Dave Taylor responds to my response… well you get it.
Here’s what Dave had to say:
Au contraire. PR as practiced by old-school agencies is long since dead, David. It’s the smart ones at the front of the pack, groups like your own agency, that are reinventing PR to remain relevant in the age of electronic communications. Remember, for every smart PR person who is part of the evolution, there are three that are dinosaurs wondering what happened to all those yummy ferns.
So… a few comments in response…
The agency model that has fleets of 20-somethings banging away at media lists, stalking reporters and emailing 1MB attachments is not going anywhere. In fact it’s the norm in PR. That’s because most companies that engage a PR agency want hits. By most companies I mean the 90% or more of the world’s major corporations who have never heard of blogging and even if they have, they see bloggers as an annoyance at best and a threat at worst.
I know this for a fact because pretty much every agency I’ve worked for works this way. If they could get a client on the Today Show, there’d be dancing in the streets regardless whether the Today Show is an appropriate placement for the client.
Dave, to be perfectly honest, the reason you think this is a dying model is because these agencies don’t know you exist. They’ve never pitched you, or Robert Scoble or Russell Beattie because bloggers are completely irrelevant to them except as a name on a list generated from Bacons.
Will smart agencies, the ones that understand the ways in which the world is changing, win out? Of course.
Companies like Dell, the ones that don’t know or don’t care until it’s too late and one of those annoying little bloggers are impacting their bottom line, are the dinosaurs. Not the agencies that are only responding to what their clients want. Once more clients start demanding more thoughtful approaches, the agencies that Dave thinks are on the way out will be forced to adopt or die.
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