There has been much debate about whether to pay PR firms hourly or a flat fee per placement they secure for you. By charging hourly, PR firms leave themselves open to the temptation of padding their accounts. Padding does occur. Only a Pollyanna would argue otherwise. As an employee, if your job hinges on billing out x number of hours, there is a propensity to bill out x number of hours whether you worked those hours or not. And there’s plenty of pressure from the top to make the numbers. Any CEO or business owner will freely admit this. There seems to be something crossways about a system where the longer it takes you to do a job, the more you get paid. But that’s the way most PR firms, especially the Old Guard, have set up their business model. In instances where you can’t put a fixed price on the product, hourly billing makes sense. When it comes to using news stories as a marketing tool, it makes sense to pay per play.
As a rule of thumb, when PR is used as a marketing tool for selling product, companies should pay by the news story, not by the hour.
Oddly, many PR firms do their worst work when it comes to helping clients get news coverage. They arrange a piddly number of stories that are meant to sell, and instead focus on areas of PR like crisis management and community relations. The trouble stems from how PR firms approach the very idea of publicity. Most PR professionals see themselves as architects rather than carpenters. They dream of major national coverage where the media icons bathe their client in praise. To achieve this goal, they think through every possible scenario. This, of course, leads the client to a smorgasbord of time-consuming PR services. This planning and preparing is in stark contrast to the work it takes to actually secure the placements. Calling the media is where the rubber meets the road. It’s a job that takes grit, determination, follow through and the ability to shrug off rejection.
Unfortunately, for the client, this is where most PR “counselors” and “practitioners” fall short. They consider themselves too important to deal with some cub reporter who doesn’t give them the respect they feel they deserve. They learn to sidestep uncomfortable personal contact with the media by mass mailing press releases or by putting the releases on the wire services. The trouble is, most companies don’t have the top story of the day. Most are regular stories that become buried in a mountain of other regular stories. But to the firm that charges hourly, that doesn’t matter. They have already cashed in on hours and hours of preparation. In a sense, the client is on its own now from this point out. After all, is it really the PR firm’s fault if the client doesn’t have a product the media is interested in?
That’s not the case with pay per interview firms. They either get placements or they don’t get paid. The corporate culture this creates is entirely different than a company that is paid whether they achieve results or not. There is no tolerance for any work that doesn’t result in media coverage. This emerging culture is a refreshing change for many clients. No long lunches — just intense focus on generating news coverage.
The best way to secure media placements is to get on the phone and talk to reporters. What marketers should realize is that the media wants to work with them to bring good, interesting stories to the attention of the public. There is unlimited need for the kinds of product stories PR firms can bring to the table. If PR firms want to meet this need, they should embrace the idea of selling media space for a flat fee like ads. They should charge for results.
