Alex Blyth

Last night B2B Marketing held its annual awards ceremony. B2B marketers from far and wide assembled at the Honourable Artillery Company in London to hear Frankie Boyle’s unrepeatable jokes, to see Man Bites Dog and Eulogy pick up the PR awards, and to party the night away.

It was a celebration not only of the achievements of B2B marketers in the past year, but also of the success Joel Harrison and James Farmer have had in establishing the B2B Marketing brand. As the recent closure of Revolution and Media Week have shown, maintaining an established publication is hard work at the moment; starting one from scratch is almost impossible.

It begs the question – is B2B Marketing an isolated success or is there really a future in business publishing?

Without doubt it’s not only Haymarket that this is suffering at the moment. Profits there fell to £4.5m in 2008 from £8m in 2007, but compare this to the performance of its competitors:

In 2008 NatMags lost £42.8m.
RBI’s profits fell 47% in the first half of 2009.
UBM’s fell by more than a quarter in the same period.
And Centaur’s profits fell year-on-year by a shocking 88% to just £1.7m.

The problem is not only that those B2B marketers who were partying away last night are increasingly reluctant to spend on advertising, it is that the buyers they want to reach aren’t reading those magazines any more. Even the publishers that have had the foresight to set up good online versions are struggling to attract advertising to them, simply because advertisers aren’t convinced that their target audience is reading them.

I wasn’t at the B2B Marketing Awards, but I know what happened on them through Twitter. I don’t need a news journalist to tell me what happened – Tweetdeck did it all for me. I don’t even need a feature writer to analyse what the result mean – there’ll be a blog written somewhere that’ll give me a view on it.

Or is that really the case?

Can I really trust the blog I read? Did Tweetdeck show me all the important results, or just those tweeted by attendees? Perhaps I’d rather read the impartial opinion of someone who’s paid to fully research the facts and then present them comprehensively and eloquently. In other words, a good journalist writing for a publication I trust.

Not all business publishers are suffering from dwindling profits. For the year to March 2009 profits at The Economist Group were up year-on-year by 26%. This despite the fact that The Economist’s philosophy of unfettered free markets was widely discredited in the wake of the credit crunch. The Economist is succeeding because it has a clear target audience, and because it pays the best journalists good money to produce well-written, fully-researched news and analysis. Whenever I read it I’m struck firstly by how little I agree with what they write, but secondly by how well written it is.

Sad though it is to say, Media Week and Revolution lacked differentiation in a cluttered market. B2B Marketing is succeeding because it has carved out a clear niche. And long may it continue to do so.

Here is the text of a talk I gave last Thursday evening to my Toastmaster club – London Corinthians. Let me know your thoughts….

(NB. All characters are entirely fictional, apart from my Dad who is entirely real, but would never be that rude about the leader of the Conservative Party)

Everywhere I go people tell me that the English language is dying.

I was in the pub the other day with my mate Dave who was incensed by the careless way people use apostrophes (I know – I really should get myself some more interesting mates).

“I was driving past B&Q the other day,” he said. “And they were offering to sell me BBQ’s WITH an apostrophe. Everywhere you look people are throwing in these apostrophes – CD’s, 1980’s. It’s even on proper road signs now!”

“Road signs?” I asked.

“Yes! I was driving down to Somerset last weekend. I was relaxing and enjoying the country views, when I drove past a sign telling me this road was unsuitable for HGV’s. There’s no apostrophe in there. Is there?!”

“No,” I said, nodding vigorously. “Certainly not.”

“Well why do they keep putting them in there?”

“I don’t know,” I said, before quickly finishing my pint and heading home.

But before I got home I had to pop into the supermarket to pick up some bits. I joined the nine items or less queue, and as I stood there wondering whether or not Dave was right and the English language is indeed going to Hell in a handcart, someone tapped me on the shoulder.

It was an elderly lady. “Have you seen that sign?” She pointed at the sign above the till.

“Yes I have,” I said, and politely pointed out that I only had three items.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “But it’s wrong isn’t it? The sign. It says ‘less than nine items’. Anyone with half a brain knows it should be ‘fewer than nine items’.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course it should.” Before I was summoned to the till.

Back home there were yet more people brimming over with rage at the deterioration of our language. Mum and Dad were staying for a few days.

“Look at this,” shouted my Dad as soon as I put my head round the living room door. He was pointing at the TV where he was watching the news.

“What? What’s happened?” I asked, immediately worried that something terrible had happened.

“This Cameron fellow,” said my Dad. “He’s an absolute imbecile.”

I looked at the TV to see the Leader of the Opposition grinning in full interview mode.

“Agreed,” I said. “What’s he done now?”

“He keeps on telling me I know what he means. Y’know. Y’know. Y’know. That’s all he says! Well I don’t know, do I? If I did know why would I be sat here listening to him give this ruddy interview?!”

You see what I mean?

Everywhere I turn there are people telling me that the English language is dying. And it is a worry, especially for me as a professional writer. If the English language dies then I’m out of a job!

And that’s part of the reason I love coming to Toastmasters. Here I’m amongst fellow language lovers.

There was a fellow at my last Toastmaster club – Manchester Orators – who was especially keen on preserving the language. Stephen was a superb speaker, a very successful businessman, and an all round good egg. I remember him giving a speech in which he told us of the day his daughter came home from university with some rather dramatic news.

“Dad,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you. It’s important.”

“Well,” said Stephen. “You’d better come into my study then.”

“Dad, it’s this,” she said, obviously nervous. “I’m…I’m gonna have a baby.”

