Some people find this Youtube video of a mock-plaintive junior at PR agency Ten Yetis amusing. Maybe it did the trick but it left me feeling a little embarrassed for her. If I was her client, I’d be wondering if that’s all there is to pitching journalists – and wondering if I didn’t need a little more marketing savvy injecting into my PR efforts.

Why, for example, was there not one single good reason offered up to the journalist to write about the product in that video? Why do readers need to know about it, why is it better than similar apps? It’s not like there wasn’t enough time – she had plenty to plug the product name (three times I counted). Maybe it’s a pile of crap and maybe that’s why, as a pitch attempt, this PR flack’s effort was pretty lame. Just my view of course, based on the information available at the time of writing. Am I right or am I being too harsh?

Note: a couple of days after writing this post, I was directed via a Twitter follower to this blog entry about other ‘quality’ output from Ten Yetis PR. And today, a very experienced trade magazine editor read my post and told me “they do the kind of PR that makes you want to kill out their emails before you even read them.”

Are PR agency founders on a mission to outdo each other when it comes to naming their firms? In striving to be memorable and achieve standout, I think we’ve now crossed the line between clever, creative branding and plain silliness. Here’s the evidence and all of them, except one, are genuine business names. A few are good, many bad and others just downright bizarre. What do you think? Can you spot the made up one?

First up are the agencies named after animals. Here we have Buffalo, Porcupine, Moose and Cow. Note that ruminants dominate, perhaps in recognition of the bullshit you get from these firms? Then again, I’ve heard a Porcupine is capable of delivering a nasty prick. If one animal isn’t enough, then go plural as 3 Monkeys and PR Dogs did. How about plural fictitious animals? You think I’m joking but there’s an agency called 10 Yetis. Throw in some emotion: Happy Giraffe or Laughing Cow perhaps? What about sea creatures? Octopus and Seal are already taken.

Flying creatures are represented too: we have Owl, Ptarmigan and Firefly. Colours are a good way of achieving brand stand-out but don’t choose Purple or Red. Need something better? Go for a colour that’s also a food. But not Tangerine or Mustard, as these too are already chosen. Or just food on its own? Fine, so long as it’s not Marmalade. That’s also taken, but disappointingly not by design agency Toast, which would surely have been a corporate marriage made in heaven. One agency has adopted an entire country as its name: Brazil. That must make calling up strangers interesting:

“Hello, this is Samantha calling from Brazil.”
“Oh really, isn’t it the middle of the night there?”

Others have gone for the slightly esoteric, such as Blue Rubicon (but at least there’s a story behind that one). But our final two examples stand out for different reasons. First we have Yellow Lorry Red Lorry. Choosing a tongue-twister as a business name must rank very highly in terms of silliness. Then we have Ireland’s Hopscotch Europe in One, which manages to be both silly and parochial for a firm that promises to take your message to the far corners of the EMEA region. Finally, this agency is either distinctly unimaginative or brilliantly simple and no nonsense: it’s called PRCo.

Photo courtesy of ~C4Chaos at Flickr

Elle Macpherson and a ceo. I know which one I'd prefer to have in my boardroom

Earlier this month Elle Macpherson, one of the original ‘supermodels’, was interviewed by Lucy Kellaway in The Financial Times. You can read the article here (although you may need to register). It’s a great read, though it left this formerly neutral reader, and I suspect many others, with a rather dim view of ‘The Body’, as she used to be known. It made me wonder what the original objective for doing the interview was, what preparation went into it and whether the outcome might have been better for McPherson, who clearly went into damage limitation mode judging from the writer’s account of post-interview phone calls.

Super models, like others at the top of their game in fashion, media and sport, are used to journalists fawning over them. Because they are hugely in demand, they can pick and choose who they grant interviews to, with the result that most journalists have to accept the sometimes ridiculous conditions they (and their publicists) demand: so-and-so will not talk about this; you are not allowed to mention (insert sensitive issue). You can see evidence of it in Kellaway’s piece but all such attempts at media interview control were never going to work with The FT, which as most people know is much more interested in business than celebrity stories.

Kellaway doesn’t make her living interviewing the likes of Elle Macpherson so had nothing to lose from writing an honest and frank account of the meeting. Though she is fair, she has a low tolerance for flaky business ‘guff’ and isn’t afraid to get the highlighter pen out when she encounters it. So why did Macpherson’s PR firm, a high-end fashion PR agency based in Savile Row, think it was a good idea to do this interview? My bet is that they approached Kellaway rather than the other way round. Why, at the bare minimum, wasn’t Macpherson briefed and ready to talk about business instead of underwear? Did they think their client was safer talking to a female reporter?

