The most important thing I ever learned

As a PR the most valuable advice I was ever given was “never assume anything” which beats “there’s no such thing as off the record” by virtue of applying to both professional and private life.

Both of these lessons were dinned in to me when I was a baby PR at the BBC, and have served me well ever since. I’ve been thinking about them recently as I’m interviewing someone on Friday for a magazine feature entitled, natch, The most important thing I’ve ever learned, and I’m idly wondering what I’ll say if he turns the tables on me. I wish my examples were a bit more profound, or more practical – “funny you should ask, Dave, the most important thing I ever learned was how to turn base metals into gold… ” But no, it’s the simple rules that support the architecture of a PR’s career. Turn up on time, ALWAYS call back, tell the truth (the biggest row I ever had was when a producer deliberately lied to me about a story, leading me to pass on a lie to a valued contact on the Observer with whom I never had quite such a good relationship again). Of course this isn’t all there is to it – you have to passionately enthuse about what you’re doing, be creative about the approaches you take, be constantly open to new ideas and ways of doing things. But the nuts and bolts of it are frighteningly simple. I’m assuming, of course, that your lessons are much more impressive…

1966 and all that

The spoof 1966 ad has been on a billboard across the road for a couple of days now. It makes me smile everytime I see it, although I never did get round to looking up the weblink to find out who was beaming these calming thoughts at my husband and son. I missed the row about the other spoof ad – the working women should all be shot one – until it had all blown over and I stumbled across it on Twitter.

This proves either that a) advertising isn’t as important as the agency wanted to demonstrate; or b) it is, and the Mumsnet row amply demonstrates the point; or c) it only works when backed up with word of mouth – nowadays massively amplified by Twitter and other social networks; or d) I’ve been confined to the house by snow and anxiety for much too long and need to get out more.

Spoof advertising isn’t a new tactic, of course. The Guardian launched a range of non-existant products when online retail really started to take off, to try to prove that people would sign up for anything if it had a website attached. And 1966 has been scooped in the spoof advertising stakes this very month by those hilarious “We can’t go on like this” ads featuring the lollipop-headed David Cameron and some vacuous verbiage about not cutting the NHS. Hats off to them for testing the boundaries of the medium, of course. But can’t help thinking they need to hire someone who knows how to use photoshop and a copywriter (and a policy advisor) who might really be capable of making Britain think.

Evaluation

Interesting piece in PR Week about the evaluation of PR campaigns and how long agencies can or should keep using the advertising value equivalent figure as a measure of success. The piece repeats all the reasons I’ve always mistrusted AVE as a measure – just colonising space in a paper for an article is no guarantee that anyone reads it, agrees with it or acts on it; it doesn’t offer a means of measuring social media comment; and for obvious reasons it can’t measure one of the key activities of a good PR – keeping bad stories out of the papers. How much might it have been worth to the BBC if the PR response to the Ross/Brand row had been niftier and those acres of press coverage about declining moral standards hadn’t been printed? How could you have measured it if it had happened?

Evaluation gets even harder when the campaign you are evaluating is trying to generate long-lasting behavioural/attitudinal change, as many of the campaigns run by government are. It takes years to achieve real social change – it’s taken decades for drink-driving to have become socially unacceptable, for example. No client is going to pay for tracking research over a decade to prove whether or not they achieved their objective. And no agency could wait that long to be paid. Who decides that social change has taken place? As an agency, how do we demonstrate that the change was due to us and wouldn’t have happened anyway? Ultimately we’re forced back on easy to measure indicators: the delivery of materials on time/ budget, target take-up rates of info packs or testing kits among certain sections of the audience, an agreed level of media coverage measured through AVE or WOTS (weighted opportunities to see – which can generate their own meaninglessly surreal statistics, apparently there were 1.4billion WOTS for stories about bird flu in this country (pop 60m) during the last time we had a health scare). On the occasions when I’ve been sitting on the client’s rather than the agency’s side of the process, I’ve always had my doubts that I’d be able to really measure the success of what I was being offered. COI were making a big noise about their new evaluation process, Artemis, a while ago – does it work?

It just goes to show

I liked David Mitchell’s column in Sunday’s Observer about the torrents of personal abuse and naked aggression that seems to be unleashed in those who post comments on newspaper articles and blogs. His suggestion is that the sane and reasonable among us should post “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful” whenever threads seem to be taking a nasty turn, in the hope that it will exert a calming influence. Pleasingly his column is now the most popular on the Guardian site with a string of more than 1400 posts, all saying the same thing, meandering over a couple of pages of virtual space.

Not that I’m a victim of this myself, in this safe and stodgy backwater of wordpress’s empire; but for various reasons I’ve been looking at the message boards on a number of sites about civil liberties and the “surveillance state” recently. Frankly I’ve rarely come across a bunch of people I would like less to be trapped in a lift with – and it depresses me hugely because it’s a really important subject and the Convention on Liberty which kicked off my recent reading was addressed by almost every person in public life I still respect. Some of the comments however – jeez. When did reasoned argument, respect for the facts and a willingness to see another person’s point of view cease to be the way that political points are made? (I know I sound like Colonel Blimp as I type this, but one of the points of that rather wonderful film is that we lose the civilty that Blimp stands for at our peril. I cling defiantly to my status as a crusted bore.)

I love the idea that technology offers a democratising tool by which everyone can take part in public debate. But blimey, we need to get our acts together and start using it like grown ups before the whole process is so degraded that it is easily ignored.

Your call is important to us…

My dishwasher broke down a couple of weeks before Christmas and when… Well you really don’t need or want to know the ins and outs of this story. Here I am still waiting for it to be fixed, one month and four, soon-to-be five re-arranged engineer-vists later. Idly holding on the phone to speak to the helpline again this afternoon, I googled Hotpoint Customer Service, and found a whole circle of Hell, populated with people frothing at the mouth and desperate to share their experiences. The online comments might eventually have some impact on the company’s behaviour – if enough people check things out online before they buy and are put off by what they find. But it did make me realise how very puny the power of the customer still is – there are comments on some of these blogs dating back to 2006, but Hotpoint/Indesit ploughs on serenely, not apparently seeing the need to change its ways one jot. For what it’s worth I will be adding my rants to the other blogs, but more because it will help me unload some rage than because I expect it to do any good.

Thank you for holding.

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