I recently had lunch with a friend who is a business developer for a video production company. We were talking about WordWrite Communications and the public relations world. He commented about how much the PR industry is changing, citing what he believes to be shrinking opportunities for earned media placements as the traditional news media world changes and gets smaller. Couple that with non-stop noise coming from every corner of the communications universe about new and emerging social media channels and new forms of advertising and my friend wondered how a firm like ours could continue to put as much focus as we do solely on public relations.
When our president and CEO Paul Furiga founded WordWrite Communications more than 11 years ago, he made a deliberate, strategic decision to open a public relations shop to help clients tell their great, untold stories. Not a full-service agency, but a PR shop, one that is focused on strategic communications that rely heavily on media relations and writing, or, as it is fashionably called today, content creation. We don’t do advertising.
Paul wasn’t alone in his vision. Dan Edelman founded his firm in 1952 as a public relations shop. Sixty years later and under the guidance of his son Richard for the past 16 years, Edleman is not only the largest independent PR firm in the world, but the largest PR firm in the world, period, with 2012 revenues of more than $665 million. In a demonstration of his commitment to public relations, Richard Edelman told PRWeek in 2011 that “advertising is the enemy.”
As PRWeek reports in its July 2013 issue, “Richard has since adjusted his position” to keep in step with a world flush with social media, sponsored content, native advertising and old-fashioned advertising (i.e., paid media).
Our firm has changed significantly over the course of its life, especially during the last three years. Our sweet spot is still media relations, positioning our clients as industry thought leaders and boosting their credibility. We believe that authentic stories, shared by fluent storytellers, continually evolved to keep the audience engaged deliver the best success in business communications. We also manage social media efforts, which from our perspective is all about the content. And we have become inbound marketing experts. We’ve adapted to a world where the prospect is an active participant in a hyper-stimulated world. But we still don’t do advertising.
So can we remain true to WordWrite’s original vision, even when the world’s largest and one of the most respected PR firms has philosophically changed, or do we risk getting passed by in a rapidly changing world?
In another recent conversation, a client told us that he believes in focusing all of our efforts on those strategies that are of the highest value. And for him and his global, business-to-business firm and many of our other clients, that is public relations – demonstrating expertise and credibility through earned media, speaking opportunities and content creation (or, as some dinosaurs call it, writing).
Communicating thought leadership and credibility cannot be done through an ad that doesn’t look like an ad. “Sponsored content” on an editorial page is still paid content, and the message does not carry the same weight as the message that is earned after having been vetted and deemed credible by a third-party.
I don’t know Richard Edelman, but I certainly respect him. Heck, that warm picture of him in the most recent issue of PRWeek immediately gives me a good feeling about him. I feel like I could pull up a chair next to him and start rapping PR. So although there is a place in his and the broader communications universe for paid content, there’s not one in WordWrite’s world right now.
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Jason Snyder is a senior vice president for WordWrite Communications.
