Best laid plans and all that.
I’d intended to write this post weeks and weeks ago following the pieces on 80s and 90s PR in the UK. In fairness, not that I warrant it, I’ve had a few false starts. I’ve asked a few compatriots and competitors whether I could interview them about the 2000s, but after consideration no-one wanted to do it. I guess the last decade is a bit too fresh in the memory and there’s still competitors, so it’d only boost Speed’s search prowess and be an opening for me to misconstrue their comments cheekily. Ladies and gents, I wholly sympathise and your decisions were doubtless wise.
So I’m going to have to rely on my own memory, views and reflections to do this. And try to avoid defamation, inappropriate revelations and anything that might make peers squirm. Like I would. Here goes.
We’ve already heard that the 80s was a decade in which PR finally became more-or-less a proper job, and that the 90s was a transitional period in which 1999 PR looked very different to 1990.
So to 2000. For me, the decade began in black tie, swimming in the Caribbean with a glass of champagne aloft above the waves, worrying about whether the millennium bug had eaten through my bank account.
But rather than me just warbling on about the past, let’s try to put some structure to this as I, well, interview myself.
Q. What best epitomises how PR was in the UK as we entered the last decade?
It was breathless. Knackering. Literally running between meetings, burning the candle at both ends trying to find good people while taking on new clients and managing all of the difficult bits that come with growing quickly. At the same time, I think we all knew after the heady days of the 1999 dot.com and vendor-financed tech boom, that it couldn’t go on like that, and that regardless of the strength of the economy there would be some corrective action.
For me that happened early in 2000 when I was at the hotel gym, preparing for another lightless day at an off-site management meeting in Reykjavik (it was half-way between the US and UK, so it seemed to make sense). I was running on a treadmill, watching CNN. The business news came on and two of the top three stories that morning were about clients of mine that had gone bust overnight. They weren’t even flighty dot.com darlings, they were tech companies that got fidgety about their prospects of getting rich quick. After that the management meeting became more about managing change and long-term strategy that frantic expansion. PR at that time was riding high, heading for a temporary fall but still with brightness in its future.
Q. It’s typified as a decade of progressive growth in PR, with economic pressures at either end and the birth of social media in the middle. Fair?
Typified by the question above, which I wrote, so yes. It went like this: heady excess, pop goes the dot.com weasel, a mixture of fear and pragmatism, the steady and accelerating return to growth (in technology at least), a mid-decade expansive mini-boom, a constant flux caused by credit-fuelled growth and client consolidation due to acquisitions in their markets, then the rapid freeze of late ’08 onwards and the stark reality of recession.
There was rarely a dull moment.
Q. How did business horizons for PR agencies change during the decade?
It was all about length of horizon I think. At the beginning of the Naughties there were numerous small but fast-growing agencies that had started in the late 90s boom, worked with lots of entrepreneurs and set their sights on building teams and agencies really quickly in order to make money quickly. There was some real arrogance around: several agencies put themselves on unrealistic pedestals and did not live to tell that tale. One dot.com knobber outfit springs to mind in particular, but I have actually forgotten it’s name – perhaps wisely! Most found their ambitions quelled (what a word that is) by the dot.com flop, and had to build their businesses around more concrete client income therafter. So the horizons were the same (expand, sell or merge, capitalise) for the smaller agencies whereas the larger ones were mostly trying to grab a piece of the action – some successfully, others in a pretty lumbering way. The mid-sized firms were either standing a bit still or holding off on offers of purchase. Some, I’m sure, soon came to wish they’d taken the money at the time. In many cases, as is always the way, egos and an overinflated sense of personal importance got in the way of a reasonable payday.
Q. How about skills and the pressures put on PRs?
I see it like this: in the 80s PR became a proper job, in the 90s technology revolutionsed the way we did it (yes, even more than the social media stuff) and in the 00s we all had to become real, proper, effective PR people. Or at least try really hard to be. Yes there were still far too many ineffective or underwhelming PRs around, but the Naughties were a time of much wheat being sorted from chaff.
The pressures were, and still are, mostly caused by change. Technological change brought with it new techniques. Market forces meant rapid expansion and contraction. More people wanted to get into PR and so that put pressure on selection procedures and applicants. As media changed, so did client expectations. Some justifiably so, some a bit lopsidedly, others unrealistically.
The skills pressures really changed in the second half of the decade, and continue to mushroom as PR’s horizons expand, media digitises and none of us can accruately predict what PR will actually look like very far into the future. A lot of skills have stayed the same as they have for decades, whereas others have stretced PRs across new media, new content formats, markeitng consolidating meaning client counsel beyond the conventional confines of PR, and a sharper look at evaluation.
Q. How did in-house PR teams change?
The walls started to come down. A decade ago a lot of PR managers I worked with struggled to make the editorial world understood within the rest of the marketing department, let along the business at large. They just got on with the press stuff and tried to hit qualitative targets. In recent years a more integrated approach alongside other marketing disciplines has become the norm rather than the exception. There were stated intentions to do this a decade ago, but for most it was piecemeal. In recent years there has been a far greater understanding, although sometimes it’s still a case of one step forward, one step back as PR became a more integral part of markeitng and business consciousness one minute and then new technology blurred the lines and led to questions about what PR really was the next minute. It has come a long way, but in many cases there remains a need for further organisational change to make communication central to the business, and engender the agility and transparency now required to be wholly successful.
Q. Did PR manage to learn from any of its own mistakes?
For me it has learned lessons from some of the rollercoaster expansion and contraction of the past decade, but that may have only made those running PR firms a bit too cautious about how best to build their businesses, given the enormous changes PR is going through. It’s daunting out there.
One thing we still haven’t learned though is how not to make schoolboy errors about how people are managed. Too many PR firms are run like hobby shops, with people afraid to have frank conversations with people about what they’re doing well and what they’re not. I’m not backing the Jack Welch-style 20/70/10 per cent mentality, but equally we’ve got to realise we’re businesses first and foremost. We need to be fair to people, honest with them, respect them and be transparent about as much as we possible can be. We have to help people to work towards achieving their potential all the time. Equally, we can’t spend our time persistently mollycoddling, ducking difficult conversations or clinging onto people whose hearts aren’t in it. In short, commercially, as a gross generalisation, we need to grow up and toughen up a bit.
Q. Was it as raucous and pioneering a time as the previous couple of decades?
Pioneering yes, raucous no. We’ve seen from previous posts than the 80s were wilder and the 90s pretty similar in that regard. I haven’t personally been to nearly so many strange places and done so many unorthodox things in the past 10 years as previously. They still do happen, but they’re pretty few and far between. The internet has probably been the root cause of that, as it gives so much scope for immediacy and diaologue, so a new kind of influence. Then again, now we have the internet to p*ss around on a lot more eh? That was a joke, obviously.
Q. What lessons can individual PRs learn from the way the profession changed over the Naughties?
That you can’t fear change and you can’t rest on your laurels. Above all, that the PR’s best friend these days is perspective: so much is changing, yet so much remains the same. Get over-distracted by digitisation at your peril, as many of the techniques of yesteryear are just as valid today if not moreso. Resist change though and you will soon become a PR has-been.
And blogging can be extremely worthwhile if you can ever find the time to do it.
