Abstract
Tim Burt is a respectable fellow. He worked for most of his career as a journalist at the Financial Times, where he won awards. When he jumped ship to the public relations industry in 2005, it was to a partnership at the eminently respectable (for a PR firm) Brunswick Group, founded by Sir Peter Parker's influential and now very wealthy son Alan. Brunswick's clients are many of the largest companies in the land.
Those two employers have overwhelmingly dominated Burt's career (although he set up his own company at the end of 2010) and it is this background which makes me wonder if he really knows much about the mucky, day-to-day business of PR. Burt says, for instance, that public relations advisers must behave as therapeutic counsellors to persuade their clients to admit their problems. I daresay that if you are dealing with the tetchy chairman of a £50 billion company, this is the judicious approach.
For the rest of us, though, we are more like doctors checking the client's prostate. It isn't meant to be pleasant.
That is not to imply that Dark Art is an unintelligent or uninformed book: it isn't. It is well-researched on many fronts and chock full of all the most up-to-date pseudo-science that the PR industry has adopted over the past 30 years to help it through its permanent inferiority complex.
Both as journalist and PR man, Burt has dealt predominantly with business bosses at the highest level and has many valuable insights into the way their organisations are run. One anonymous corporate communications boss at a top 20 British company is quoted as saying: “There is a secular trend to lower retained fees.”
That scary assertion inspires much of the book thereafter, for it seems that lofty PR people such as Burt and Parker have for years been encroaching on other professional services, and now those professionals are pushing back. The only trouble is, they have rather more than a way with words and some good media contacts to offer. Spooks, lawyers, risk analysts, corporate planners, management consultants and others with far more scientific skills than most PR people can boast are offering competitor intelligence, risk assessment and damage limitation services which had often in the past been provided by the PR industry. With revenues squeezed, the big PR firms feel vulnerable. They are facing their own reputational crisis, which loosely interprets as: PR may be too important to leave to PR people.
This usurping by more impressive-seeming rival services has happened in a threateningly-fast way, partly because of the wave of massive corporate crises since 2008 (chief of which was the Deepwater Horizon disaster for BP – a lucrative client for Brunswick). Burt does not assess whether the crises might have been averted or lessened if the crisis planning had been taken away from the PR men before 2008.
The internet has also made the job of the thoughtful PR man harder because reputational crises unfold much more quickly – almost instantaneously in many cases. One academic from the Cranfield School of Management is quoted as saying: “The stakes are much higher nowadays if you make a corporate blunder. Companies used to have more time to think before they had to react …”
And as if the above were not enough for the PR industry to contend with, Burt points out that the business pages of the national papers – the traditional area of influence for financial and corporate PR people – are turning their backs on run-of-diary stories and want scoops about corporate failure or bad behaviour. “Although traditional news media outlets are losing readers and cutting corporate coverage,” he says, “business leaders are as concerned as ever about what is written.” If his thesis – that PR people are losing their ability to improve what is written about their clients – is correct, then we old-schoolers would be in a pretty pickle.
It can't be correct, though, because as Burt acknowledges, London is a boom town for “reputation laundering” – the business of polishing up the images of dodgy governments and corporations by firms like Tony Blair Associates.
So, I think what Burt means is that big, non-dodgy companies are subjected to greater scrutiny and at the same time forced to offer greater transparency, which makes life harder for him. But the rest of us don't face such pressures most of the time. In my own experience, whilst there is truth in what Burt says, it is not nearly that bad and social media are opening up avenues of activity that in themselves present new types of business. There is plenty of room still for the creative opportunism that made the British PR industry so successful in the past. The ability to blog and tweet anonymously, for instance, means that one can send out very sensitive messages with total control of content. The clients and the fees may be smaller, but the volume of work is high. These are the real Dark Arts, and they are thriving.