In Selecting the Right PR Partner,How Much Should Size Matter?
This is not about sex, where the sizes of the most noticeable anatomical parts play an oversized role in attracting males and females to each other. Unfortunately, too often, this focus excludes the most important parts, which turn out to be not muscles, mammary glands, and waistlines, but hearts and brains. It’s those parts we ultimately fall in love with that keep us happily together.
No, this is not personal, but strictly business. It’s about selecting the right company to build or distribute your products, represent you in transactions or in courtrooms, and especially getting your message out far and wide so customers will know who you are and trust what you’re offering or selling.
As someone who has been in the public relations business for quite some time, it always intrigues me why clients select one PR firm over another and how size is a major factor in making that selection. In the battle for media attention, do you want a David or Goliath? Is size really all what matters?
Why are those lists called “rankings” so popular and influential? Rankings are fundamentally just reports of how much money firms make. Yet, is the airline with the most flights, largest staff and highest revenues really the best to fly on?
Is the law firm with the heaviest case load, most attorneys and largest fees always the best to retain?
And in my field, public relations, is it foolish to hire a relatively small firm and not a mega cap, a Goliath ranked the largest, one with the most accounts plus a vast army of publicists on their payroll?
My answer to those questions is this: the biggest and wealthiest aren’t always the best in every situation.
Do you want to brag you’ve retained Goliath where you’ll be the smallest cog in the giant’s wheelhouse or is it better to be represented by a masterful David with his unerring publicity slingshot aiming at just the right targets?
With a David, perhaps you’ll not have the largest, highest ranking PR firm, but probably you’ll have the best, most experienced, most talented and dedicated and the most passionately committed one working unceasingly on your account!
So, if you want to fly on the safest airline, retain the toughest law firm, hire the most proficient public relations, instead of checking rankings to see much they earn, interview them, check their history in handling issues, products like yours.
Rankings don’t show how passionate, how successful, resourceful or dedicated a PR firm is in making worthy causes triumph, deserving organizations flourish, or justice prevail. No, in rankings it's all about size and fees that matter.
What's missing is inspiration. Sure, we all have to make money, but PR must also inspire and do good, which is why I just created Planetary Lifeguard to blow the whistle on climate change. And wrote the book.
And then there are those groups and movements being ridiculed, oppressed and their books banned like the LGBTQ+ community whose major library STONEWALL we represent and we're fighting for its right to be treated justly and fairly in a democracy. While they pay us only a modest fee, it's the justice behind their cause that matters to us most.
And speaking of justice, TransMedia Group takes on causes it believes in sometimes for little or no fee at all, like our trying to free a black man from a Texas prison where he's been caged already over 22 years for a murder for which there is today evidence that Lamar Burks didn't commit.
No, we and other legal experts like Ignacio Estaban believe he was framed by a couple of corrupt DEA agents who are themselves now serving prison sentences. See the letter below that I recently wrote to the governor of Texas who just pardoned a white man who fatally shot a Black Lives Matter protestor.
Then there's Michael Mota, a hard-working entrepreneur from Rhode Island we're representing whom the Boston Globe has been "fixhated" on (a word we created btw) by having published what a lawsuit soon will be alleging were 17 flagrantly false and defamatory articles over a five-month period for whom we've found the perfect attorney to sue them, who happens to be Donald Trump's lawyer and his long-time friend, Peter Ticktin, as we're branding this another "witch hunt."
So, the largest, most profitable PR firms are not always the most clever, resourceful, well-meaning or highest ranked.
Anyway, I hope you'll excuse me as I just had to get this off my chest. Business, I guess, will always be business! Now read my letter to the gov and be well, my dear friend.
