PR: Would You Like a Job Peggy Olson?

The critically acclaimed TV show about the advertising industry, Mad Men, opened its latest season with the episode Public Relations. In a way that great television often does, the episode captured some stark truths – in this case, the essence of the PR industry in an era 35 years ago when advertising was the dog and PR was the tail of the marketing mix.

The gist of the story was that Don Draper, the lead character, messed up a newspaper interview that led to his firm receiving bad publicity, which was bad for business. Meanwhile, Peggy Olson, one of Don’s young creative leads, comes up with a PR stunt to regain their account with Sugarberry Ham. She hires actresses to fight over a ham in a supermarket. The stunt goes sideways when the fight turns real and the actresses get arrested. Don gets angry at her, but Peggy wins back Sugarberry. Good for business.

In the Mad Men era, PR equalled publicity, either managing it when a reporter called or creating it with cool stunts. Don is an amateur; Peggy a natural. I’d hire her in a minute. But before I did, I’d warn her that even though the public relations industry in our post-Mad Men era has changed a lot, it still has a long way to go before it’s the dog. I’d tell her that PR has an opportunity to become as powerful and compelling as the ad business in the last decades of the 20th century, if only a couple of things would change.

Firstly, the ownership structure of most of the world’s large, global PR firms is an insurmountable wall in the way of greatness. Tucked near the backside of global ad conglomerate org charts, the world’s major public relations firms, with the exception of independent Edelman (disclosure, my employer), are encumbered by second-class status. They are grouped into kludged organisations with names such as “constituency management”, “diversified agency services” and “specialised agencies and management services”. The organisational categories are basically “other”.

Despite the talent and excellence of some of the holding-companies’ PR firms, they will never assume marketing leadership locked in a last-generation concept that puts ad networks at the front of everything.

When these holding companies were formed, the ad agencies ruled the day and owned the client, and their DNA was born of a time that will never again exist. And regardless of all the talk by holding company heads about the importance of digital, the ad guys still run the show.

Because so much of the world’s PR talent is locked into this declining model, the entire industry is being held back. PR needs a little bit of Darwin to create the model of the future holding company – one made up of great PR firms, with perhaps a small creative ad agency and a digital direct-marketing firm in the “other” part of the organisation.
Secondly, agencies need to own – really own – social media in the new engaged economy. It was social media that poisoned the holding company, ad-agency-led marketing model, but it can be social media that empowers the PR industry. If – and it’s a big if – the industry embraces the implications of social media and restructures itself to take advantage of the new engagement economy, it will move to the centre of the client relationship.

My pitch to get Peggy Olson to join the PR ranks would also include a confession. I am an accidental PR guy. I didn’t choose this business, it chose me. I didn’t know it existed when I was in college; I scorned it during my years as a newspaper journalist and I found myself in it one day and have now embraced it.
I would tell Peggy Olson I’m glad I did because PR, before long, might just be the dog.

Would You Like a Job Peggy Olson?

Mark Hass is president of Edelman China.

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