PAYING ATTENTION

As advertising philosopher Faris Yakob says, everything is PR. That means there’s a lot of competition in the PR space, and not just from PR agencies. But the skills required to get the right messages in front of consumers – whether they’re planned as part of a campaign or in a time of crisis – remain very valuable to marketers.

As the old phrase goes, everyone has a story in them. And that’s where most of them should stay. But with media outlets still cutting back on editorial resource and the rise of new digital tools that have allowed brands to talk directly to consumers – or enlist the help of influencers to talk through them – and gain word of mouth/mouse it seems like a good time to be a PR agency.

While clients have long had their own communications departments and continue to bring this function in-house, they still see the need for these specialist skills and the rise of social as a communications platform has also helped promote the sector’s storytelling abilities.

Pead PR, one of the biggest PR agencies in the country, utilises its range of skills to meet the need to tell their clients’ stories in more visual ways across multiple media platforms. “Our clients come to us to manage, protect and enhance the reputation of their brands, product and service,” says PR doyen, Deborah Pead. “Through PR’S ability to tell stories, we work hard on engaging people much more deeply with a brand’s story, which we shape through informed media relations, credible influencers, smart media choices and well-crafted content. We have been working towards an integrated suite of services for many years and the range of services now includes everything from defining the right communications strategy for our clients to creating content that plays out through editorial, native content, video, visual, digital assets, event management and social media.”

Attention is currency in marketing, and the best PR agencies are very good at getting it. Increasingly – and in yet another example of everyone doing everyone else’s job – they’re also behind integrated communications campaigns, like Pead’s launch of the Huawei Mate 10, where the live activation resulted in almost 100,000 views and a total sell out of all units in New Zealand in one month.

Jacqui Ansin from Lily & Louis confirms how critical it is for the PR specialists of today to have idea creators and storytellers, not just writers or account managers. “They need to be able understand what consumers want, how brands fit into their life and to weave a strategy that connects the two,” she says.

Hustle & Bustle, which was ranked at no. 32 on the Deloitte Fast 50 and has recently opened an office in Singapore, has hired a creative director with agency experience in order to offer creative solutions, which then helps to increase earned media.

PR agency Sherson Willis focuses on corporate affairs and aims to make reputation a capital asset for all their clients. Amy Mckenzie says they achieve this through a mix of earned media, government relations, activation and events, content and social media marketing, creative visualisation and design. She says clients seek the agency out because of its particular specialist skills and contacts. For example, it was recently appointed by Airbnb to support and educate media and stakeholders around regulatory issues they face in this market.

The biggest shift Mckenzie sees from the market is the understanding that PR is more than just a media release, and that the best brands and businesses are the best story tellers. Measurement has always been fraught, with the dubious Advertising Value Equivalent model based on column inches. The new PESO communication model (Paid, Earned, Social, Owned) supports the shift to newer media channels, as does the increasing importance of social as an earned channel.

While many of these specialist PR agencies are investing in creativity, a number of PR agencies operate under the umbrella of a major full-service agency. Mango Communications, which lives alongside DDB but has a number of its own clients, offers public relations, social media and experiential services. Within those pillars are a whole raft of different skills, from content creation, to media relations, influencer marketing, activations and events, promotions, issues management and communications strategy development.

Managing director Claudia Macdonald says Mango competes with specialist agencies in PR, experiential and social but creative/brand agencies have also added all these skills because they can see the demand for an integrated approach. But fewer have done it with more specialised areas of PR such as corporate comms, financial PR and government.

“Increasingly clients have an ‘agency village’ and generally the roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. However, where two agencies in the village have suggested different responses to a brief, there are times when our solution has been chosen over, say, the brand agency’s one because the client thought it was better for the brief. We rarely pitch against full service agencies, to be fair.”

At board and C-suite level there is increased awareness of how reputation can increase or decrease the value of the business, and how PR can help to earn the trust of staff, shareholders and the customer. And when you’re protecting that brand, businesses want to know they’re in good hands.

“There’s a fine line between the skills of a customer services person and a PR person in managing Facebook,” says Macdonald. It’s all good until something goes wrong – and identifying when that might happen is a skill PR people are trained to look out for. So there is an increasing need for PR agencies to help sort out other’s messes.

Through PR’S ability to tell stories, we work hard on engaging people much more deeply with a brand’s story, which we shape through informed media relations, credible influencers, smart media choices and well-crafted content.