visually compared to radio, plus its entertainment appeal and reach. The expansion of the trade and lifestyle media in the 80s and 90s drove further change as the desire for more specific (and often banal) information grew. Then along came the internet, creating scope for what would be a two-way dimension to media and content taken onto all manner of platforms.

Meaning that while conventional media is getting the body blows at the moment because of this new ‘competition’, the lust for information and sharing content has never been greater. And for organisations wanting to gain value of some kind through PR, the choices are both extensive and ever-changing.

I’m not going to delve into that further here. What I will say is that, generally speaking, the PR industry is currently far too hung up on new types of media and trying to make itself look on the ball, without having the balls to truly change itself in preparation for what the media will look like in the future.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what it will look like in the future either. But it will all just be media – conventional, social. Print, audio, visual, text, delivered wherever and whenever. Animal, vegetable, mineral. PR needs to stop glamourising digital media while it stands back on its heels worrying about media change.

Could PR (and other marketing) agencies have predicted this change better when the internet first began to gain a foothold in the mid 1990s? Possibly. We could have seen the two-way thing coming better, but couldn’t have quite foreseen the meteoric rise of YouTube back then. Not the print media’s burying of heads in the sand over payment for content.

So here we are. A right mixed bag of an industry. I think, and Speed thinks, that it will all just be media and that the PR agency of the future will need its whole team to be equally adept at all types of media. In the meantime, let’s look at the choices facing PR buyers in 2010.

A la carte, but at the risk of indigestion
This is doubtless incomplete, but here are the types of sustained external PR support on offer in the UK today:
- Classic PR agency: knows conventional media, niche expertise in one or multiple sectors, has started a digital division probably, and talks about PR and digital PR as if they are two separate disciplines
- A step up from that: as above, but talks about the domino effect of content from social to conventional to social media etc, and gets that it’s all just content, you just needed to be cleverer in deploying it
- A dithering dinosaur: classic agency with no willingness (probably at the top) to understand digital PR and would rather leave it to someone else. Ancestors probably blindly wedded to the Penny Farthing when Henry Ford was busy plotting. On borrowed time
- Pure digital agency: may talk about doing digital PR, may not even use the letters P and R, but is working with clients to create/deliver/inspire influential content across social media. So is doing PR whether it says so or not. Typically smart entrepreneurial people, shorter-term commercial ambitions, marvellous hair and look down on classic PRs (and in some cases, like the dinosaurs, that’s fair enough). However, not investing in understanding and being able to deliver across conventional media. Perfectly capable of delivering a social media campaign that makes it into The Sun, but does not really understand The Sun and so assured outcomes from the investment can be questionable
- Ad firms or other marketing agencies: have started muscling in on former PR turf. All’s fair in that respect, but generally ignorant of how to handle and measure the influence of the editorial world effectively. Could make a claim for the PR ground of the future, if only the shareholders or powers that be didn’t see it as a modernising advertising business rather than a marketing business. Saying your stuff is great and getting others to say your stuff is great will always require different approaches
- Mish-mash job: may have done social media consultancy for a car brand, also does trade print PR for niche clients, also does some international campaign management, big on digital PR obviously (because people need to say that these days) and also now has a blog. Potentially extremely painful

No one of these agencies is likely to provide a full range of effective PR services for any sizeable brand today. You could say that has long been the case, that brands have long worked with several agencies, and that’s true. But as media keeps digitising and diversifying, the danger is that any sizeable brand might need a dozen PR agencies, and an army of internal PR people to manage them. The freedom of a la carte, but too many courses and inevitable indigestion. And a bigger bill to pay.

How can PR buyers make sense of this?
Increasingly, I get calls or briefs from prospective clients not really sure what they’re looking for. That’s completely understandable, because the way the industry markets itself to them is in a real mess. The need for rapid modernisation and threats from new kinds of agencies has caused some wild claims, some strange diversions and some changes in fortunes. Couple that with the recession and media change, and the landscape looks very complex.

In many ways, the advice here to clients is unchanged. Figure out what you want to do commercially, define your brand strategy, then comes the talk about how and what PR can deliver for you. Then you can assess who you want to reach and understand what media is best, and what content you’ll need. Inevitably, not all in-house PR departments will have the ability to determine all that for themselves, or even dedicated PR experts who have that knowledge. The problem is that at the moment too many client teams are approaching different kinds of agencies and getting all kinds of different stories about what it is they actually need from PR.

In the words of my brilliant colleague at Seymourpowell, Richard Seymour, “they’re probably digging in the wrong place”.

What should PR buyers do?
It’d be presumptuous, arrogant and possibly foolish of me to tell people what they need to do. But I’m paid to consult, so let me stick my neck out and see if I can avoid mortal wounding. Here’s what I think PR buyers need to do in working out what external PR support they need at the moment:
1. Do you really know which media will be most effective for you and how you can best/most accurately measure the impact of what exposure you’ll generate across it?
2. Does/how much does your audience care about you, and why?
3. How will your PR operation (and content delivery) work overall: are you sufficiently agile to get the job done right?
4. Which types of agency should you rule out of the running because they don’t provide enough of the services you need?
5. If it can’t all be done under one roof, is the best split of responsibility by media type or audience type (and shouldn’t an agency working to reach a specific audience be able to handle all the media required to do that?!)?
6. Hand on heart, do you really have a clear view of where the media landscape is heading and, in particular, how to work with social media?
7. Equally, do you really understand how the conventional press has changed in the past few years and what its modernisation plans are?
8. If the prospective agency claims to understand how to deliver content across conventional media and now understands the digital world too, do its web site and blogs live up to that, and are its senior management all engaged with it too?
9. Once you’ve figured most of these things out, have a serious conversation, ideally with your board or senior local management, about how what PR can deliver for the business is changing and how the way the business uses PR services will need to evolve too
10. Once you’ve got the budget signed off, think hard about how you need to measure the value of PR and do not just take one agency’s word for it. This is a hot topic of debate at the moment, although some corners of the industry seem to be staying suspiciously silent on it

This honestly isn’t supposed to be a plug for Speed, but incidentally our approach in all of this is to invest in becoming the agency that cracks it all: that can work equally well across all forms of media to deliver assured and measurable value for clients. It is not just media digitisation that is forcing that evolution, it’s us being bold and not tolerating any lily-livered half-bakedness. If the PR person of the future can’t handle what the media of the future will be, they should start looking for another job.

So (phew..) agencies are worth hiring. But the right agencies and for the right reasons, and in my opinion PR buyers both need to tread carefully and take an honest look at how they’re set up to do modern PR.

Next post: a three-year plan for upgrading your PR department to meet this challenge.