Select PR Agencies
This paper discusses three agencies, among them the UK’s top-ranked Bell Pottinger Group, Hill & Knowlton, and Edelman. We use industry leader BPG as benchmarks for assessing the service menu of the rival firms.
The PR arm of parent Chime Communications PLC, Bell Pottinger has led the industry four years running in the PR Week league tables of disclosed billings. Bell Pottinger comprises 23 brands or boutique agencies – Bell Pottinger, Good Relations, Harvard, Insight, Resonate, De Facto, Traffic, MMK, Search Relations and Corporate Citizenship – and a staff of nearly 400 domestically, in major EU markets, the Middle East and North America.
Befitting the broad communicative services scope of Chime, itself a listed and full-service marketing communications spin-off of Lowe Howard Spink and Bell that engages in public relations, above-the-line advertising, digital production and communications, marketing, consumer research, corporate social responsibility management and design, Bell Pottinger offers a diverse menu of services. These can essentially be classed into traditional and “new media”. The former counts orthodox areas of corporate PR: brand building communications, addressing investor and capital markets relations, business to business and consumer public relations, corporate social responsibility programmes, traditional corporate literature (e.g. annual reports), issue and crisis management (the usual reason for ad hoc engagements of PR consultants), ‘international’ and ‘change’ communications. When catastrophes of the boardroom variety impend or have actually hit the headlines, crisis PR advice is wanted so badly that Bell Pottinger gives prominent display to a ‘24/7 Crisis Comms’ helpline on its Web site (Bell Pottinger Group, 2009).
On the other hand, the industry leader has not been reticent about offering advice and outsourced service in respect of cutting-edge communications in ‘search relations’ (the search engine marketing niche, helping clients achieve higher page rank when interested consumers search on certain key words), what the agency terms ‘mapping on-line conversations’ (managing on-line discussions about a client in critical, opinion leader blogs, forums and other social media), and digital media production.
Being an established name among global PR networks, the first of the multinationals and world leader for a long time, Hill & Knowlton naturally offers core services but gains a great deal of credibility itself for engaging with issues, such as environmental sustainability, that thoughtful CEOs confront from one week to another. At H & K, the traditional services cover PR strategy/message development, business-to-consumer PR, a focus on corporate reputation (that really goes without saying in any PR campaign), ‘public affairs’ government (presumably equal parts PR and lobbying), ‘media programmes’ (‘the truth well told,’ in the corporate vision of multinational ad agency McCann-Erickson), business-to-business marketing, digital media production, international PR, (stock and financial markets) analyst relations, and stage-managing company spokespersons to face media competently (Hill & Knowlton, 2009). Just to blur the boundaries, H & K London is not averse to taking on mainstream, multi-media advertising campaigns though one concedes this is not unusual in the world of ‘integrated’ advertising and PR agencies.
On the other hand, H & K would appear to differentiate itself by offering a ‘Business Healthcheck’, inter-disciplinary expertise on sustainability communications, integrated stakeholder communications, and the oft-neglected but nevertheless vital area of promoting and defending sponsorships of celebrities and events. Helping often-criticised developing nations make their case at the bar of world opinion (the agency handled Uganda but one thinks of Iran, China, Nigeria, the Sudan and Mexico as particularly vulnerable and thorny examples).
Edelman is another US PR agency that originated in Chicago in 1952, opened its first overseas branch in London in 1968 and has grown mightily to become the largest independent PR agency network around the globe with no fewer than 3,200 staff in 51 nations (Edelman.co.uk, 2009). Brands within the London office are mainstream brand marketing boutique JCPR, Internet communications unit Spook Media, mobile telephone specialist Edelman Mobile, full-service research shop StrategyOne, and health and medical specialist BioScience (with its own ‘Health Engagement Barometer’). One concedes that marshalling thought leadership in the health and medical fields is a worthwhile specialty. The forays into market research, media placement strategy, and mobile marketing are, however, activities more characteristic of full-service advertising agencies.
For the most part, therefore, the menu of Edelman services is expected of any sizeable PR consultancy: defending and shaping corporate reputation with consumer, financial, and government stakeholders; public and political advocacy campaigns; and managing adversarial issues and full-fledged crises.
Public Relations Theory
In relation to course content so far, the three agencies plainly fulfil the mandate of public relations as crafting and managing communications between client organisations and relevant target publics. In the main, these comprise government, consumers, internal publics, professionals who might endorse or balk at recommending company products, and, notably for companies listed on stock markets, analysts and investors. The sheer breadth of tools the PR agencies boast about make one realise that they have gone beyond the tools and channels inventoried in Chapter I to embrace Internet and mobile telephony technologies.
Turning to the theories discussed in lecture 2, we find evidence of the operation of Grunig and Hunt’s Model 4, Mackey’s situational theory and Habermas’ ‘ideal speech and the public sphere’ in the case of three Edelman campaigns that backfired. The public debate about the predatory-monopolistic business practices of Microsoft is a case where the public at large and regulatory agencies are able to exercise symmetrical communications. Resentment at having no choice because Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer are pre-installed (and shut out competitors) likely gave the Justice Department and the various state attorneys-general the impetus to sue the company on anti-trust grounds.
Edelman is talented at self-promotion, as attested to by investing in, and cannily publicizing the Edelman Trust Barometer and the Global Peace Index. On the other hand, the reputation of the agency itself has been damaged time and again by forays into crisis PR that ignored ethical boundaries or appeared insensitive of public opinion. In 1998, Edelman USA was criticized for ‘astroturfing’ in an attempt to dissuade a dozen-odd state attorneys-general from joining the anti-trust suit against client Microsoft. This referred to inducing letter-writing and phone-call campaigns to make it appear that there was grassroots support for the software giant when in fact, all the materials were in-house efforts of Edelman’s.
In turn, the workings of situational theory and ideal speech are evident in the counterproductive effort to manage unfair labour practise at Wal-Mart or another coal-burning plant in Kent because the general public is aware and has taken legitimately adversarial positions.
In 2005 and 2006, an effort to ‘manage’ the online conversation about Wal-Mart’s egregious wage and health-benefit policies boomeranged when it was revealed that supportive material distributed to popular bloggers had all been written by an Edelman account executive. Clearly, distributing ‘good news’ about the number of job applications received by America’s largest employer, bar none, or in respect of accommodating Salvation Army fund drives (whereas rival Target would not) could be criticised as inconsequential in the light of the retail chain’s woeful labour practices. Where ethical business practices are concerned, clearly, Habermas’ theory argues that the balance of power is with the general public and the regulatory agencies that represent them.
Closer to home, September 1st 2009 saw another attack by activists on Edelman’s UK offices continuing a protest that commenced in July 2008. This time, the agency itself was roundly criticised for ‘greenwashing’, portraying the plan of power company Eon to build a new dual oil-and-coal-fuelled plant in Kingsnorth (at the Hoo peninsula in Medway, Kent) as proceeding with full ‘environmental awareness’. Plainly, even 55 years of astute PR experience does not protect Edelman from mistakenly thinking that it could sugar-coat the bitter pill of dirty coal combustion. In this situation, it was plainly up to Eon to invest in electrostatic scrubbers that would be acceptable to a population that had lived with a variety of lung and upper-respiratory diseases since the dawn of the coal-fuelled Industrial Age. This is an example of situational theory but discourse is definitely not equal because the confluence of both public opinion and inter-governmental policy is in favour of slowing down of greenhouse gas production.
Bibliography
Bell Pottinger Group (2009) Home/Index page. Web.
Edelman.co.uk (2009) London. Web.
Hill & Knowlton (2009) Our services. Web.