Our Future in Public Relations

Ken Kerrigan

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839095986
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

With more time to communicate than ever before, we find ourselves in a dystopian world where platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are disintermediating traditional media channels, resulting in the loss of jobs in newsrooms, and creating an era where truth is now in the eye of the beholder. At the same time we are embracing the power of big data and analytics to tell us what business leaders should say and do. Is that the right approach or are we just taking the easy way out?
Aimed primarily at communications management professionals, Our Future in Public Relations explores whether the profession of public relations still matters today. Is PR just a new form of marketing or is it more alive and important than ever before, especially as a driver of purpose-driven organizations? In an era of fake news and diminishing trust, it's time to ask exactly what our future in public relations will be.

PART I

THE PAST

1

IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

When I began my career in public relations, you could say the profession was a lot like baseball. We all strived to make the “perfect pitch.” Getting a “hit” was all part of a day’s work. So, when I stepped into “the batter’s box” – still high on the memory of the New York Mets defeating the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, I thought if I could apply these basic principles of baseball I’d be a “PR All Star” – that was an award back then – in no time.

And then it happened: my first performance review. I barely had one year of experience under my belt, but I thought I might receive a verbal pat on the back and maybe a small bump in salary. Boy was I wrong. If you were a fly on the wall during my review, you’d undoubtedly recall the words my boss said to me: “Ken, you’re a fraud and a failure who will be found out at any agency you go to, large or small.”

I felt like I’d been hit in the head by a fastball, but what I did next changed my career. When my review was over, I left the office and walked down Fifth Avenue to the Bobst library at New York University (NYU). I’m not really sure why. I had graduated from NYU the year before, so I guess in some Freudian way I was trying to crawl back into the womb of academia.

I took the elevator to the seventh floor. NYU has a large collection of books on public relations and I had spent a great deal of time roaming those sections as an undergraduate student of the profession. I found myself doing so again. As I perused the shelves, one book caught my attention, if only because of its prescient title. It was Your Future in Public Relations, by Ed Bernays.

In the book, Bernays outlines what he believed to be the ideal qualifications of a public relations professional. Naturally, I was eager to see how I matched up against those qualifications. Oddly enough, Bernays didn’t make a single reference to baseball or getting hits and making pitches. In fact, he didn’t talk much about the ability to get publicity for a client at all – that skill could be taught later, he said.

Character and integrity were the most important personal traits of the PR professional, wrote Bernays. The PR professional first owed integrity to society, then to their clients or employer, and as important to themselves, he wrote. Bernays may be the “father of public relations,” but for me he was more like Shakespeare’s Polonius giving advice to Laertes. I quit my job the next day.

Playing basketball with my brother for the next two weeks, I kept thinking about the Bernays book. I discovered I was a terrible basketball player, but I thought I still might amount to something in public relations. I made a checklist of the qualifications Bernays described:

• Act with integrity in everything you do.
• Be guided by objectivity – don’t just tell clients what they want to hear.
• Be discreet and honor confidences like a doctor or a lawyer.
• Understand the principles of psychology – what makes people tick.
• Have an imagination, which Bernays called “that rare and sparkling quality that springs to life automatically under proper stimuli.”
• Develop a broad cultural background – essential in dealing with people, ideas and trends in society.
• Be insightful – see the implications of actions.
• Read as much as possible – business magazines, newspapers, lifestyle publications and more

I’d like to say that at the age of 21, I had mastered these traits, but I don’t think anyone can so early in life. Fortunately, as time went by, I managed to be surrounded by communications leaders who gave me the opportunities to develop these skills time and again.

One was Howard Paster, the late and great former chairman of Hill & Knowlton. Years ago, I asked Howard what traits he looked for in hiring professionals. I wasn’t surprised that his comments mirrored those of Bernays. “The professional must be flexible, simultaneously balancing the needs of clients, staff and self, always exercising judgment and employing fairness and honesty in dealing with a complex array of constituencies,” he said. Howard even insisted that all of his employees display the agency’s code of ethics in their offices. Despite all the so-called changes that have taken place in the communications landscape today, Howard’s guidance seems nearly timeless.

Howard likely would have been in full agreement with Bernays. In fact, Bernays wrote that:

The mastery of routine skills in public relations is useful, but of less importance than some of the other desirable characteristics. Skills can be learned or hired. Character, integrity and a logical objectivity in the individual practitioner are the really essential attributes of any public relations professional worthy of the name.

So, what is our future in public relations? Are the characteristics that Bernays spelled out decades ago still what we look for in hiring professionals to support the public relations function? Many would argue that they’re not. They are certainly not the skills taught in most university communications programs. Rather, today these skills are more often the cornerstone of degrees in sociology or even degrees in business.

Instead, we say we need professionals with expertise in data and analytics and social media savvy. We need video producers and content generators. On the agency side, staff are repeatedly told, clients expect nothing less.

In many ways, that approach is not wrong. The world has become so disintermediated that these skills are needed to effectively communicate with the stakeholders of virtually any company, especially consumer brands. But are things really so different today that the characteristics outlined by Bernays shouldn’t be the top priority?

