The value of the PR old timer
Some wise words from Julian Richer at the weekend, in his increasingly must-read column.
The Richer Sounds boss and all-round good guy writes about picking good advisers and getting good advice.
Point 4: Advisers can be intimidating, which annoys me; and the more confident and slick they are, the more I worry.
He isn’t talking about PR people specifically, though his words surely apply.
One thing he doesn’t mention is advisers being fired, something which seems to happen a lot and from the outside often doesn’t make much sense.
So a company puts its PR contract out for tender and jumps ship from one firm to another that isn’t in truth much different.
Along the way, it perhaps lost a really good flak who knew the company inside out and had built long-standing relationships with hacks who had come to trust him, to take his word for things.
The hack speed dials the flak who knows nearly everything, and gets told “we lost the account mate…try the other lot”.
What was gained by that, one is left wondering.
Newspapers are the worst for this I think, always admiring talent on rival papers from afar and imagining it to be superior to what they already have. It hardly ever is.
Are we heading back to the 1970s, asks this from the Centre for Policy Studies, by which it does not mean a return for flares and Ford Cortinas.
It is talking about energy and the cost of living crisis. It has some forecasts and some solutions. We are going to be all ears for those just now.
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