The Flack Of All Trades

This Deadly Agency Type is a little harder to characterize – the type more often manifests itself in individuals than entire agencies. I’ve seen some agencies, however, especially smaller ones, build their entire business approach around the Flack Of All Trades mentality, as I’ll attempt to explain here.

Some of the best PR people are, almost by definition, good generalists – expert communicators who happen to have a reasonable amount of knowledge about many different areas of business and society.

At the very top of the game, there exists a small group of PR innovators whose experience extends well outside of pure flackery, and whose ability to understand and, more importantly, to guide macro-level corporate strategy, sets them far apart from the usual.

These rare individuals operate at the level of trusted business advisors to clients enlightened enough to understand their value. At best, truly strategic PR advisors can go far beyond crafting the publicized version of the corporate story – helping to actualize the strategic arc of the long-term narrative itself, as it’s played out day-to-day through the company’s vision and operations.

While it’s fair to describe these unusual professionals as generalists, in truth their level of insight makes them more like the PR world’s version of A.E. Van Vogt’s nexialists.

At a level some rungs below this, one finds a species of PR generalist whose chameleon veneer of talent exists in being able to know (or to learn) just enough to fake their way in just about any market sector. These are the Flacks Of All Trades (and the masters of none).

Heading into a new business pitch, these guys often approach things from the standpoint of “Let's win the business, then figure out how we'll service it.”

The client opportunity may be far outside their real area of experience and knowledge, but why should that hold them back? If the brand (or the budget) is big enough to be worth chasing, what does it matter that they’ve no expertise in the client’s specific market area? Busk it!

The Flack Of All Trades (FOAT) takes pride in having a short learning curve and an advanced set of Googling skills. Presented with a business opportunity with, say, a high-profile telecom company, the FOAT will invest hours in intensive online research, to learn as much as possible about the client, their products, markets, competitors, and issues.

This is, on the one hand, sensible pre-sales research. It’s the kind of thing any business development person would naturally do if they’re serious about tailoring a good pitch for the prospect.

The problem with the FOAT approach, though, is that the knowledge and vocabulary gained through this research may well be the only insight they have into the client’s space.

The FOAT excels at projecting themselves into the mindspace of the target client, tweaking and boosting the thinnest areas of their credentials to make it appear that they have a great deal more experience than they really have. If their bio reads “ten years’ expertise in pharmaceutical issues management”, it’s entirely possible they’re talking about their decade-long struggle with Ativan dependency.

Outside of résumé inflation, boasting sector expertise they don’t truly have, another characteristic of the FOAT is often revealed in the list of agency services they claim to provide.

Scores of agencies list areas such as crisis management, investor relations, employee communications, corporate philanthropy, event management, and media training among their range of services. In truth, very few agencies are big enough to offer real depth in all of these areas at once – and the ones that are big enough, are generally also smart enough to know better than to trumpet all these disparate proficiencies under one brand.

I’ve worked in a number of big companies and agencies where I’ve had direct or indirect responsibility for some of these areas (yes, I’m a bit of a FOAT in that respect). And I’ve learned enough to know that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Investor Relations, for example, is a truly specialised discipline. It is not just another branch of corporate communications. I had the benefit of seeing something of the craft at a public company, where the Director of IR reported into my office as VP Global Marketing. Clearly, what our immensely-talented head of IR did every day was completely unrelated to general PR.

Crisis management, again, requires a particular combination of level-headedness, sound instincts, common sense, candour, alacrity, strong relationships, and clarity of thought. It’s an area of the business that is not easily taught.

One can study the principles and case studies, spend a lot of time mapping out potential crises, planning response scenarios, and putting your client spokespeople through the wringer in intensive media training sessions. But until you’ve actually lived through a hot proxy battle, an environmental scare, a tainted product recall, or a plant closing, you’ll never know if you have what it takes to be a skilled crisis communicator.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to win a good-sized piece of business with a well-known company. The kind of trophy account any agency would be proud to have on its books. My relationship with the client’s head of PR was strong enough that he volunteered to show me the RFP submissions from the various firms who had competed for the business (borderline naughty, I know – but would you have said no?). We spent an afternoon chuckling over the monotonous uniformity of several of these proposals.

The client’s RFP document had included a section for bidders to provide information on the “additional agency services” they were able to provide. Every single firm, whether large or small, included a set of scarily similar boilerplate paragraphs, professing expertise in some or all of the areas I mentioned above. Two of the candidate firms’ responses were literally identical, apart from a little word-smithing here and there – even down to the same grammatical errors showing up in both proposals. (It's an incestuous business and people move around a lot. Sometimes, when they move agencies, "stuff" moves with them. That's just wrong.)

The point is, every single one of the agencies pitching for this piece of business appeared to present itself as a FOAT. When it came to the finalist presentations, the client remarked that it didn’t seem to matter what he asked some of the candidates – they would all confidently claim to be authorities on every facet of corporate communications. One of the reasons we won the business, apparently, was that we were rather more forthright about areas we considered outside our core expertise. We weren’t afraid to say: “no, we can’t do that.”

The Flack Of All Trades who can do a little bit of everything, can do a lot of harm when they stray into one of the areas where their purported expertise is at its thinnest. If your main need is for general, all round PR support – the FOAT may fit. But if you’re looking for deep expertise in a particular industry sector or service area, make sure you check out your agency’s case studies and references in detail. Can they really be both a floor wax and a dessert topping?

Part One: The Classic Sweatshop
Part Two: The One Trick Pony
Part Three: The Behemoth
Coming soon - Part Five: If It Moves, Bill It!