A Hard Sell

In a scathing column, journalist Neil Shoebridge wrote that if marketers "knew how hard some [PR] firms work to pump up the billable hours they charge back to their clients ... they would fire them and sue to get their money back." In response the national president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia, Annabelle Warren, argued that the such practices would be in breach the ethics code. "Media relations requires consultants with strong experience and high level skills. Good marketers know that handling the media needs specialist public relations practitioners," she wrote. It is an argument that is unlikely to persuade Shoebridge, who suggested in his original column that PR firms are hired "because the PR industry has convinced the business world that dealing with the media is hard work. It is not: it requires honesty and responsiveness, qualities that are in short supply at most PR firms."