Stephen recoiled in shock and horror. For some time he didn’t know what to say. His daughter waited for him to collect his thoughts. Eventually he said: “You’re my daughter. I love you. Over the past 20 years I’ve paid for you to have the finest upbringing possible. You’ve gone to the best schools, you’re at one of the greatest universities in the world, and still you come here, and you have the nerve to say to me that ‘you’re GONNA’. You mean ‘you’re going to’!”

So, what lies behind all this?

Well, I recently found this rather revealing quote. It was in a book called ‘Attitudes toward English Teaching’, and the authors had spent a long time observing the teaching of English in schools. They concluded:

“Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates.”

Again, in his “Methods of Study in English” MW Smith said: The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.”

I’m sure that many of these people who keep telling me that English is dying would agree with that statement. The only problem is that that the first book was written 1961. The second in 1885!

Look into it more closely and you’ll find that every generation throughout history has complained about declining standards of English. People were even complaining about declining standards of English as far back as ancient Sumeria. Among the first of the clay tablets discovered was one written by a teacher in which he complains about the sudden drop-off in students’ writing ability.

The point is of course that language changes. What was important in language 30 years ago is less so now. And what is important today will be less so in 30 years time.

So, while we should all try to uphold standards and communicate as precisely as we can, we shouldn’t lose too much sleep about it. In my view, rumours of the death of the English language have been very much exaggerated.

Old Labour stalwart Tony Benn was famous for his insistent focus on the issues. He never had any time for all the froth and hype around personalities or the daily tittle tattle of gossip. Whether or not they agreed with his politics, almost all agreed that he was a serious player who was interested in really making a difference to the lives of those he represented.

Now this isn’t just a general ramble on twentieth century politicians. It has a point….

I thought about Tony Benn in a training session I was running yesterday for some bright and experienced agency PR folk. They had come from consumer backgrounds and were struggling to get coverage in the trade and business press. So, their HR Manager had called me in.

We looked through some of the press releases they were putting out. We talked about the problems they were having. It soon emerged that they were doing what many consumer PRs do when they turn their hands to B2B PR – they were issuing releases about product features, company news, and so on, and were “making it more B2B” by dressing it up in technical language and business-speak.

The problem of course is that trade and business journalists by and large aren’t interested in hearing about the success of company A. They aren’t interested in hearing about allegedly great new products from company B, the latest exciting new hire by company C, or yet another strategic alliance between companies X and Z. And they certainly aren’t interested in hearing about it when it’s described in technical language that the writer doesn’t really understand and then padded out with meaningless business-speak.

Yet this is what so many press releases contain. The examples I worked with yesterday were by no means the worst I’ve seen. The people I was working with are intelligent people who know how to write and who represent some of the UK’s largest consumer brands. They just weren’t nailing it for this particular market.

So, we talked about what trade and business journalists do want. They want press releases that are clearly written, where it’s easy to quickly grasp the story (that doesn’t by the way mean jamming it all into the opening paragraph). And they want the issues. They want to know what this news means for their readers, what trends it reveals about the market, what broader lessons can be drawn from this experience. We talked about how to frame press releases in those terms so that they also promote their clients. We looked at how to apply this theory to their press releases.

It was a fun session. I always enjoy working with clever people who just need a few tweaks to start looking at their work in an entirely fresh way – there’s always that moment where you can see in their eyes that they’ve got it.

And what’s more it reminded me of Tony Benn and his insistence on the issues. As I made my way home I remembered the time, more than 15 years ago, when I saw him speak. Leaning on the lecturer’s podium, hundreds of rapt eyes focused on him, he shook his pipe at us, a twinkle in his eye, and told us that we should “never get distracted, always focus on the issues, the issues”. He was absolutely right, and he’s still absolutely right – because of course he’s still very much with us – it is the issues that matter.

This is one that no PR will ever admit to doing. Ever PR knows they shouldn’t do it, and every PR, if asked, will vociferously deny falling into this trap. And yet so many do, because it’s really, really hard to avoid.

It is “Writing like a PR, not a real person”.

What do I mean by this? Partly I mean the effusive descriptions of products, clients and events – “a fantastic new product”, “a client you’ll absolutely love”, or “a once in a lifetime event”. But I also mean the vague description of topics that the PR doesn’t really understand – this is where empty phrases creep in, phrases like “user-centred design”, “self-service online application”, “market leading service provider” and so on and on and on.

But that’s not all. I also mean press releases, pitches, even incidental e-mails that are written in an overly formal style. They’re intended to sound professional and capable, but can very easily end up sounding stuffy, cold and convoluted.

Now, I think journalists can be a bit hard on PRs with all this. They forget that most PRs are working hard to remove all this hyperbole from press releases, but are fighting against marketing departments who have no idea what it takes to get media coverage. They forget that most PRs operate under terrific time pressure, and cannot ever hope to be experts on everything they need to be.  They also forget that to many more junior PRs a journalist is a genuninely intimidating figure, and so it’s no surprise that those twenty-somethings fall back on stiff formality for fear of appearing unprofessional.

Most of all though those journalists forget that PRs aren’t professioanl writers. Journalists can be terrible writing snobs and, when they sneer at the poorly written communications from PRs, they’re forgetting that PRs are paid as much for their interpersonal skills, their media planning abilities, and their creative spark as they are for their ability to express themselves fluently in writing.

Of course the very best PRs do learn how to write brilliantly. They learn all the rules, all the tricks and tips, and they ensure that their ideas and expertise comes across as well on page or screen as they do in person. Sadly though most PRs never admit that they’re not experts in this area, and so they never do anything about it……