A young PR freelancer, whose first potential client only wanted to pay her by results (PBR), instigated a lively debate on LinkedIn last week when she asked for advice. The overwhelming response was “no”, suggesting instead a mixture of retainer and bonuses for results pre-agreed. Others on the client side said they only pay for PR by results – no retainer, just a sort of commission based on sales into publications. I’ll come to their rationale in a moment.
PBR also implies that PR is just press relations and not a wider, more strategic part of the marketing mix. See http://craigpearce.info/ for an excellent overview of what PR should be about.
As someone who has worked on both sides, for agencies and in-house, we have the smallest part of a company’s total marketing and sales budget but are expected to provide the most measurement. RoI is important, I agree; however, spending so much time on measurement often stops work being done.
This constant criticism and nit-picking of PR worries me. It’s been going on for years.
Compare the profession of PR to accountants and solicitors: we all offer intellectual capital in addition to tactical implementation.
Perhaps we should also compare ourselves to advertising agencies – again, intellectual capital, creativity plus definition and understanding of our audiences.
However, I’ve never heard of an ad agency only being paid by results, nor any such debate. After all, if an advertising campaign costing many thousands, even millions, of ££s doesn’t bring in expected sales, the agency is still paid, isn’t it? Yes, the space is paid for and the ad appears – but no guarantee of results, just like PR.
Clients using PBR say this makes the agency more creative and focuses minds. But what about the counsel, strategy and planning that goes into a good PR campaign – how is that paid for? Ad agencies, accountants and solicitors are paid for their time in understanding the client and their challenges or issues.
I would suggest that if they are working with an agency that doesn’t constantly come up with new ideas or challenges the client, irrespective of payment method, this is an agency not worth having. It’s about results. Good ideas will get results; so will pure hard work. And sometimes neither will get a result. What is needed is the right mixture of creativity and graft.
Finally, a word about the journalists, because we are really discussing media relations here. I find it incredibly difficult to imagine that a journalist with any integrity (or a strict editor!) would guarantee that an article, interview or press release will definitely appear. The only way this would be the case is if the title is owned by the journalist or if it’s a standalone web-based publication. And we haven’t even discussed tone – what if it’s a negative piece? No payment?
So, will it be quantity or quality? We can get masses of on-line coverage, but is it what we should be getting? If the client wants the FT, how can we guarantee this in order to get paid? The pressure on executives must be enormous. If it’s a good agency or freelancer, achievable, realistic objectives will have already been set.

- Grazia Valentino-Bosch, director of Really Global PR & Corporate Communications.