Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PR...

Start your short list of candidates close to home: poll your friends, colleagues, and business acquaintances for recommendations first. Then call the trade-press editors in your industry. Even the most jaundiced veterans will have a handful of PR people that they trust and work with regularly; ask for the names of three or four of the most accurate and professional. If your public-relations program is a smart one, you'll work the trades regularly; calling now gives you a head start, and name recognition when you send in a new application or product item.

Don't expect details from an initial agency interview; too many agencies have seen their ideas listened to, then passed on to the low-ball bidder. PR people won't get specific about implementation unless you're willing to pay for the extra time involved. What you should expect to get from the beginning is a strong concept -- an angle on your product or problem that is both true and fresh.

Be patient making your rounds. You're looking for creativity, and that can take time to find. Ron Bownds had to sit through a half-dozen presentations before he heard the angle that would give his Utopia bottled water a market position strong enough to earn space on the supermarket shelves. Agency after agency had suggested the predictable mix of supermarket sampling and a flurry of press releases to tout product quality, but Ellen Sterner of McCarter & Associates had a better idea. She invited reporters to spend a day with Bownds in the Texas hill country hamlet of Utopia itself, to have a look at the spring on his family farm that actually produced the water, and to hear firsthand how one former petroleum geologist kept his gumption during lean times in the oil patch.

Trooping through six different agencies was worth the effort. "I can get a higher price for my water now," Bownds says. "I could have acomplished the same thing if I'd blistered the market with TV or billboards, but I didn't have the $3 million that would have taken.''

2. Selection
Buyer beware

Few experiences are more heady than "the treatment," the selling strategy practiced first, and still practiced best, in a handful of the high-rise corridors of Manhattan. The atmosphere intoxicates: paneled halls filled with sleek young men wearing slim gold watches, stunning women radiating self-confidence, a conference room perched over Central Park, carpeting piled higher than your wingtips. Two vice-presidents make the pitch, talking of lunches at The Plaza, dropping names like glittering pearls, dazzling you with a multimedia display of rock music, flashing slide carousels, and promised greatness.

Caveat emptor. If the initial program seems incredibly detailed, it is probably a warmed-over version of what worked for someone else last year. If it sounds too good to be true, it is probably a loss leader to grab your advertising dollars. If the vice-presidents promise they can have the press eating out of your hand after one lunch at The Plaza, ask them if that's really their idea of sanitary restaurant behavior.

Forget the two vice-presidents, anyway -- you'll never see them again if you sign on, unless there's a crisis. Forget the view of Central Park; that's reserved for shearing the sheep. Your work will be handled down the hall by the agency's newest junior account executive, Bennington College class of '88.

That's not necessarily a bad thing; that junior account exec could be a corker, with just the right friends at "Entertainment Tonight." The point to remember is that public relations is a one-on-one art. You may sign with an agency, large or small, but you're hiring individuals.

Talk to the people you'll actually work with on projects; look at the work of which they're most proud. Is the copywriting clear? Have they targeted the right audience with the right message? Ask how long they have kept their clients, then call those clients directly.

Chemistry, as crucial as it may be, is not enough. When you talk, do your reps understand your markets? Do they routinely track the most appropriate trade or general media editorial calendars? Can they understand the message you want to give your customers, then refine it into a message that will get the attention of your targets? Most will press for a retainer -- the longer the better -- "to guarantee continuity.''

A retainer should guarantee better service than if you were a single-project transient, but make sure your agency doesn't consider it the equivalent of dues, a fee you pay for walking on those thick carpets. Will you pay more for additional tasks such as help with a Rotary Club speech or an employee newsletter? Does the retainer include incidentals, or will you be billed again for out-of-pocket costs? Are you billed for just time, or time and overhead, 85% confusion with a 15% charge? For most small co

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