The PR Agency Problem with Integrated Communications
During a recent job interview, a senior PR person asked me an interesting question: "What have you learned about our industry from your job search?"
This got me thinking. In the past few months, I’ve had more than thirty interviews with senior PR folks and recruiters. While the agencies I’ve spoken to have ranged from the biggest companies in our industry to disruptive start-up firms, one recurring theme struck me: the challenge of selling genuinely integrated services to large clients. Understandably, this was especially the case for companies that had built their brands on media relations services.
This really won’t come as a shock to folks in PR. Many large clients have separate marketing and communications functions, and agencies typically reflect their clients’ personal metrics. So, if the agency reports to comms, and the comms team is measured on securing top tier media coverage, then that’s what the agency delivers.
Birds (and people) stick in their swim lanes
This is compounded by a perception that PR = media relations. While most agencies and our industry bodies have done a fair job of trying to shift this perception, there’s more work to do. If the RFPs I’ve received over the past couple of years are anything to go by, media relations is far and away the dominant service prospective clients are wanting, with perhaps a desire that agencies ‘help’ with social amplification and the occasional blog post.
Now, before I completely disenfranchise my readers, there certainly have been great examples of integrated digital, social and media campaigns from PR agencies big and small over the past few years. I’ve had the good fortune of being involved in my fair share. But retained, recurring integrated communications at scale eludes many larger companies.
My interviewers shared a perspective that while one-off campaigns certainly got attention, their larger clients struggled to adopt a genuinely integrated mindset for day-to-day communications.
The mid-sized and larger PR agencies all seemed to have dealt with the need to offer integrated services by creating dedicated digital and social centers of excellence to service emerging client opportunities. These stand-alone digital and social teams typically did great project work - but the agencies still struggled to embed digital and social tactics – and, more critically, an integrated mindset - into retained programs alongside media relations.
So, what to do? While I can’t say I’ve cracked this nut, there are three things I feel can help any agency struggling with this challenge.
1.Double down on integrated strategy
The digital, content and social team center-of-excellence model makes sense for a bunch of reasons. The team members often have specialized skills, and the functions frequently are held to different metrics. But while they exist in a silo, they run the risk of being shrouded in mystery, especially in agencies whose revenues are dominated by media relations services. If these silos are orbiting like satellites around the business, then they’ll never get the sales, marketing and client attention they need. The answer lies, in part, to cut across the silos and focus on an integrated communications approach.
Seeing beauty in the abstract
To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If your silo is media, then you’ll default to media. Same for social. Rise. Repeat. So, it’s time to go back to agency basics and collaborate on an integrated approach to communications. Build a new methodology that reflects the business environment, new, proven avenues of trust, and the content and channels that genuinely influence the audiences you’re trying to reach. Putting the right people on this exercise, throwing aside previous assumptions, and creating a scalable, truly integrated attitude to communications is a step towards embedding an integrated mindset in your agency (and its clients). It’s also critical to pilot this approach across the firm, with ‘friendly’ clients and in new business responses. This is as much a change management exercise as it is a consulting one, and can’t succeed if training equals PowerPoints shared over email. It will also require the agency’s leadership to drive the change – and hold people accountable for seeing it through. The result will be a proposition that will resonate with your more integrated-leaning clients, and help build connections with their marketing colleagues.
2.Consider the new PR baseline skills and reinvent
The perennial agency staffing/skills challenge is working out how far ahead of client demand you can afford to get. It’s a chicken/egg thing – if you know in your heart of hearts that influencers are where it’s at, and you feel you could sell in influencer marketing services, but lack the skills, do you take a punt on a specialist? Or sell first, hire later? You could tie yourself in knots. But I’d suggest before over-investing in silos, research your teams’ current skillset (and areas of interest), and assess against known short-term and medium-term needs. You might be surprised what you find.
This needs / skills assessment should point you to a new ‘core’ service offering and ideally help you reduce the silos across your business. Social media community management is an obvious tactic that should be in the tool kit of any modern PR professional. While you may need specialists with a deeper understanding in areas such as social advertising, the ability to tell stories using social channels and content is eminently teachable and, I feel, best placed in the hands of the day-to-day account teams. Identify other existing and desired talent areas, and then take another look at your silos. Hopefully you’ll find that you now can build to a much stronger base of integrated / multi-skilled consultants, and smaller, more focused centers-of-excellence…
3.Embed integrated leadership
I’ve had a handful of genuinely agency-changing client experiences in my career. At my first agency, it was securing a national contract to launch a new sporting competition. At my most recent, it was winning global business that touched almost every market and employee. The game changing clients allow you to do your best work, at scale, but are challenging to manage. Their scale and metrics can make thing
s like methodologies redundant. And if you’re hired to do media relations, you’ll probably still be doing media relations forever. This isn’t for a lack of desire. It’s for the reasons I outlined above, combined with the day-to-day challenges of running large pieces of business.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to this, but one place to start is embedding a senior integrated strategist into the business. Have someone with a broad communications skillset commit to finding and creating opportunities. This person should sit on the core team but also have the freedom to walk the halls.
To start with, it may be as simple as getting infographics into press releases, taking a quarterly research paper and turning it into a microsite, or ensuring media coverage becomes a discussion point in a client’s LinkedIn group. But these small actions will help give both the client and the agency confidence in integrated services. From there, negotiate a pilot with a single business unit and bring your integrated methodology into the quarterly planning process. Staff the resulting program with your best integrated consultants, with support from the centers-of-excellence. From these tiny acorns, mighty (integrated) oak trees grow.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s also not easy. But if PR is ever going to get into the integrated communications game at scale, it’s going to take thinking at a strategic/practice, HR and client team level. It will take strong agency leadership combined with a friendly client who’s willing to join you on this journey. I’d throw in something about marathons, sprints, journeys and single steps, but you get the point. Just remember, when it comes to PR and integrated strategy It’s not me. It’s us.