The perils of PR
economist.com
economist.com
At the strategy and budget levels, PR is being eaten by marketing. We also have a quality problem -- there's virtually no barrier to market entry and many clients don't know what they need. The combination means there's a lot of relatively ineffective work being done.
Practitioners, particularly on the agency side, are too invested in doing leading-edge, breakthrough work when most clients, most of the time, need consistently good-enough work that is repeatable and measurable against KPIs. It's our equivalent (well, one of our equivalents) of chasing shiny objects.
The ice floe is melting. We used to be the gatekeepers to the media gatekeepers. Then earned media lost a lot of its power, and we became content strategists and producers. Now content is becoming largely commoditized so our production of it gets edged out in favor of paying influencers and their audiences for a slice of attention. You can build a business out of that (many, many have) but it's not PR. And that makes it harder to defend as a separate need/discipline.
https://www.themuse.com/amp/advice/the-difference-between-ma...
A good primer is here: https://github.com/mecommerce/ThirdLove-Tech-Blog/blob/maste...
And https://www.vexpower.com/ is an early but very promising educational tool in the space.
(More detail.. it's a bit like the Fed's inflation data: when you can manipulate the constants at will, introduce fake data as proxy for missing data, etc.. the ways and means to force a desired result are endless)
The only metric that matters is: did your sales go up? Ogilvie understood that. The ads that other PR and advertising people admire aren't necessarily the ones that work.
While the only metric that matters is sales (I fully agree), you need other metrics to understand how those sales happened. This is the dangerous thing.
I've worked at companies where people were evaluated based on very specific metrics, like web traffic or social media engagement. The problem with that is you end up focusing on improving those numbers rather than improving sales.
But if you only focus on sales, you can't tell which activities made a difference (or in which direction). You need other data to understand what's happening.
A better book than Ogilvy on Advertising, in this regards, is Claude C. Hopkins' Scientific Advertising. It lays out all the principles for testing ads, back when we didn't have any concept of analytics. The basic method was: Try different things in different markets to see what works best. Keep doing it indefinitely, so that your ads only ever get better.
There's no reason the same approach can't be taken with public relations. If you're working for a national brand, try assigning some PR folks to exclusively work the media in one given region. Then see what the difference is.
(Obviously, you have to do a lot of work to "control the variables", but any data scientist -- or any scientist at all, actually -- should be able to figure that out in their sleep.)
It's not rocket science. These methods have been around for a very long time.
Honestly, I think we've just gotten lazy. Setting up market tests is a lot of work, whereas creating an A/B test in AdWords is easy. But there's no such thing as an unmeasurable publicity tactic (whether it's advertising or public relations). You just gotta be willing to do the work.
"Tried and true" means doing things the same way everyone else is doing it, i.e. following the crowd. The whole point of marketing/advertising/publicity/PR/other-words-for-the-same-thing is to stand out from the crowd.
So while I agree that people tend to stick to the "tried and true", that's also why most of it doesn't work. You can't both stand out from the crowd and follow that same crowd. They're contradictions and mutually exclusive.
But that doesn't mean you should lose your head and do stupid things just for the sake of doing something different. Small changes, implemented incrementally, are the best ways to enact long-lasting change. You have to go into every test fully prepared for it to fail. If failure would be catastrophic, that's a stupid test.
I agree - but PR is about so much more than just standing out from the crowd. If you are talking about PR in the marketing sense - sure, but things like crisis management, investor relations and internal communications are different ball games.
I was in two startups, and for both of those, 99% of the PR person's job was to get the company favorable press coverage.
A famous quote from an executive (not one in advertising):
"I know half my advertising budget is wasted. I'm just not sure which half."
Online banners charging "per impression" is second order effect, by occupying "mind share" while charging "per conversion" is first order effect. IMO most measurements are on the first order side and we have less visibility on the second order effect
Brand-reinforcement is the Philosopher's Stone, these days. It explains a lot of decisions made by corporations, that don't seem to make sense to empirical animals, like us engineers.
I worked for a corporation that had an incredibly valuable brand, and was constantly frustrated by the decisions they made, in an effort to reinforce their brands.
A brand is a very "fuzzy" concept. It basically starts with a "persona," like an actor's part, and everything the company does, needs to reinforce that persona.
It works very well, and is very difficult to quantify.