Tellingly, Macpherson misinterprets Kellaway’s reference to the basic accounting term ‘wasting asset’ and responds frostily (savour the mental image, as the ‘Ab-Fab’ PR agency minder sitting in on the interview didn’t get it either). We are left wondering if she really is as deeply immersed in the business world as she claims to be.

What’s the most important lesson? I’m torn between “never use a fashion PR agency to handle business media relations” and “if your client is the brand and writes a ‘brand poem’, make sure they never mention it during a media interview.”

Most companies who hire marketing services firms love to assert their power by making their suppliers jump through hoops from time to time, and it’s an increasing practice. Which is why, a few times each month, suppliers of advertising, public relations and other marketing services have to participate in a time consuming and usually fruitless ‘beauty parade’ game, otherwise known as pitching for client business (other businesses use the more generally known term: selling).

I’ve been on both sides of the fence on many occasions and can tell you it isn’t pretty. Clients often draw up flaky briefs that are impossible to interpret and then refuse to be pinned down by answering perfectly reasonable questions of detail. The agency people will try to persuade the client that they’ve had their best account team giving lengthy, considered thoughts to the brief. In reality, it’s likely that most of the effort is the result of whichever individual has enough free time working into the wee hours of the night before the pitch. So it was interesting to see the results of a survey on this theme from the UK’s Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) reported here.

The survey, completed by 51 out of the 180 PRCA firms, found that the amount of time spent on a new client sales pitch varies widely but the average is 20 hours. That got me thinking about the cost. Fortunately, the PRCA also produces another survey called the ‘inter-firm comparison’. This is an anonymous survey allowing agency management to benchmark their businesses against other PRCA member firms on various factors, including hourly rates charged. To arrive at a reasonable cost estimate for our average 20 hour sales pitch effort we have to make some assumptions about how that time breaks down. Here are my ‘best guess’ assumptions:

• Board Director: 2 hours
• Account director: 8 hours
• Account manager: 6 hours
• Account executive: 4 hours

Using the PRCA’s 2009 hourly rates for the different job levels, and the above breakdowns for time, the theoretical cost of that one sales pitch, based on unrecoverable hourly rates alone is £2,292. Over a typical 46-week working year, assuming the agency pitches once every two weeks, the theoretical annual cost amounts to £52,716 per agency.

This figure excludes any third-party costs. PRCA communications director Richard Ellis says the 20 hour average refers to ‘time spent preparing for a new business pitch’. We must therefore assume it does not include the time travelling to, from and attending the various pitch process meetings, multiplied by the number of people from the agency involved; it looks a bit on the low side otherwise. Neil Backwith* thinks so too. He tells me 50 hours is the average time investment for a new business pitch made by the groups of PR firm CEOs he works with. If we use Neil’s figure, the annual cost jumps to £142,312 per agency. But even this might well be conservative. Ellis says the survey figures “went into the ‘over 200’ at the other end of the scale”!

Who pays for all this? Clients ultimately, of course, but indirectly through the fees agencies have to charge for their services. As Backwith points out,

“By asking more agencies to pitch clients will end up paying higher rates for the privilege – quite the opposite of what they hoped for!”

Do they and their procurement colleagues realise this? Do they care? Is there a better way? Microsoft’s Peter Devery clearly thinks it’s time for a change, stating in a recent PR Week article that:

“…. the PR pitch beauty parade is a legacy of an old industry. The process is lengthy, costly, resource-hungry, inefficient and often does not result in the required level of understanding which will lead to a fruitful partnership. We have to move the industry on, for both the agencies’ and clients’ sake.”

Some in the agency world are fighting back by banding together and refusing to pitch. But sadly it’s the Belgians who are doing the rebelling, not the Brits.

Postscript Feb 2011: I’ve just discovered www.winwithoutpitching.com, founded by Canadian Blair Enns. The resources on his site are well worth a look.

* Neil Backwith is a management consultant, trainer and mentor to professional services firms and their leaders. He was previously chief executive (EMEA) at PR firm Porter Novelli. He is author of the PRCA book ‘Managing professional communications agencies’.