The guest speaker at the dinner was Peter Barron, Google’s director of external relations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and former editor of Newsnight.

The CIPR has chosen the group as the best sector group of the year. In its citation, the CIPR said: “The group continued to run their high quality and well attended monthly speaker programme, which featured speakers in 2010 to include Rt Hon John McFall MP, Treasury Select Committee; Richard Alderman, Serious Fraud Office and Edward McBride, The Economist. The committee also organised visits to The Guardian and No 10 Downing Street (which was an instant sell-out). The group also updated their financial PR guidelines at the end of 2010, with the new version of ‘Through The Thicket’ launched in early 2011.”

First on board was Roy Hodson who had just left the FT after a distinguished career. His experience stood us in good stead in ghosting articles and drafting press releases for clients. He was so good at winkling out stories and writing them concisely with a light touch.

Roy always said that you need finders, minders and grinders in an agency but that the difference with Caroline Cecil Associates was that the finders also do the minding and grinding. That tenet remains today. I like to say that, with us, you get the principals not the kindergarten in the back room.

What has changed since 1991?

In the ‘80s, advertising was the Rolls Royce of the communications disciplines and PR the poor relation. Now, according to WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell: PR has “resumed its rightful place as one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, marketing medium today”.

The number of journalists moving to PR has turned into a flood. There are more PRs working in-house although, slightly surprisingly, Kingston Smith figures show only a 16 per cent increase in employees in the top 40 consultancies over the last two decades.

And…

A clear communications strategy is even more important with today’s faster-moving news. The number of outlets has swelled – 24 hour rolling news, websites, blogs and social media. But the crisp written and spoken word still leaps out of the mass of different channels.

Budget cuts in traditional media mean journalists are more stretched, so there are fewer lunches, less alcohol and more coffees.

Mad Men’s on TV instead of the real thing at Valin Pollen!

Caroline Cecil Associates has evolved to reflect these developments. Although Roy has retired, our team today has a greater breadth of experience from journalism to presentation training, and industry to social media.

But one thing is unchanged: PR is still great fun.



Sir Martin Sorrell believes the biggest millstone around the PR industry’s neck is a dearth of really good people. Sorrell, the highly esteemed boss at global marketing services group WPP, was speaking at a CIPR dinner last week, but we had a private chat to circumvent the Chatham House rule.

He believes editorial publicity (PR) has ‘resumed its rightful place as one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, marketing medium today’. This, Sorrell puts down partly to the advent of social media, partly to the rise of the importance of polling and data, and partly to the maturing of the industry itself. ‘It used to be about who you knew. Now it is about what you know, as well as who you know’ he said.

When I quizzed Sorrell as to the single biggest factor holding PR back, his response was ‘talent’.

At first glance, this is surprising. Having covered the advertising, marketing and PR worlds as a journalist for more than a decade, one of the most noticeable things about the latter sector is the cast of likeable, charismatic and well-networked characters at the top of the business. But Sorrell’s talent analysis goes deeper. He is comparing PR not with advertising, but with professional consultancy firms such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs (where one of his sons, Mark, has just become a partner). ‘These firms continuously hire the best people. Our malaise as an industry is that we don’t – we just nick them.’

Sorrell quite rightly points out that marcoms consultancies, and particularly PR, have a tendency to ‘steal’ talent from other firms, rather than training, developing and evaluating people in-house.

‘Today, most industries have overcapacity, but we are in the differentiation business and our shortage is in people,’ he says.

However, Sorrell did point to one bright spot for the comms business; the huge demand from blue-chip organisations to improve their internal comms. ‘It’s the biggest challenge for CEOs at the moment,’ he said.

See more photos here.

Journalists are as keen as PR people to build relationships, and Pym made it clear that he is happy to meet with PR professionals, though he warned that breakfast is usually much easier than lunch.

Significantly, in a speech at the end of last month in London, Simon Lewis, who was Gordon Brown’s official spokesman, made the same point. Lewis knows both politics and business – he was communications chief at Vodafone before arriving at No 10. He posed the question that a response to a news item should not be, “What is our response?” but instead, “Do we have something to say?”

Everyone in PR knows that “no comment” can be a very loaded statement and any lack of response needs to be phrased better. But we must not be afraid of having a “lack of response” strategy because we fear that a “no comment” will be attached to the company and make it seem guilty.

It can be difficult to judge when to jump and when to stand back. Ill-informed social media “pub talk” tends to fall to the bottom of the heap – and often extreme views are cancelled out by opposing ones – while informed comment comes to the top of the pile. But, the first step before leaping in, should be to ask how any potential communication ties in with the company’s strategy and key messages.

Having clear, concise messages is as important as ever. Television news, however good quality, is like tabloid journalism. It depends on pictures, and a reporter’s word count on most news programmes can often be no more than 140 words. And Twitterers delight in the confines of 140 characters. So, if a company cannot explain itself succinctly, misinterpretation is inevitable.

There are some great examples of companies communicating well and fast when problems have arisen such as British Airways during the strikes and the ash cloud, and less good ones such as Eurostar when the wrong kind of snow fell. Of course, the best comms strategy cannot cover over operational cracks such as the “insufficient contingency arrangements” for Eurostar’s stranded passengers.

And the strongest communications teams are the ones that are least visible, so communications people becoming the story can be a sign of things going wrong – just think of BP and its spokesman Andrew Gowers.

We talk of globalisation as though this is a new concept but in fact it has been going on for a long time. My husband started supporting Tottenham Hotspur when he saw a back-page newspaper photo of the team celebrating on an open top bus after winning the FA Cup. He was brought up in Mumbai and the paper was The Times of India. Which neatly illustrates the point how the speed of globalisation has changed. Today he probably would be able to see the pictures live, not two days later.

In PR we need to stick to our strategy and messages, but be fast on our feet with our tactics. Instant response without any anchoring strategy is like politicians changing policy on the basis of focus group meetings.