WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell has spoken out against politicians and business leaders for celebrating economic recovery when the market is “less worst” rather than growing.
Speaking to Bloomberg at the annual World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, he said “you can’t declare victory until you see consistent gains year-to-year.”
Delegates at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference last October received the same message when Sorrell delivered the keynote.
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PR and media response to the Inconvenient PR Truth campaign launched yesterday falls into two camps: broad agreement or a direct challenge, not to the key message of the campaign, but its style.
The irony could not be more delicious. The campaign has utilised a well worn PR tactic, namely powerful content, to get attention. It’s pulled in opinion from across the industry and is now an open platform for discussion.
There have been lots of positive comments. Conversations are taking place on the campaign site itself, blogs, Twitter and an article on the PR Week site. There has been lots of positive input.
But the campaign’s language has also been the target of criticism. It stands accused of opportunism and dramatising the issue, yet much of the content is collated, or crowdsourced to use digital parlance, from articles and blogs where PR spam has been debated over the past two to three years.
Realwire and the campaign in general have been called “arrogant” for its approach to raising the issue. I caught up with its CEO Adam Parker for breakfast this morning. He has strong opinions which he is forthright in sharing but he certainly isn’t arrogant. Engage on the issue and you’ll find out for yourself.
Parker’s objective was to create a discussion around the issue across the PR and media industries and work towards some solutions.
Yes of course it would be great if a PR or media industry organisation or publication was campaigning on this issue – but they aren’t and none have picked it up until now. In his latest blog on the campaign site Parker goes as far as offering to start-over and calls on the CIPR or the PRCA to take up the issue.
Final thought: maybe PR spam isn’t really the issue that it is claimed to be by bloggers and journalists, in which case the campaign will die a natural death. But I doubt it.
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The PR industry is celebrating the NLA’s “climb down” last week over its web licensing scheme. The move followed Meltwater’s challenge of the scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal.
The NLA said last week that it was suspending invoicing until the Copyright Tribunal reports its findings. In its submission Meltwater has asked the Tribunal to refund any fees if its claim proved successful.
“We’re delighted that the NLA has decided to suspend invoicing for its ill-considered new web licence pending the outcome of a Copyright Tribunal brought about by Meltwater,” said Kevin Taylor, Past President, CIPR in a statement.
But celebrations could be premature as the PRCA’s director general Francis Ingham recognises.
“[…] The NLA say they’ll retrospectively bill users if the Tribunal happens to rule in their favour. I think they’ll lose the case, but even if they were to win, I am extremely doubtful they would find it easy to back-date bills – I know they’d like to be a wing of the Revenue, but they’re not.”
Steve Earl has waded through Meltwater’s 30-page submission to the Copyright Tribunal. He studied media law and has considered the arguments in a post on his blog. It’s well worth a read.
He believes that the Meltwater claim rests on three points:
Meltwater has asked the Copyright Tribunal to rule that end-users who receive its aggregated lists of breaking online news stories are not breaking copyright law in any way.
In a comment on this blog last week Durrant’s managing director Jeremy Thompson said:
“Meltwater are challenging the NLA’s right to licence hyperlinking which they believe is against the spirit of the internet. They tried something similar in Scandinavia and failed.”
The Copyright Tribunal could take up to 12 months to adjudicate on the case. In the meantime the PR industry is celebrating last week’s announcement by the NLA as an early victory.
Francis Ingham has the last word.
“The fundamental point is this though. If they were confident of their position, they wouldn’t have blinked. But they have. And in our view, it’s because their bluff’s been called,” he said.
The PR industry trade associations are standing firm on the issue of business-to-business web licensing. Here’s reaction from the CIPR and PRCA on news that the NLA’s licensing scheme will go ahead in the New Year.
“I can think of no other organisation that would charge you for improving the lifeblood of their business. Member schemes usually involve a reward, not a fee. […] I find it hard to accept that my members should pay fees for increasing the readership of content that is available free of charge.”
Kevin Taylor, President, CIPR
“[Our] position hasn’t changed. For so long as content is freely available, I think this is an unfair and legally un-enforceable charge.”
Francis Ingham, Director General, PRCA
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The majority of clients (83 per cent) are in favour of payment for pitching according to a story filed by Peter Hay in PR Week this morning.
Confused.com is the exception that proves the rule. According to reports the client offered to purchase the ideas from agencies involved in its recent competitive pitch process after the pitch had taken place.
Clients might be in favour of payment for pitching when polled in a survey but the reality is very different. Why would a client pay when there are plenty of firms lining up to pitch for free?
The issue is the oversupply of PR agencies; for every agency that wants to charge there will always be an agency willing to pitch for free. As a result the cost of pitching is priced into an agency’s overhead. Many agencies probably haven’t even considered the financial impact.
The only way this could work would be if the industry switched wholesale to a payment for pitching model under the campaigning leadership of an organisation such as the PRCA or PR Week.
The research is based on a survey of 186 PR agencies by Furlong PR.
Related posts:
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Weber Shandwick’s European CEO Colin Byrne was on cracking form as he addressed the PRCA and CorpComms Conference yesterday. He said that he didn’t think that we were out of recession but countered that it probably wasn’t a bad thing as it has forced the industry to get in shape and focus on client service.
