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As the company celebrates its 30th year in business, Jennifer Janson, managing director, and the company’s founder, Roger Staton found some time to talk about changes in the PR industry since 1977.
RS: Back in 1977 the average house price was £4,000 (now £185,000); it was the end of an era, as Elvis died. Star Wars was the film of the year. The professional PR industry in the UK, never mind the specialist technology PR field, was in its infancy.
JJ: So what was it like to be one of the pioneers of technology PR?
RS: At the time, Angela and I didn’t think of ourselves as pioneers. We set up the business from our home and focused on the area that we really understood – technology, in its broadest sense. I suppose this was ahead of its time to some extent, as there wasn’t the same degree of audience segmentation that you get these days where clients might have a specialist B2B PR consultancy, consumer PR agency, investor relations company, channel marketing agency and so on.
JJ: I think that’s been the secret of your success – focusing on what you are good at. The focus of the business today is still very much the same: technology-based businesses, be they marketing technology providers, consumer electronics or telecom infrastructure suppliers.
I suppose the media landscape looked pretty different in the late 1970s. What have the biggest changes been?
RS: Well there were no 24-hour rolling news TV channels, no World Wide Web, no blogs or other social networking sites where customers could respond to our clients instantly. But there were excellent journalists at national and trade magazines, just as there are now, and they wanted good stories.
JJ: The media has grown exponentially in recent years, and timescales have changed dramatically. Clients no longer write press releases solely for the media, they write them with the knowledge that customers will also be reading them directly, from their websites. It means that as PR practitioners, we’ve had to adapt. And of course the advent of user-generated content means we are no longer dealing only with a handful of really influential media outlets.
Another major change, I imagine, is that ways of measuring PR have become more sophisticated now?
RS: Yes, measurement of PR effectiveness has to relate to business benefits not just PR for PR’s sake. When we set up the business, the success of a campaign was judged by clients, in a lot of cases, on the basis of ‘gut feel’.
JJ: The pressure on any consultancy to demonstrate substantial return on investment is huge. So huge, in fact, that we are developing our own measurement tool, called 360.
RS: Many of the fundamentals are still the same, though. Clients want consultants, above all, to really understand their business. If we get the messaging and writing right, and add excellent photography, the formula for successful media coverage hasn’t changed in 30 years. The processes may be different now, but the two-way trust that is needed between journalists and PR consultants is still crucial.
JJ: I agree. The global reach of media relations work we do from the UK wasn’t really a consideration years ago. Today ‘thinking globally’ is a big part of our work. A story we might place on BBC News Online can be picked up in the US, the rest of Europe, Australia.
RS: That’s very true. Although we did have big global brands as clients when we first started, some of whom are still clients today, we didn’t need to worry so much about the instant, global spread of information.
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