Alex Blyth

This week Campaign ran this article on its website:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/944244/Confessions-new-business-executive/

It’s a first-hand, confession-style account of one person’s experiences working at a new business agency. It’s an interesting article and has prompted a flurry of comments. However, I’m not convinced it was a good idea for Campaign to run it.

Let’s put to one side for a moment the issue of whether a leading trade mag like Campaign should really be the forum for a disgruntled employee to conduct this kind of poison pen revenge job – these articles are often very popular with readers who can recognise the scenario and identify with the writer. Let’s also accept that the cloak of anonymity was essential for the author to fully express his views. We can even refrain from pointing out that Tom Messenger’s writing would have benefited from the attention of a more vigorous copy editor.

The real problem with this article is that it doesn’t offer a portrayal of life in new business agencies that many people working in that industry today would recognise. Ten years ago there were quite a few a few disreputable agencies like the one described here. They were terrible places to work and they did little for their clients other than waste their time and money. However, the industry has matured. Most new business agencies are now thoroughly professional outfits, employing bright and hard-working people who use a tried and tested formula to provide good new business  leads for their clients.

The comments on Campaign’s website page make this point in no uncertain terms, and many of them raise the question of what Campaign was thinkng of running something as poorly researched and one-sided as this. There is, without doubt, a place for first person anonymous confession-style articles, but they  have to ring true with the readers. Before agreeing to publish them, the editorial team needs to speak to a few people in the industry – both clients and practitioners – to check that they recognise the scenario being portrayed.

Sadly it doesn’t look as though Campaign did this. I believe this is a reflection of the trend in so much journalism – away from properly-researched articles by capable and impartial journalists and towards sensationalist diatribes from amateurs with axes to grind. It does no one any favours, least of all the publication involved.

I was fortunate enough to be invited in to University College London yesterday as a guest lecturer on its Masters course in Technology Entrepreneurship – http://www.ucl.ac.uk/msi/prospective/postgraduate/technology-entrepreneurship/Programme_08-09.pdf

It’s a really well attended course and there were 45 students there to hear me talk about how PR can be the entrepreneur’s single most cost-effective marketing tool.

What’s more, many of them clearly took my message on board – by the time I returned to the office I had several e-mails waiting from students telling me all about the great products and companies they’re developing and wondering if I would be interested in writing about them.

Impressive and dynamic PR work from the entrepreneurs of tomorrow!

I always wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

I spent most of my childhood reading books, and I daydreamt my teenage years away picturing my future life as a writer – by night I would be masking a riot of hedonistic, but elegant, excess as all essential research, and then I would emerge at around midday to flamboyantly touch my pen to paper and effortlessly produce works that would leave readers gasping for breath at my ability to rake up raw emotions, to tear apart false arguments, and to cast light into the shadowy corners of ignorance. My only concern was whether turning up to pick up the Bookers and Pulitzers would start to eat into my party time.

Of course, life as writer is nothing like that in reality. OK, my nights are admittedly a riot of hedonistic, but elegant, excess. (Last night I even had a bag of dry roasted – well it’s nearly the weekend). But my working day is much harder work than I ever thought it would be.  I’ve discovered that writing isn’t just a matter of sitting down with a good cappuccino, firing up the laptop and sitting back as the bon mots come fizzing out of my fingers. In fact most of the time I struggle to think of any mots, let alone some bon ones. Most of my time isn’t even spent writing – it’s spent researching and planning what I’m going to write and then editing what I have written.

This is a revelation that I share with people on my writing courses (http://www.alex-blyth.co.uk/training.php) – writing is as much about planning and editing as it is about the act of writing. Most inexperienced writers make the twin mistakes of firstly diving straight into the actual act of writing without sufficient planning, and secondly not spending enough time editing their own work before declaring it complete. The result (unless you happen by chance to be a Byron or Hunter S. Thompson, both of whom not doubt had no need for such mundane activities as planning and editing) tends to be writing that lacks structure, flow and clarity.

