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How to... communicate with PRsWell-briefed and carefully managed, external PR experts can provide the answer

for marketers keen to make their publicity pounds work harder

Picture Billie Jean

Right now the big boss with the budget has one thing on his mind. What can he

cut? Departments shudder as he runs his finger down the list of outgoings, willing

him not to pick their pet project. But what about external teams PR agencies,

for example? Who needs external PR when youve already got an internal

marcomms team?

He might have a point, but for cash-strapped marketers, external PR agencies

can offer exactly the kind of flexible, on-demand resource that will save cash in

quiet times and keep the finance directors finger pointing elsewhere.

Using agencies can be good for managing the peaks and troughs in activity,

says Richard Ellis, communications manager of the Public Relations Consultants

Association (PRCA). In a small organisation, this could mean that you can do

without a PR manager and only incur costs when you are actually running a

campaign.

Fresh thinking

But the benefits extend well beyond any need to avoid salary bills, according to

Debbie Davies, consultant marketing director at pregnancy guide producer

Emmas Diary. The pregnant women who make up Emmas Diarys target

audience are hungry consumers of information from many sources, making PR

the best way to reach them. Davies has just appointed PR agency Wildwood

Communications to take care of this work, charging the company with finding

creative ways to communicate the brands consumer research.

I really value the freshness of ideas that you get from an agency, and their

independent point of view, she explains.

In-house people are inevitably immersed in the business and this can prevent

them from coming up with the kind of creative ideas that make a campaign

successful.

In an agency, people working on your business can bounce ideas around with

others and share information on consumer trends you benefit from that

creative environment. In-house PR people, unless they are extremely well

More focus on

what exactlymarketers wantfrom a PRrelationshipwould give thema much moresuccessfuloutcome

Experiencedagency staff will

w to... communicate with PRs - The Marketer magazine http://www.themarketer.co.uk/articles/how-to/how-to-communicate-wit...

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connected, would struggle to replicate that level of creativity.

Davies also appreciates the ability of consultants to challenge her view with

opinions backed by their own experience, again something that she feels

in-house PR managers are less likely to do. A new perspective is valuable, she

adds.

This point is underlined by Kay Baldwin-Evans, director of marketing

communications at Skills for Health, who has managed the work of a variety of

PR agencies. Having a PR consultant in a meeting with her can be effective, shesays, aiding her in securing board buy-in for a project. Theres a credibility that

goes with the external consultant status, believes Baldwin-Evans.

This credibility, she argues, also extends to the media. Journalists often know

PR agency people from their dealings on other stories. We can tap into those

contacts in a way that an in-house person might not be able to when

approaching them cold, she says.

Telling a good story

Cultivating good relationships with the media is of course one of the prime

objectives of PR consultants, whether this is with traditional print journalists,broadcast media or, increasingly, bloggers.

This brings a variety of benefits to marketers. Agency PRs are adept at

analysing a business and finding stories of interest to the media. When

Manchester-based PR agency Brazen began researching client Silentnight, for

example, it discovered that one of the companys directors had been using his

particularly sensitive rear end to test beds. The agency came up with the idea of

insuring his bottom for 1m a story that yielded plenty of media coverage.

But the information flow can also work in the other direction, says Andrew

Watson, marketing director at MacDonald Hotels. When we were planning a

summer campaign our agency executives had already talked to travel journalists

to find out which big issues they were planning to cover we could then tailor

our PR campaigns to fit, he says.

Woolly briefs

For all the advantages of retaining the services of PR agencies, marketers can

easily slip up in managing them and run the risk of wasting their investment,

according to Stuart Pocock, managing partner at The Observatory International.

Plenty of marketing directors regard PR as a necessary evil and delegate it.

That may well change over the coming months as PR emerges as a more

cost-effective channel than above-the-line media.

Pococks advice for marketers keen to make their PR pounds work harder is to

spend more time defining objectives in the brief.

The PR briefs Ive seen tend to be woollier than those handed to ad agencies.

Inevitably these result in haphazard results and the marketer concluding that PR

agencies arent worth the money, says Pocock. More focus on exactly what

they want out of the relationship would give these marketers a much more

successful outcome.

Simply briefing a PR agency that youd like it to raise awareness of your brand

may well not elicit the kind of work that is possible to link to measurable sales.

But with details about your target audience, and knowing what exactly youd liketo boost awareness of, a PR agency can devise a workable campaign. The best

agencies have access to the same kind of planning data as a media planning and

buying agency.

have a strongsense of thenews cycle andshould be ableto tweak themedia plan as it

goes along

Dos and donts

Do think carefully about


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Experts differ on how closely you should define what youd like your PR agency

to do. Richard Ellis of the PRCA believes that agencies work best when the

clients wider business objectives are explained, so they can see the context for

their work. And Skills for Healths Baldwin-Evans says she brings her PR agency

in on many internal strategy meetings, because they get to know our business

better and we benefit from their ideas.

Others employ a tighter flow of information. Sanjay Nazerali, director of

marketing, communications and audience insight at BBC Global News, likes to

equate his briefing of PR agencies with that of his advertising agencies: Iveseen money squandered with vague briefs to PR agencies, so Im quite

draconian. I prefer to set a very specific objective without too much extraneous

discussion. Id rather an agency told me how they were going to get people

watching one of our channels than generate a big debate about the future of

news.

