Public Relations and Communicators Blog

Over the last decade I've seen the role of the junior most trainees and executives in PR change substantially. The first rung in the ladder in the years of yore of the PR profession would start with the mundane task of cutting, pasting & filing news clippings for clients and their competition. The agency would typically reason that since this was the most essential grounding that any PR professional needed, the longer they spent time in this task, the better the professional's media knowledge and understanding would be honed. This was also the time when the executive was to 'observe' all other activities and get a feel for media relations, client servicing and reporting. The other task the junior executives were assigned was to do with reporting. An onerous task at one point, where each of the clipping details had to be painstakingly entered into an excel file with the headline including title, page, journalist and size. Often the poor executive would spend 3...

You know the maxim of bottles & wines right? I have a theory that says that old wine in any bottle has to taste better. If the taste is not to your liking, chances are that its time to change your drink. Public Relations agencies take pride in old and steady relationships. We do too! But a spate of recent pitches that we were invited to, shock-struck my eyes open. Thrilled as we were to participate in these pitches, we were gloating in the fact that Blue Lotus was making dents into decade old relationships. We were also excited to explore how help change the way PR can be used for these ‘rock-steady’ organizations. Just a few weeks ago, we’ve replaced an agency which had a 13 year old relationship, and another pitch we were invited for where the relationship had soured progressively over the last 10 years!! During one of our pitches (in the penultimate round) I was while casually conversing with the client on their rationale for change of agency after so many years and I got enligh...