Tuesday, March 22, 2005

A short lesson in PR and a potentially big mistake

Last week I was feeling a little undervalued and generally overlooked at work. I know I have only been at the agency for a relatively small amount of time (a month and a half) and in any new job anyone has a fair bit to prove. But while I might be impatient at the best of times, the fact remains that I have worked in PR for nine years and without wanting to sound immodest I have a really broad brand marketing experience and I assumed that was one of the reasons I was employed for the job. Not only have I created and implemented pure media relations campaigns, but I have also devised and deployed strategy and PR mechanics for local markets to implement by themselves in Europe, North America, South America, the Far East and Australasia. And I have done this for some of the biggest, most iconic brands in the world including one rather famous cola manufacturer. No. Not that one - the other one.

As far as I was concerned the straw that broke the camels back was when I happened to learn, last week, that my company was pitching (today) for a luxury car marque. My agency (and all the people involved in the pitch) has no experience on working on car marques, whereas I do. In my time I have worked on [insert famous car marque] and [insert famous car marque] in the United Kingdom, and [insert famous car marque] in the US. As far as consumer publicity campaigns for car marques go, it’s safe to say that I know my stuff.

Now admittedly I am somewhat predisposed to jumping to the wrong conclusion. I assumed that there must be some dark power play going on behind the scenes, hence the reason behind my boss not inviting me to contribute towards the campaign strategy and platform and an even darker motive as to I was not asked to demonstrate my knowledge of the automotive industry at the pitch itself.

Of course the real reason that I wasn’t asked to do either of these things was because the pitch is highly confidential and I shouldn’t have actually known about it in the first place. The other reason is that my main boss (the company owner) didn’t actually interview me for my position and therefore had no idea I had all this relevant experience. It was only when I told her that I knew about the pitch and wanted to help out using my knowledge that she asked for my help.

Now, marketing directors are very aware that editorially placed, third party brand endorsement is at least three times more effective at influencing consumer purchasing decisions than advertising ever will be. But because in PR there are fewer overheads (no media buying, focus groups, creatives, etc) brand directors know that they can get away with paying their incumbent and prospective PR agencies a considerable degree less than they would have to pay their ad agencies to get three times the equivalent page space or air time. In actual fact in PR the overheads are so low that for some of my current clients return on investment (editorial vs. advertising space cost x total campaign value) is in some cases as high as 100:1. To the uninitiated, that is what we in PR call “a bit of a bargain”.

So, marketing directors absolutely get the value of PR, but won’t cough up in any significant way for it. Well some of them will. Most of them will try it on first. So getting back to this car company – my boss first shows me the brief we received in order for us to prepare for the pitch and write the document. As per usual the brief was extremely broad and the allocated budget was tighter than a ducks arse. But this company is so prestigious that they know we will take any amount of money to work on it. It’s kind of like God telling you that, yes, you can go out with Brad Pitt for life, but you’ll have to deal with the fact that he’s only ever going to fuck you up the arse with not so much as a simple reach around.

Actually, I could live with that.

Anyway, anyway – aside form the broadness of the brief and the fact that the budget was small a salient part of our remit was to create a campaign platform that would, in addition to speaking to the core target audience, also address, in a relevant manner, the Asian market.

The plan that my boss showed me, which she had written over the course of two weeks, was actually very well thought through, despite the fact that we had no real market intelligence or brand guidelines to work with. I liked most of the ideas and the ones that I didn’t think were so strong I gave constructive feedback for on how to make them work more effectively. Finally the suggested campaign platform completely took into consideration the Asian market.

But I had a question for my boss. I asked her - was she sure that when the marque briefed us to address the Asian market that they were talking about the Indian / Pakistani market, which she had taken the term “Asian” as referring to. Because in my experience at least, any campaign where I was asked to speak to an Asian market, was always referring to Far Eastern territories – Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese. Not Indian or Pakistani. My boss, who unlike me, has never worked on a Far Eastern campaign, assured me that if they had wanted to address a Far Eastern audience they would have definitely asked for an “Oriental” themed campaign – a term I have personally never heard used by a brand manager.

Now I will admit that I might have been wrong and she was right – but the only way to ascertain that would be to go back to the potential client and get them to clarify exactly which territories they were referring to. But my boss didn’t do that. Even though, in my mind, that would have been both logical and actually critical.

Today we went to the potential clients office and presented the pitch document. We presented well, they smiled and nodded a lot and at the end they told us that they recognized that we had collectively put a lot of effort and thought into our ideas.

But there was one thing. The one area of our pitch that they did not comment on was how they felt we had answered the part of the brief that asked us to address the Asian market (or as we had put it in the pitch, the “Indian and Pakistani” market). When my boss bought this element of the document up and asked them what their thoughts were we were met with a couple of seconds of stony silence and a few awkward looks. The response? “Yeah, it was great. Yup – good ideas.”

And the thing was, they weren’t good ideas. They were GREAT ideas. But only great ideas if we were indeed supposed to have been specifically talking to the Indian and Pakistani communities. Because if we were supposed to have been talking about anyone else we would have looked like fucking idiots.

I have a sneaking suspicion we might be the latter. And I think we might find out pretty soon.

One day someone will actually listen to me. But until then, I’m not holding my breath.

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