By Adam Wakefield
The stark reality facing the public relations industry today came under the microscope during a presentation at the 2016
PRISA Conference, held as part of
Loeries Creative Week in Durban in August.
Speaking on the topic were Professor Sonja Verwey and Clarissa Muir from the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Strategic Communication within the School of Communication, who pulled no punches on the choices facing the industry.
Verwey began the presentation by quoting Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities; “‘It was the best of times and it was the worst of times’, and that is really true for the industry.”
“At the best of times, PR as a profession has never been more needed and recognised, certainly to such an extent that I’m sure you know that many of your clients are actually setting up their own in-house functions,” Verwey said.
However, lying in opposition to this is the fractured relationship many clients and agencies have with one another, clients luring talent away from the industry, and a business model that needs to evolve with the times.
“We know that because of digitisation, there’s been convergence in function and probably because of that, there is an increasing need for what we call ‘full service agencies’, where you don’t just specialise in PR anymore,” Verwey said.
If PR firms do not maximise their competitive advantages - being knowing and understanding the value and concepts of relationships, reputation, and the wider socio-cultural context - and adapt, PR is not going to survive.
“The industry needs to reflect where it is and whether it is responding appropriately to the challenges in this context,” Verwey said.
Clients are complaining that they are being overcharged, work with junior people who do not understand their business, and are not responsive to the client’s needs and problems. This is coupled with agencies being burdened with increasingly high expectations and shrinking financial margins.
“Increasingly, you are under pressure to produce the same, and even better, with digitised teams for less and less money,” Verwey said.
She believes it is interesting that at client-agency negotiations, the outcome is the clients never pay more, but the agency who compromises and charges less for the work they put in. As such, managing client expectations in such a market is “very challenging”.
Another phenomena changing the industry is digital disruption, which eradicates market linkages. The industry, as an intermediary, is fully engaged with this disruption.
“Unless we want to become fossilised, we need to figure out how we make ourselves relevant as public relations professionals and also how we respond to this digital disruption facing the world,” Verwey said.
To survive, public relations agencies need to have a business model that can handle the rigours of a market environment that lives in a constant state of tension, disruption, and re-alignment.
“Our value as public relations agencies and professionals relies on this ability to have this deep and trusting relationship with our clients. As it is, they really distrust their agencies,” Verwey said.
“We need to understand our client’s business needs. This comes up time and time again. They honestly feel that the professionals that they’re dealing with know their field of expertise but they really don’t deeply understand or engage with the client’s business problem.”
As agency professionals, they need to progressively expand their boundaries and be collaborative business creatives. Verwey stressed how important collaboration is, even though it can be difficult to manage people in an agency context who have collaboration but did not choose to do so.
“Our focus has to be on how we deliver the total experience in terms of the relationship and the value that we actually provide,” she said.
Big data provides the excellent insights but the sheer volume of data is a challenge for firms to analyse.
“Is this a Kodak moment for our industry? They were hugely profitable, they were great, but what they didn’t see coming was the technological change. Is this the rise of PR?” Verwey posed.
“Are we grasping at the opportunity we have in terms of the space we’re in, or will it ultimately lead to our demise in terms of our way of functioning?”