The PR industry is experiencing a bit of a kerfuffle in a cocktail glass at present.
According to industry website Mumbrella, the Communications Council “has opened talks with several of Australia’s biggest public relations agencies with a view to the organisation widening its remit to include PR”.
A bit of deconstruction is in order. The Communication Council represents ad agencies and assorted marketing and award groups. The “biggest PR agencies” are several marketing communication agencies plus Gabrielle McDowell’s operation and Michelle Hutton, of Edelman. McDowell is famous for being involved in a campaign that did some damage to relationships between the beer industry and the Howard government and that took some grovelling to overcome.
Crossing John Howard on this, or any other, issue is about as smart as the Housing Industry Association having crossed Paul Keating in 1993. But McDowell is regarded as part of the serious issues management end of the industry and Hutton is a respected player who headed Hill & Knowlton in Australia (a job once held by John Connolly) before being headhunted to Edelman. We are also in a market where there really are no “big” PR agencies any more.
It should also be said that really good, creative marketing PR is a lot harder, for instance, than investor relations media work. It is much easier to get finance journalists to accept corporate views than it is to get a radio talk show host to talk about socks or underwear.
But deconstruction aside, the basis of the move is that the PR agencies apparently want to join The Communications Council because they are unhappy with the Public Relations Institute of Australia, the industry group that represents about 2500 of the PR practitioners in the country, in particular because of the way the PRIA represents marketing communications agencies and runs its annual awards, the Golden Targets.
Now no one has ever pretended that the PRIA represents the entire industry. The membership could represent anything between 10% and 20%. Many senior industry players are not PRIA members and probably would hate being called PR people — even though PR is exactly what they do, except under another name such as corporate relations, public affairs or corporate communications. Essentially all the functions — whatever the title — are based on relationships with “publics” and/or stakeholders. And the irony is that some of these senior players don’t belong to the PRIA because it’s seen as too dominated by marketing communications.
Anyway, there was a debate on Mumbrella about the PRIA and the Golden Target awards, which, I confess, I haven’t read. But some of the debate was no doubt about those interminable internal PR disputes around topics such as whether PR is part of the marketing function, whether PR is a profession or not and whether anyone cares about these self-obsessed debates. The debate was also portentous. One person, Stuart Gregor, of Liquid Ideas (my type of agency back in the 1960s), even described it as “a big move”.
What it really represents is the insecurity that affects PR people. They feel guilt about being in PR — partly because of the way the term is used pejoratively, especially by those such as politicians who draw on its skills all the time. Some marketing communications people would assuage the guilt and feel more comfortable within an advertising agency milieu although, as an advertising colleague once said to me: “Ad agencies used to run companies’ marketing. Now they get invited into the board room to re-decorate it.”
The obverse of this is the PR industry, which for years spent time yearning to be in board rooms, got there and then forgot that a major part of their jobs was not listening to directors but telling directors what was going on in the wider community outside the board room.
What is clear is that kerfuffles such as this are irrelevant — PR just keeps getting bigger and bigger and society is saturated with its activities. The good practitioners — in consultancy, companies, not-for-profits — are just accepting the reality and getting on with it. When they are involved in really serious debates they are about ethics.
What is also clear is that there are more and more PR people. Indeed, The Australian, seizing on some recent ABS figures, suggested the number of PR professionals is due to match the number of working journalists by the end of this year. The ABS data is difficult to interpret and its numbers actually include journalists and writers. The difference is unclear to say the least, or having serious implications for one or other category if it is not.
The figures need some interrogation, particularly in the context of the other ABS series on media and marketing people in general. According to the ABS figures for media and marketing are 254,000; journalists about 25,000; and, PR people about 21,500.
The divergence between PR and journalism tempts one to characterise the ABS figures as based on a category error. But whether it is an ontological mistake or not, one suspects that the number of PR people surpassed the number of journalists (if not journalists plus writers) in the US long ago and has probably surpassed it in Australia.
*Declaration of interest: the author is a PRIA member
Ah well said Noel. The pragmatic voice of reason. Especially the bit about the insecurities that some PR people have about what they do, how it’s described and what it is connected to.
God, those endless posts about where PR “sits” and what aspects of the marketing mix are most important and ” what aspects of ads/social media/promotions etc are connected to (or are more or less important than) what parts of PR and media relations”.
So long as the clients get it, see value, seek our counsel, enjoy the success and pay their bills, who cares?
It’s certainly never worried me.
Martin Palin
Palin Communications
I wouldn’t dispute the thrust of Noel Turnbull’s article about the machinations within the PR industry but his characterisation of a beer industry campaign with which I was involved as not ‘smart’ and needing a lot of ‘grovelling’ to fix the relationship with the Howard Government is simply wrong. Our PR and lobbying campaign was successful on every meaningful level.
It came about because of a Coalition election pledge that beer prices would remain virtually unchanged as a consequence of the new tax system. But subsequently Costello, as Treasurer, introduced a significant hike in the excise rate, driving up beer prices.
Our campaign – which was sustained for over a year – eventually led to a reduction in the draught beer excise rate. The consequence was that the price of beer fell in pubs and clubs throughout Australia (how often have you seen the headline ‘beer prices down’?), reversing a decline in beer consumption and substantially restoring the beer industry’s profit pool to pre-GST levels.
Inevitably, it was Costello who bore the brunt of our very public campaign. I think it is fair to say he was pretty grumpy as a result. It was Howard who made the peace with industry and initiated the discussions with The Democrats to facilitate the passage of a suitably amended excise bill through the Senate. If anything, the PM’s personal political capital was enhanced. The beer industry and its lobbyists continued to enjoy a good working relationship with the PM’s office and with other Howard Minister’s with whom we engaged, with the understandable exception of the Treasurer. I certainly don’t recall any of us doing any ‘grovelling’.
Sad. Now we suffer the offended sensitivities of the spin folk. Shoot them all, I say. (Or at last deny them lunch.)
Hard to get shoutjocks to discuss ‘socks & underwear”? But that would require that they raise their standards.