When a bestselling book about your profession is entitled “Toxic Sludge is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies, and The Public Relations Industry” it’s obvious that your business has a rather dodgy reputation.
But most of the suspicion that’s directed at us concerns the way we shape the truth to serve our clients. Hey, that’s our job – we carefully construct alternate realities where our clients can rule uncontested, their strengths highlighted and any possible potential tiny little deficits carefully glossed over.
What’s not talked about as much are the real lies that PR agencies tell clients and/or prospects. Yes, doing any sort of business requires the spewing of some polite fallacies to lubricate the wheels of commerce. But there are fabrications that are particular to the PR business. You see them lurking, again and again, in the latest cut and paste press release announcing a new client win. You read them on agency blogs. You hear about them from disillusioned clients.
And now here they are, neatly organized into a list that may pry open the PR version of Pandora’s Box. That would be rather apt since Pandora herself was gifted with the blessings of clever speech, crafty words, and a bit of a deceitful nature.
1: “This is such a terrific product/service!”
Part of public relations is managing clients’ expectations. Not all products and services are newsworthy; some will appeal only to a niche market. Others are entering a market that’s already oversaturated. But many agencies are scared of telling their clients the truth fearing they’ll lose the business. Instead of functioning as a strategic advisor, they act like an over-eager suitor on a first date. Has any PR person angling for your business ever told you your product/service just wasn’t all that exciting?
2: “Your account is in the best possible hands…”
PR firms often bring their best, brightest and most articulate stars (the Biz Dev team) to the pitch and infer that this is the talent working on an account that bills 3-5K per month. How many times have you heard that senior staff will be pitching the media on your behalf? Meanwhile, back in the real world, a junior AE or AE with limited experience is handling your account and has no idea what she/he is doing or why.
3: “Our agency has deep experience in this space.”
Never mind the fact that likely 90%+ of that collective experience no longer works at the agency, having long ago moved on to competing agencies or retired/passed away
4: “We did all that we could do.”
Hire the IBM of PR firms and, if they fail to get the product noticed, corporate PR can always bow out gracefully with a “Hey, it’s not my fault. The agency didn’t do anything. And they have such a great reputation—who could have known they’d screw this up?” The agency should have done something, but so should corporate PR. When none of the PR players bothers to extend themselves a bit, it’s always the client who suffers. It doesn’t even take two agencies to play pass-the-buck, often an agency will tell a client after the agreement is signed and months into the assignment that something can’t be done because it’s beyond their scope of work. For example, the agency won’t pitch speaking opportunities because it’s “beyond the scope of work.” Nonsense – getting media attention for a client through any possible, valuable venue is the job, period.
5: “We know Web 2.0″
More and more PR firms are offering clients help with podcasts, promoting and writing blogs and writing releases carefully optimized to ride high in search engine results. That’s great, assuming the agency has real expertise and isn’t just along for the ride on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. There are plenty of blogs that were guaranteed to “ramp up your SEO” languishing unread in the backwaters of the internet, and you can podcast until you’re blue in the face without seeing any improvement in your site’s page rank. Run away fast from any agency that suggests that a widget can magically solve all of your PR problems.
6: We have great relationships with (insert high profile reporters’ names here)”
I’m dumbfounded when prospects want me to drop names of reporters I know. Dropping the names of reporters at key media outlets such as The New York Times, MSNBC, BusinessWeek or Forbes, to cite just a few, really means nothing for the client. Reporters know a lot of PR people, and visa-versa. And whether a reporter likes a PR rep or not, they aren’t going to write a story that isn’t interesting to their readers. In any case, it’s far better to find the right reporters to tell an interesting story than to keep pitching a small group of elite reporters.
7: “We have affiliate offices all over the world.”
Not a lie, exactly, (assuming they aren’t counting their freelancers’ apartments as satellite offices) — the falsehood is in the implication that this matters. In reality, lots of dots on the map that’s proudly displayed on an “About Us” page doesn’t mean squat unless there is a need or purpose. How will a branch office in Barcelona or Budapest serve your business?
8: “We offer highly-targeted strategic public relations.”
When in fact they just routinely blast out press releases via e-mail with the hope that something will stick, and reporters know to automatically delete the latest gibberish from ABC agency because they never send anything useful or interesting. Here’s a tip. Ask exactly who the agency is pitching, a small well-selected list of reporters is far better than sending a release to an entire mailing list comprised of every reporter that everyone in the agency knows, has heard of, or thinks may probably exist.
9: “We do a great job taking advantage of the news cycle.”
Certainly getting your clients comments out on the topic du jour is a good thing, but it’s far more important to think outside the box and make the news. Coming up with creative pitches is more difficult than riding the news wave so many agencies convince clients that a quote embedded in a few stories about the crisis of the moment is great PR. In reality, it’s a small part of what an agency should be doing.
10: “It’s not our fault, your product/service just isn’t all that compelling.”
The biggest falsehood agencies foist upon clients is that poor PR performance is largely the client’s fault. All too often the truth is closer to this: there are many untalented PR folk, with minimal smarts and/or communications skills, who send poorly written press releases via unsolicited email blasts and inundate a lot of journalists with boring, predictable crap. If the agency didn’t tell you your product was a tough sell at the beginning of your relationship, they shouldn’t tell you that after their campaign fails.
Okay, so I fibbed. I actually have 11 Top Ten Lies:
11: “You’ll get real benefits from our relationship.”
Years ago someone, who later became a client, told me he was paying $5000 a month to a big name PR firm who had suddenly stopped speaking to him. The last two months of the relationship there was no reporting, no answered phone calls, zip. Eventually he discovered that to this big PR firm his 5K a month basically covered only the administrative fees and nothing more. Yes, he was paying them to bill him. Sadly this isn’t a one-time instance, it happens frequently at PR agencies with a corporate parent. It’s particularly sad when it happens to smaller businesses and organizations for whom that 5K a month is their entire ad/marketing budget, and they opted to take a risk and spend it all on public relations.
So there it is. The 11 lies agencies PR agencies tell clients and prospects. I want to thank Andrew Edson, Jennifer Johnson Avril , Stephen Koenigsberg, and Rebeca Shiller for their feedback with this column.
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