“PR has an undeniably important role in business. The recession has forced us to focus on the value that we deliver for clients. Forget talk of reputation, we need to help clients be successful. We need to deliver tangible results and sales,” he said.
Byrne hung his presentation around a series of themes, littered with personal anecdotes, that he believed would set the agenda for the PR industry as growth returned.
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PR used to be the first marketing discipline to be cut in a recession. But no longer.
According to Sir Martin Sorrell speaking at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference in London today, the PR industry is being driven by the opportunities presented by digital media.
PR has also benefited from the political focus on polling and insight he said.
Sorrell pointed to successful campaigns in the US such as the Clinton and Obama campaigns which focused heavily on a strong communication strategy.
Harriet Green, CEO of electronics distributor Premier Farnell and one of the FT’s Top 50 Women in Business said that this should be a “golden age for PR”.
“Digital leaves a footprint that can be measured,” she said.
Green shared the example of Element 14, Premier Farnell’s community of engineers that launched in June and connects the business to 17,000 customers, delivering insight to the business.
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WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell speaking at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference in London today spotlighted the issue that all marketing agencies face: pitching for free.
“The RFP process is still a long process and it’s all for free. WPP has participated in a pitch for a piece of work recently invoicing four major groups all for [no cost to the prospect] and in one global pitch recently we delivered a 36,000 page document,” he said.
But Sorrell said the situation is unlikely to ever change due to over capacity in agency land.
“There will always be competitors that are prepared to [pitch] for free,” he said.
Sir Martin Sorrell was first to take the platform today and share his experience of the current climate for marketing services at the PRCA and CorpComms Conference at Mill Bank Tower, London.
“I don’t see a recovery. I’ll declare victory when year-to-year revenues are better, not less worse. Confidence needs to transfer into cheque signing,” said Sorrell.
“PR will be down like-for-like in 2009,” he said.
PRCA chairman and Ketchum boss David Gallagher was more upbeat.
“Although there is still a quarter to go, member agencies are reporting anecdotally that 2009 will either be flat or slightly up,” he said.
“It feels better and we may be more confident but we’re not yet out [of the recession]. There is no lift in the top line. Like other agencies we are controlling our costs effectively,” said Sorrell.
As global economies emerge from recession Sorrell urged agency leaders to head East.
“There are no growth prospects in Western Europe and the US. Asia and India are the markets that offer the greatest potential for growth,” he said.
In addition to developing its geographic reach WPP under Sorrell’s leadership is focussed on increasing its digital reach from 25 per cent to a third of the business – and build its consumer insight expertise.
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The D&AD was set up in 1960s by the advertising and design industry to celebrative creative communication, reward its practitioners, and raise standards.
The D&AD seeks to protect intellectual property in pitches through fair payment for work. It has also created a series of effectiveness awards that test objectives, strategy, tactics and measureable outcomes. The awards are a meaningful benchmark for campaigns in the design industry against which an agency and its creative work can be judged.
Could this be a model that the PR industry could adapt via the CIPR or the PRCA to enforce pay-to-pitch and create standardised benchmarks?
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PR Bristol reported today that the NLA is introducing a set of charges for the distribution of newspaper website content for business-to-business. PR Week carried the story at the end of last month.
According to PR Bristol from January 2010 if you circulate a web page to a client both your agency and the client will need to pay the new NLA eClip charge. Clipping agencies will become liable for the cost from September 2009 and are likely to pass on the cost.
In the growing number of comments on the PR Bristol site an unnamed individual from the NLA defends its position.
“Licensing charges will only affect those client businesses who receive and use digital newspaper cuttings as part of their business. If a PR agency systematically monitors newspapers on behalf of a client, this is commercial use of copyrighted material and you need an NLA licence.”
“The NLA estimates that over 95% of PR agencies – if they copy digital content to clients – should see an increase in client copying fees for the inclusion of newspaper web content of less than £100 per year; while the agencies’ own license costs could increase by around 10%, entirely depending on what they do.”
I’ve long criticised the PRCA for its limp approach. But director general Francis Ingram has led the defence of the industry. And he’s having none of it. On his new blog he criticises the NLA for creating confusion and introducing additional cost at a time when the industry is under numerous pressures.
“[…] they’re talking about charging agencies and their clients for URLs. They’re talking about charging PRCA members for directing their clients to the newspapers’ own sites. And then charging clients too. That is simply outrageous. If the newspapers want to make their content available for free, and then live off the advertising revenue, then good luck to them. If they want to charge for web content, then – again-that’s their choice. But charging for links to publicly available, free material is utterly ridiculous.”
I’m all for protecting intellectual property but by any measure this move by the NLA is ill thought out.
At Speed we are increasingly sharing a digital monitoring dashboard with our clients. It’s an open source platform built on Netvibes that sucks in content from across the web – including national newspapers. Will this attract an NLA levy?
When I share the results of Google News search or a RSS aggregator that has pulled in content from national media with colleagues and clients will they need to pay per click?
And what of the future of the Guardian Open Platform? Will its commercial partners now need to pay to republish content?
I think the NLA needs to host a proper debate on this issue.
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