Cash on delivery

After youve briefed your PR agency youll need to decide how to pay them. The

traditional remuneration method is a monthly retainer. This is useful if you need

an ongoing resource, such as a press office service. Increasingly, however,

marketers using PR agencies for specific campaigns will pay their agency aproject fee, sometimes augmented by a bonus if certain results are achieved.

This system has the advantage of avoiding what many marketers regard as the

onerous task of analysing monthly timesheets that agency account staff use to

justify their retainer fees. Client and agency agree on the objective of the

campaign, the agency works out how long that work will take and then both

sides agree a fixed fee.

Ive found that a fixed project fee plus a bonus works really well, says Baldwin-

Evans. You suddenly find your agency becomes very creative when theres

potential to earn that bonus.

Of course, not all agencies will agree to be paid on a fixed project fee for every

piece of work. They are wary of campaigns where it is tough to work out in

advance how much time theyll spend, because the costs of staff time could

outweigh the fees.

Constructing a bonus system also throws up the issue of how you define

success. The essential nature of PR, as opposed to paid advertising, is that

even the cleverest, most creative campaign may gain no column inches or

broadcast time if knocked out by a big news story.

The answer, as many marketers have learned, is to keep a degree of flexibility

on where and when you want coverage to appear and to build contingency

planning into campaigns.

Experienced agency staff will have a sense of the news cycle and will be able topull a campaign at the last minute and release it a few days later if they feel it

may be squeezed out of the news agenda.

Similarly it may not be realistic to specify the exact media channels where youd

like to see the story featured the agency should be able to tweak the media

plan as it goes along, depending on how much interest the campaign receives

from journalists.

On occasions where it is necessary to pay a PR agency with retainer fees,

Debbie Davies of Emmas Diary recommends having regular catchup meetings,

even if on the phone, with agency staffers to closely monitor how they are

spending their time on behalf of the client.

Maintaining an efficient use of PR resources means carefully splitting tasks

between an in-house PR department and an agency. Nazerali believes it is best

to keep in-house PR people focusing on tasks that require liaising with other

departments within the organisation. During the US elections we sent a bus on a

objectives before a

campaign begins, as well

as how you intend to

evaluate success.

Do bring your PR agency

in on campaign planning

as early as possible

before the advertising is

finalised. PR people canoften advise on changes

to adverts that could

yield more media

coverage.

Do ensure that both the

inhouse PR department

and the PR agency are

clear on the boundaries

of their roles.

Don't insist that your PRagency sends out a set

number of press

releases each month,

under the assumption

that eventually something

will get covered. This will

inevitably lead to

releases being produced

for stories that have little

news value and this

only alienates journalists.

Don't assume that a PR

agency can conjure up

coverage out of thin air

its staff need material to

work with and that must

come from the client.

Don't forget that the

agency is also a

business and must make

a profit in order to keep

well-motivated people

working creatively onyour account.


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Case study: From bling to bullying

External PR agencies can be adept at coming up with novel ways to promote

your story

The Communication Group came up with the idea of running London Jewellery

Week for its client City Fringe Partnership, an economic development and

regeneration partnership.

The agency brought in private bank Coutts and cosmetic brand Bobbi Brown

as sponsors and arranged extra funding from the London Development

Agency. It persuaded 600 jewellery designers to take part and drafted support

from leading industry names including Theo Fennell, Laurence Graff and David

Morris.

The inaugural London Jewellery Week took place in June last year, with 180

events including the Swarovski Runway Rocks catwalk show, which attracted

global media coverage.

Vodafone asked its agency Threepipe to come up with a fresh way of

promoting its Cut it out anti-bullying campaign. The agencys solution was to

devise a competition for school children in conjunction with the West End show

Joseph and charity Beatbullying.

The show features a bullying storyline and for the competition children were

challenged to create a design for a cloak similar to that worn by Joseph in the

story.

Weber Shandwick found a novel and appropriate way to promote client

MasterCards launch of the PayPass system for buying items under 10.

The agency covered Londons Millennium Bridge with a carpet of images of

notes and coins and then invited commuters to donate their cumbersome

cash to the Coin Street charity, which works to improve Londons South Bank.

coast-to-coast trip with journalists conducting interviews and updating blogs. I

sent a BBC press officer along to set up interviews and work with producers. It

needed someone with an in-depth knowledge of the BBC and how our people

work, which an agency person wouldnt have had.

However, when Nazerali needed to publicise one of the corporations new

Persian language channels, he sought an agency with the specialist knowledge

of that regions culture and language.

Others have different ways of splitting work. Davies tends to leave the contactwith trade journalists to in-house PRs while her PR agency handles national

media, because she feels theyre a harder pitch. Ellis thinks marketers can often

get the best out of both by positioning the in-house PR person to liaise between

the organisation and the agency.

Orchestration

Getting external PR agencies to collaborate with your other external agencies is

yet another challenge. Pocock recommends encouraging interaction between

agencies of different disciplines to achieve a campaign that is more than the sum

of its parts: Forward-thinking marketers will tend to invite all their agencies in for

at least one pre-campaign meeting.

But when employing more than one agency, Nazerali always gives them different

briefs. Its my job to be the conductor, he says. I dont want to end up with the

violins taking their lead from the trumpets.


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Claire Murphy is a freelance journalist and consultant editor of PR Week


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How to... Communicate With