In-house PR practitioners don't have it easy, in general. Sometimes they have to deal with a lack of understanding and appreciation for the work they do. (Did I say sometimes?) Sometimes they get recognized internally only when something goes wrong that needs to get fixed, now. Sometimes they're asked to wear so many hats and expected to be masters at media pitching, crisis management, Facebook, Twitter, speech writing, SEO and measurement dashboards that they run to webinars and conferences to boost their skills, only to be frozen by anxiety when they see how much they have to learn.
Sometimes these in-house PR practitioners—and their senior leaders—need to enlist a PR agency to combat and defeat all of this fatigue and anxiety. What an agency offers is not the brand and reputation of the agency itself—that's beside the point. It's the unique mix of skills and experience that an individual agency practitioner can offer that really matters.
In a recent issue of PR News' premium newsletter, Catherine Frymark, SVP, corporate communications for Discovery Communications, reflected on her time spent working for agencies before joining Discovery. "I don't regret one minute of starting my career in the agencies," said Frymark, who was honored as one PR News' Top Women in PR at a luncheon in New York in February. "In fact, when I am hiring I give a lot of weight to candidates with agency experience. I know they have the fundamentals. They can multitask and serve the client."
Frymark pointed out that working on a portfolio of brands keeps agency pros fresh. And that's the key selling point for brands and organizations that may be considering working with PR agencies. Agency pros are like the proverbial shark that Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer discusses in "Annie Hall." Alvy says that "a relationship is like a shark—it has to constantly move forward or it dies." If you work at a PR agency, to survive and grow you have no choice but to keep moving forward, from client to client, from skill to skill.
This brings to the in-house team—which may live their brand but may be lacking the outsider's perspective—a freshness that's very difficult to achieve inside the brand.
Follow Steve Goldstein: @SGoldsteinAI