So, one of the many pieces of advice I offer to anyone who wants to improve their writing is to spend a third of your time planning the piece, a third of the time writing it, and then the final third editing it. Taking this approach has the positive side-effect that you’ll spend a great deal less time staring at a blank page. I always assume that what I write will be bad on the first draft, but I know I’ll improve it on the second draft and by the time I’ve been through it three times someone might actually want to read it.

And I’m lucky enough that a few people do want to read the things I write, and so I get to do what I always dreamed of – earn a living as a writer. Admittedly it’s not exactly a spectacular living, and if I’m honest it barely pays for any hedonism at all (those nuts were a rare moment of reckless abandon) but I’m happy with it.

Mention Balham to most people – especially those old enough to remember Peter Sellers’s radio work – and they’ll gleefully respond with the phrase “Gateway to the South!” For the longest time there was little else to recommend the place. Bombed out of all recognition in the London Blitz, it’s now just a row of fairly unattractive low rent shops. All right it’s got a Waitrose. And it’s not far from Clapham. And it’s handy for the Northern Line. But having an easy means of escape is  hardly the highest praise that can be heaped on a place.

However, for those in the know there is now a very good reason to visit Balham. Tucked away on a side street, and very often ignored by those crawling between the pubs on the high street is the Balham Bowls Club. It was until a few years ago a functioning bowls club, frequented by distinguished gentlemen who no doubt muttered over their G&Ts about the raucous goings-on in the Be@One next door. And quite right too. Terrible place. Full of loud youngsters drinking brightly coloured cocktails. But then – as is often the way with places frequented by muttering old men – the tide of time overtook them and they found themselves having to sell their clubhouse. It was bought by someone who had the bright idea of turning it into a bar, and then the even brighter idea of not doing the usual strip-it-out-and-give-it-a-retro-refit but just leaving it as it is. So, all the old armchairs are there, the snooker room, the board listing past club presidents, the glasses that you remember from the 70s and wonder where they went to, the dusty portrait of the Queen, and best of all that oak-panelled sense of calm that you only ever get in places like that.

So, it’s a superb place for a couple of drinks of a Wednesday evening. And I was lucky enough to be there doing exactly that last night. I was even luckier to be doing it with one of the most charming and interesting PR executives I know. Which brings me away from ruminations on my local area and bars, and onto something closer to the alleged subject of this blog…..

We were discussing the many differences between working in-house and at an agency. She works in-house and has a great job that she loves. She had many good things to say about the agencies she worked at before going clientside. She even had some good things to say about the agencies who now work for her and pitch to her. But one thing neither she nor I could work out is why agencies insist on putting their most junior staff through the ordeal of calling up journalists and pitching stories to them. Very often this involves giving them fairly weak angles on unexciting stories, sitting them at a desk with a phone and telling them to get on with it. It rarely results in them placing a story, and more often results in them alienating the journalist, damaging the client brand and making the poor PR executive wish he or she was working somewhere else.

So, last night as we watched a large fluffy dog pad into the room and jump the queue at the bar to be served a bowl of fresh water, we agreed that the practice is rife and counter-productive in the long run (agencies making their junior staff do these ring-rounds, not dogs jumping queues in bars). She’d had to do it many times at the start of her career and had found it a largely embarassing and pointless exercise – she now builds long-term relationships with key journalists and phones them up when she’s got something genuinely interesting to discuss with them. I get a couple of calls a week from people who clearly don’t really understand what they’re pitching to me, and don’t really want to be doing it – I find it largely embarassing and pointless and would much prefer it if PR executives took the time to build a long-term relationship with me and called me when they have something interesting to say. I know that every other journalist would prefer that. I know that anyone who’s ever worked in a PR agency would prefer that. I know that clients would get more coverage and so would prefer it.

So, the question is this: why do agencies insist on putting their junior staff through this ordeal?