Seems to me to be a semantic difference more than anything (A PR Manager probably has a lot more responsibility than a typical Account Manager in advertising).
In my experience, because the budgets being handled are usually much smaller, splitting agencyteams into creative/accounts teams doesn't happen very often in PR, unless the agency is huge. In most cases you'll do a bit of both, although obvs people have different strengths. But it's very rare to get a 'creative' in PR who is completely non-client facing.
After a moment of madness and a desire to move to London, I applied for a couple of jobs last month. For reasons I won’t bore you all with, I can’t move until September, so was looking at jobs that start then (mainly grad schemes).
I did one for a PR company which has come through, and I have a phone interview with them scheduled. But after a couple of conversations about it, I’m not sure it’s my thing, and am wondering whether I should just sack the interview off.
they take a product/cause/research write news stories and press releases that chime with/set a certain news flow that day/week and then use connections and contacts to try and get as much press/radio/tv coverage of the above as possible. This is sometimes offset against advertising spend etc.
Can be an interesting, worthwhile job... can be rubbish, depends what you are pr-ing for really.
Oh, There's also the crisis/reputation management?aspect to PR.? lot of PR is keeping stuff out of the news.?
Pay is ok, about 25k entry level, 50-60k senior level, and rising to six figures for in house/director roles, though these are rare.
20-something arts/marketing grads writing press releases about shoes and ice buckets it sounds like a fairly humdrum kind of thing, a soulless pursuit and often essentially morally bankrupt, but no more than a million other so-so career paths.
But at a high level, when you're dealing with creating propaganda in an effort to alter mass perception and propagate one narrative over another, you're essentially getting in the realms of magic(k). Which sounds quite fun.
to rehabilitate Peter Sutcliffe's reputation than it would be to get your mum to stop sucking off tramps for five minutes and put some make-up on that made her look slightly less like a fat drunk clown.
It's odd how PR as an industry has a reputation problem.
I deal with and am friends with a lot of PRs and on the whole, they're all pretty decent, smart people. Most have some background in journalism. I tend not encounter the arts grad types waiting for a husband characterised above.
The industry is about building and protecting reuptations. Naturally it's a bit more interesting if you're PRing a worthy campaign or an exciting artist than if you're account exec for a brand of crisps.
The worst type of PR for me is the "lifestyle business" type, normally a one or two person home-based operation run by people who don't really understand what PR is and give the rest of the industry a bad name. These people will have spent this week sending out releases starting with...
"Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so why not treat that special someone to our client's product that has nothing to do with romance."
There's a company I've dealt with in the past that claims to be a PR firm, but is essentially two girls who run the twitter account for their friend's cupcake shop. That's not PR, it's fluffy bullshit.
If you are interested in PR, follow @markborkowski on Twitter.
If you look hard enough, you can see the PR angle in most stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that fox attack story the other day came from the Countryside Aliance. It's probably not the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I spoke to Max Clifford once (sorry for name-dropping. He seems like a nice bloke incidentally) and it was around the time the press were going mental over "devil dogs killing babies."
I tried to engage him on it and he said "If I was the Rottweiler club of Great Britain or whoever, I'd just place a story about a Rottweiler rescuing a cute kid from drowning in a pond. Picture of the dog sitting next to the kid, quotes from onlookers, quote from a sympathetic dog behavior expert and relieved parents and that's that. Problem solved."
It's a dark art.
(Luxury) travel PR is the one to get into. A big part of the job involves taking journalists on familiarisation visits to far flung exotic places. Plus, it's actually an interesting subject.
I used to work with someone who did the UK PR for Las Vegas, she had a fun job for a while.
Are you saying it was completely made up or just that it was altered to be a fox by PR parties?
My initial thought was only that a family pet had done it and was being protected from being destroyed. Or that they'd done something truly stupid like tried to pick up a fox and this was their excuse for how it turned out.
The kind of job you end up doing will vary enormously depending on the type of clients you're working on, and the type of campaign. For example FMCG PR (e.g. Food and drink) can be very product focused - you could be organising an event for a load of trade journalists to tell them about a new loaf of bread, for example. Government PR is often about encouraging behavioural change, e.g. you could be encouraging local newspapers to write about the importance of getting a flu jab if you're over 70, to try and reach older people who should have them and who aren't being reached by traditional advertising. Or if you work in corporate communications, this could involve managing the announcement of your quarterly figures, briefing your spokesperson and taking them on the Today programme, for example. It is a mixed bag.
And when a smart, professional member of the marketing team enquires how all the nonsense and bullshit you've come up with fits with the timing, strategy, messaging and identity of your organisation's carfeully mapped communications plan to just shout *COVERAGE! COVERAGE! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND PR!!!!* like a hyperventilating magpie
.. to misquote Game of Thrones, PR is a sword without a hilt.
