This week in PR (12 April newsletter - the consultancy issue)

There are over 25 content links in this week’s round up. 

From these, I’ve chosen one theme, consultancy. I hope you won’t stop reading: I know that most people working in public relations are in-house and I acknowledge that the minority working in consultancies or as independents make a disproportionate amount of noise (they’re having to win business, remember).

But the boundary between in-house and consultancy roles is porous, and many of us switch sides during our careers. And there’s a case that every practitioner should operate as a consultant, even while working in-house. In addition, many in-house practitioners manage external suppliers.

There are also some surprising lessons in the global balance of power from this week’s content.

As a warm-up exercise, Anne Cantelo provides an overview of the mistakes companies commonly make when contracting public relations services. She leads with ‘believing PR means the same as press coverage’ before citing a couple of notorious examples where media attention led to negative reputation consequences. You don’t want to walk in the shoes of Gerald Ratner or Prince Andrew.

Nor should all media contact be a one-way street leading to media coverage. We should seek to build relationships with key journalists, not merely treat them as messengers. This is a point made by Blurred’s Karen Noctor. 

‘Journalists serve as gatekeepers of truth and we constantly tell our clients and internally as a team that when it comes to landing stories establishing and nurturing relationships with journalists is not merely about securing ‘coverage’; it's about earning trust.’

Being a consultant means coaching clients and working towards longer-term objectives and not just chasing short-term wins.

In a different context, this was a point made by measurement and evaluation expert Richard Bagnall. He talked about the danger of focusing on activity (outputs) over results (outcomes).

‘Because you become what you measure, you become a ‘busy fool’. We do stuff and then we say we’re going to count the stuff that we’ve done - and we’re going to confuse that with some kind of meaningful measurement. We lose sight of what actually matters.’

He warns that it’s about to get worse as we’re about to drown in a sea of mediocre AI-generated content which will require teams to run even harder just to stand still. Busy fools indeed.

In this context, I confess it’s taken me until now to understand why Google felt the need to add the second E to its quality rater guidelines: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness or E-E-A-T are the factors that need to be present if content is to rank highly.

At first glance, expertise and experience sound like the same thing. On further consideration, it’s easy for an AI chatbot to affect expertise on any given topic, given its ability to ‘learn’ from large amounts of data. But AI can’t claim firsthand experience of the things it's talking about; that’s an asset that remains distinctively human.

So let’s return to those humans working in consultancies - and specifically international consultancies. Let’s learn from their experiences.

When we think of international consultancy networks, the typical model is of a US-headquartered network expanding internationally. Even if the team does not originate in the US, English will be the principal language.

So this week I’ve learnt of two examples that run counter to this trend, both thanks to PRovoke Media (a strong source for covering the international consultancy business).

Paul Holmes interviewed Fiorenzo Tagliabue, the global CEO of SEC Newgate. As his name suggests, he’s Italian and the network originated in Italy, expanding in the UK with the acquisition of Newgate.

What’s more, we learnt the explanation of the firm’s name. This doesn’t follow the pattern of a US company named for its founder (think Edelman or Burson) but invokes a Latin phrase (Tagliabue had previously worked in a media role for the Vatican). Prepare for an explanation that draws on the classics:

‘Our brand SEC (which comes from the Latin Societas Europaea ad Communicationes) had both a purpose and a program: to build a PR agency rooted in the European foundations of our job, which stems from the ideas of two major thinkers: Aristotle and Cicero.’

Only recently Alan Anstead had led an article with: ‘Aristotle is the father of public relations, not Bernays.’ I’m sure he would approve of this attempt to overturn the usual Made in America assumptions about the origins of public relations.

Then there was the podcast interview between Maja Pawinska Sims and Farner’s Roman Geiser and Gordon Tempest-Hay of Lansons, a recent Team Farner acquisition. The ambitious agency has Swiss origins:

‘Farner became that big gorilla dominating the Swiss market and two and a half years ago we decided to take that model of being more than a PR agency – a management consultancy for integrated communications – to the European level. We are already a top ten player in Europe.’  

The US is no longer home to all the big beasts in the PR consultancy jungle.

So how can you become a better consultant? The phrase ‘management consultancy for integrated communications’ resonates and in this context I recommend listening to Sharon O’Dea. She handled a wide range of questions in a live chat with Advita Patel, ranging from the choice of internal communication channels (‘Never be driven by the channel; be driven by the need. What do people do and how does communication fit into their workflow? Focus on what you’re delivering for your people.’) and onto how to handle someone you don’t agree with (listen to their argument - advice she gives to others but admits she isn’t always able to follow herself).

Consultancies usually start small. Joanna Randall described starting out as a sole trader in 2010 before establishing a limited company.

The obvious exit strategy for a successful founder is to sell to a bigger beast (see above). She has followed a less obvious route:

‘I decided to transfer ownership of Purplefish to those who have been integral to its success: my colleagues. We are now proudly employee-owned.’ 

It’s a reminder that the assets of a consultancy business do not lie in intellectual property or in bricks and mortar. The assets really are the people; for once this hackneyed phrase is no exaggeration.