Today, I still occasionally wander the aisles of the library at NYU. I’m on staff as part of the university’s graduate program in Communications Management. Each year I challenge my students to develop a communications strategy utilizing their understanding of today’s integrated communications approaches. We do that by responding to a hypothetical request for proposal (RFP) from a large consumer products company.

The RFP is straightforward, but daunting. The client has a goal to double their market share, preferably overnight, and is seeking proposals from top agencies to help them do that. The challenge is that the client’s product, as a result of social taboos and cultural biases, is not used by a large demographic group. The winning agency will be the one that comes up with an effective strategy to break down these barriers and drive sales, preferably in large numbers.

The class is typically excited by the challenge. Who wouldn’t want to develop a strategy to break down unfair social taboos? We put up a few white boards and start to brainstorm. “What do we need to do first?,” I ask. Many ideas are shared, but we almost always land on the thought that we need some data-driven insight that will give our targeted audience a “reason to believe” in the product.

“What else?” I shout, telling the class that we need to have our response to the client quickly if we are to make it to the next round. “Social Influencers,” they shout back. Yes, we need to do “influencer mapping” and identify who can speak on behalf of the product’s attributes. Armed with a working knowledge of the laws and regulations that guide how a brand can work with influencers, we know that the influencers we will suggest need to have a large following, but more importantly, they need to be able to speak to the brand’s key attributes with authenticity. But at the same time, they need to be people our targeted audience can relate to and trust.

Next, the class starts developing social media strategies. We need to have a plan for platforms like Instagram. We need visual images that will be shared and maybe even go viral. We also need event planning. We need to find a way to give the brand a presence at an event that our target audience cares about – we need to “show up differently” one student invariably shouts out.

“O.K. is that all?” I ask. After a brief silence, one or two students raise their hands to say they think we need an earned media component to our strategy. I nod in agreement. It seems like we have fleshed out a relatively modern, integrated communications approach to the client’s challenge.

While the students have been shouting out ideas, I’ve been quietly clicking on the classroom’s laptop, revealing pieces of black and white images of an old newspaper photo on the massive screen at the front of the room. As the image appears in full, I congratulate the class. “You have just designed the basic framework for a successful consumer public relations campaign, but the year was 1929!”

The students are surprised to hear that the RFP we’ve been reviewing was actually issued by Lucky Strike cigarettes. The “agency” that designed the campaign was helmed by Ed Bernays, the “father of public relations.” The disenfranchised demographic referred to were women.

At the time, a woman smoking in public was seen as being socially unacceptable. Lucky Strike wanted Bernays to change that. The class was correct in suggesting that the first course of action was to establish a strategic insight. Bernays, the nephew of famed psychologist Sigmund Freud, did just that. After speaking to psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, he adopted the idea that the lit cigarette in the hands of a woman could serve as a symbol of protest, a “torch of freedom” (much like the one held by Lady Liberty in New York’s harbor) against the inequality that women faced in society (and sadly still do). The class was also right about the use of social influencers. Bernays hired several wealthy debutantes of the day and had them agree to smoke during the very popular Easter Parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Since the campaign took place nearly 100 years ago, there was no social media platform to take advantage of, but the visual image was still the most important element of Bernays’ communications strategy, and the lack of social media platforms was of no consequence. After all, who needs Instagram when you have nearly a dozen newspapers and several national wire services at your disposal in New York City alone, each with their own team of photographers.

Bernays invited photographers from each paper and wire service to be stationed at a specific corner of Fifth Avenue. Once the debutantes arrived at the intended spot, he gave them the signal to light their cigarettes (their “torches of freedom”) and the waiting photographers began clicking away. Combined with a well-crafted press release, the image appeared the next day in newspapers across the country. Within a week the campaign had “gone viral,” women were smoking in public in large numbers, and a social taboo was largely shattered.

The Torches of Freedom campaign has been widely criticized over the years for “manipulating” women into smoking. Perhaps it did, but it must be noted that beginning in the 1960s Bernays became a vocal opponent of smoking and took part in several anti-smoking campaigns. I cite the campaign here, and in my class, as a reflection of how the “modern” techniques of integrated communications really haven’t changed very much. What have changed are the mediums through which we communicate with the public.

But was the Bernays campaign a form of manipulation? Maybe. Today, the power of public relations can be used for social manipulation as easily as it can for social good – perhaps even more so than in the early days of Bernays (just look at the controversy surrounding political content on media platforms like Facebook, for one example).

As modern campaigns seem to resemble those of the past, one might quote Yogi Berra and say, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Only this time campaigns are not always in the hands of practitioners like Bernays, who viewed the function as a form of social science. Rather, today’s integrated campaigns are often led by those who aspire to win awards in marketing and advertising – preferably on the beaches of southern France.

In the following chapters, we will further examine where public relations has been, where we are now and where we seem to be going. It’s a road filled with its share of bumps, sudden twists and turns. But it’s a journey we need to take, especially now.

2

DON’T WORRY, YOU’VE GOT SKILLS

Wouldn’t it be great if a list of rules existed that could guide the practice of the public relations function as a means to achieve excellent organizational performance? From time to time, a client will ask if there is a simple checklist of best practices they can use to help...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I. The Past
• Part II. The Present
• Part III. The Death of Truth?
• Epilogue. The Road Ahead: A Conversation with Industry Leaders and Academics
• Bibliography
• Index