It's much more difficult to measure than other forms of marketing and you can't control the message or the timing in the same way. But often the consequences of ignoring it can be dire.
Not me
Don't know
PR is what girls with 2.2s in History of Art do until they find a husband.
Kate Middleton is the ultimate example of this.
I know someone with a 1st in History of Art who does it.
funny how PR people have such a terrible reputation for being cunts
#iamacomedian
take it to the # thread.
Most specifically, what's the pay like?
paper riches
tell me more about this paper
Depends hugely on the organisation.
Generally though, more than journalism, which is why all the people I know seem to make the jump sooner of later.
*Bides his time*
SOONER OF LATER
you need a new sub-editor
^ real reason he hasn't moved.
No one will have me :(
*Sobs*
Account Exec ~£25k - £30k
Account Manager ~£30k - £35k
Senior Account Manager ~£35k - £40k
Account Director ~£40k - £50k
Much like in advertising.
these all seem too low to me
http://www.prweek.com/uk/bulletin/prweekukdaily/article/1170748/in-house-salaries-rocket-agencies-lag-behind/
Yeah I don't know how PR works really...
...those on the `creative` side of it will earn a lot more than those on the accounts side of it that's for sure. Just like in advertising.
That £50k figure is probably offset by the gargantuan figures being earned at the top. A median figure would be much more representative.
True, but from experience, it tends to be about a +10 on the figures above I think
There is little chance of getting a senior PR manager (in London at least) for less than 40k
It is usually:
Assistant - 20k
Officer - 30k
Manager - 35-40k
Senior Manager- 45-50k
Strategic director - 50-100k
And those numbers get higher for private sector firms, especially finance.
Ah ok.
Seems to me to be a semantic difference more than anything (A PR Manager probably has a lot more responsibility than a typical Account Manager in advertising).
Makes sense!
Also
In my experience, because the budgets being handled are usually much smaller, splitting agencyteams into creative/accounts teams doesn't happen very often in PR, unless the agency is huge. In most cases you'll do a bit of both, although obvs people have different strengths. But it's very rare to get a 'creative' in PR who is completely non-client facing.
Aye.
Probably explains why the pay's more - individual skill sets need to be higher.
Reason being
After a moment of madness and a desire to move to London, I applied for a couple of jobs last month. For reasons I won’t bore you all with, I can’t move until September, so was looking at jobs that start then (mainly grad schemes).
I did one for a PR company which has come through, and I have a phone interview with them scheduled. But after a couple of conversations about it, I’m not sure it’s my thing, and am wondering whether I should just sack the interview off.
Very varied
they take a product/cause/research write news stories and press releases that chime with/set a certain news flow that day/week and then use connections and contacts to try and get as much press/radio/tv coverage of the above as possible. This is sometimes offset against advertising spend etc.
Can be an interesting, worthwhile job... can be rubbish, depends what you are pr-ing for really.
Oh, There's also the crisis/reputation management?aspect to PR.? lot of PR is keeping stuff out of the news.?
Pay is ok, about 25k entry level, 50-60k senior level, and rising to six figures for in house/director roles, though these are rare.
lot's of question marks there, copied from another thread.
Thanks!
Not something
I'd want to be involved in in a million years, but some of the stuff some PRs get asked to do is fascinating
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020805/Libyan-dictator-Muammar-Gaddafi-tries-hire-NYC-public-relations-firm-improve-image.html
For most
20-something arts/marketing grads writing press releases about shoes and ice buckets it sounds like a fairly humdrum kind of thing, a soulless pursuit and often essentially morally bankrupt, but no more than a million other so-so career paths.
But at a high level, when you're dealing with creating propaganda in an effort to alter mass perception and propagate one narrative over another, you're essentially getting in the realms of magic(k). Which sounds quite fun.
Yeah, i'd love the higher stuff.
great stuff aleister
now can we hear the one where you necromance Peter Sutcliffe into respectability
It'd be easier
to rehabilitate Peter Sutcliffe's reputation than it would be to get your mum to stop sucking off tramps for five minutes and put some make-up on that made her look slightly less like a fat drunk clown.
(sorry)
I meant your Dad.
g
well this is embarrassing
another devastating rejoinder lost to the miniature keyboard of my misfiring smartphone
would've doubtless been wasted on thee, mind
You've
got fat hands.
you're a condescending trouserbulge looking to lavish your particularly distasteful brand of hardman pedantry on the unsuspecting proletariat of DiS
http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/social/4422665#r7241455
never forgive
never forget
I'd dispute
that it's condescending, pedantic or 'hardman' to point out that you've got hands like a pair of meaty frisbees.
PS
Yeah sorry about that other thread. I hadn't read it properly and misconstrued what you were saying.
