The Advice Vacuum

by Allan Biggar

This article is an excerpt from a new book
by Allan Biggar written with Michael Willard titled,
"All About Brands: The Biggar Picture."
It is due out later this year.
Biggar is chairman of All About Brands.

In the golden days of worldwide public relations agencies, you had people who knew how to give strategic advice. They could walk into a room and immediately command attention. There was a reason for this: They knew what they were talking about, and they knew how to convey their messages convincingly. This has not totally disappeared, but within the giant communication holding companies, the sagacious strategic counselor is a vanishing breed.

I believe this has the possibility of doing serious harm to the industry. Today, many large agencies are made up of less-expensive professional staff and have become what I call body shops, a lot of bodies but underdeveloped brains for our type of work.

In other words, they lack the experience and gravitas to give strategic counsel. It is important to keep the guys over 40 who might earn in excess of £100,000. It is important to keep the professional with experience who goes on maternity leave for a short while. This is what clients want to buy, and they are generally willing to pay a premium for value. When young, inexperienced PR specialists are tossed into the breach during a real crisis, they become cannon fodder. The client quickly realizes that the agency team is over its head.

This is generally not the fault of the young specialist, who is eager to learn but simply not ready for the big show. It is the fault of the agency for pushing talent to the lowest common denominator and squeezing the client to pay fees as if it had been assigned a pro.

Often, the fault lies at the very top, and the endless pursuit of the bottom line and the next quarterly reporting period. The PR business is not a commodity providing business. It is a service business. Agencies need to recruit, nurture and keep senior people. I'm talking 40- to 50-year olds; people who have been there, done that, and succeeded.

I remember Howard Paster, an executive vice president of WPP public relations, coming to see me when I headed up Europe for Burson-Marsteller. He said he was worried about my hiring practices. I looked him in the eye and said, "What you are really saying is I can't hire a professional over 40 who has two kids and a mortgage, right?"

The biggest competitors in the industry are not other agencies stealing clients, but the growth of in-house company PR specialists. At one time, if you weren't good enough to work at an agency, you went to a company. The agency was the major league, and the company hired the minor leaguers. Today, the company people are being paid more, and it is the agencies that are getting squeezed. This shouldn't be. If the agency account leader is not at least as savvy as the in-house PR specialist, why does the company need the agency?

What we need to do is to reinvent ourselves to add value. We have been cannibalizing - eating both sides of our breakfast and there is nothing left in the middle. This is true of ad, PR, and digital agencies. We're going to have to develop an articulate argument as to why PR agencies should be hired. The people that do this have to be experienced, trusted, and feel they have a career in the agency and that the agency is not just a jumping-off place while waiting for an in-house job.

Agencies need to become the new idea incubators, the hothouses. This has to be done in a non-corporate environment. Companies should look forward to sitting down with us, because we are the ones who will boost their sales, save them money, and, in fact, save their bacon during a crisis. This should be a platform of mutual respect. I fear the PR industry has lost a lot of that.

In other words, I still believe clients will pay for good advice and creativity.

Allan Biggar is chairman of All About Brands, plc. He can be reached at allan@aabplc.com