Cunt.
tbh that backdown was all I wanted
now we can be friends again, or at least, the twin heads of Janus, straining apart...and yet together...
is that where Jennifer Egan
got the idea for the chapter in Goon Squad?!
I think Goon Squad came first
(not read it but was talking to someone else about it the other day)
I *think* it's a not-uncommon thing to find perky Manhattan PR types hanging out with rich and powerful dictators who have public image issues
In the Stephen Fry sitcom Absolute Power
their PR firm was asked by a bunch of extremely right wing country alliance types to rebrand the Nazis.
I think these kinds of japes go back well past Bill Hicks telling everyone in marketing to kill themselves.
bill hicks did it best though
It's been a (very) long-running thread in Doonesbury as well.
There was a thread on this a few weeks ago that raised some interesting points.
It's odd how PR as an industry has a reputation problem.
I deal with and am friends with a lot of PRs and on the whole, they're all pretty decent, smart people. Most have some background in journalism. I tend not encounter the arts grad types waiting for a husband characterised above.
The industry is about building and protecting reuptations. Naturally it's a bit more interesting if you're PRing a worthy campaign or an exciting artist than if you're account exec for a brand of crisps.
The worst type of PR for me is the "lifestyle business" type, normally a one or two person home-based operation run by people who don't really understand what PR is and give the rest of the industry a bad name. These people will have spent this week sending out releases starting with...
"Valentine's Day is just around the corner, so why not treat that special someone to our client's product that has nothing to do with romance."
There's a company I've dealt with in the past that claims to be a PR firm, but is essentially two girls who run the twitter account for their friend's cupcake shop. That's not PR, it's fluffy bullshit.
If you are interested in PR, follow @markborkowski on Twitter.
If you look hard enough, you can see the PR angle in most stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that fox attack story the other day came from the Countryside Aliance. It's probably not the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I spoke to Max Clifford once (sorry for name-dropping. He seems like a nice bloke incidentally) and it was around the time the press were going mental over "devil dogs killing babies."
I tried to engage him on it and he said "If I was the Rottweiler club of Great Britain or whoever, I'd just place a story about a Rottweiler rescuing a cute kid from drowning in a pond. Picture of the dog sitting next to the kid, quotes from onlookers, quote from a sympathetic dog behavior expert and relieved parents and that's that. Problem solved."
It's a dark art.
(Luxury) travel PR is the one to get into. A big part of the job involves taking journalists on familiarisation visits to far flung exotic places. Plus, it's actually an interesting subject.
I used to work with someone who did the UK PR for Las Vegas, she had a fun job for a while.
Sorry for the massive post.
nah, it's a good 'un.
my first response to the reporting about the fox thing was pretty much 'oh aye, but where's the rest of the story...?'
the fox thing was astonishing idiocy
the way the media not only lapped it up but amplified it was the worst kind of cuntish obtuseness, the crassest pandering imaginable
and the worst thing is that none of them feel ashamed right now
so yeah, PR concoction perhaps, but someone's gotta pick up the ball for a buck
how so?
I didnt read any of it tbh.
I'm a bit confused too.
Are you saying it was completely made up or just that it was altered to be a fox by PR parties?
My initial thought was only that a family pet had done it and was being protected from being destroyed. Or that they'd done something truly stupid like tried to pick up a fox and this was their excuse for how it turned out.
wow, this is amazing.
Thanks!
I work in PR
The kind of job you end up doing will vary enormously depending on the type of clients you're working on, and the type of campaign. For example FMCG PR (e.g. Food and drink) can be very product focused - you could be organising an event for a load of trade journalists to tell them about a new loaf of bread, for example. Government PR is often about encouraging behavioural change, e.g. you could be encouraging local newspapers to write about the importance of getting a flu jab if you're over 70, to try and reach older people who should have them and who aren't being reached by traditional advertising. Or if you work in corporate communications, this could involve managing the announcement of your quarterly figures, briefing your spokesperson and taking them on the Today programme, for example. It is a mixed bag.
In my experience, working in PR consists of doing whatever you fucking feel like
And when a smart, professional member of the marketing team enquires how all the nonsense and bullshit you've come up with fits with the timing, strategy, messaging and identity of your organisation's carfeully mapped communications plan to just shout *COVERAGE! COVERAGE! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND PR!!!!* like a hyperventilating magpie
Heh
.. to misquote Game of Thrones, PR is a sword without a hilt.
It's much more difficult to measure than other forms of marketing and you can't control the message or the timing in the same way. But often the consequences of ignoring it can be dire.
I worked in Music PR for a bit
The industry is full of cunts who like shit music.
no but i've heard some stories
Surprised John Brainlove hasn't made an appearance.
I'm sure his job is in Music PR.