Do your own dirty work

Second only to the ring-round in the PRs' shitlist of jobs they just don’t want to do is the media audit. They have to do them though because their boss tells them to because either a) they’re after a new contract or b) they’re trying to hang onto an existing one.

Taking each of the above scenarios in turn:

A) If you want to win some new business by impressing the firm with your exhaustive knowledge of them, do your own research. If you want to show them what a rubbish job their current agency is doing, don’t bother, they’re looking for a new agency so they already know how crap their current bunch are. Do not rely on the sketchy knowledge of your average trade hack, who will almost certainly be working on something else with a deadline fast approaching.

B) If your client is trying to gauge how much of an impact they’re making on the world stage, then they’re almost certainly not making much of an impact.

When I was very new to the game, I'd never heard of media audits. They didn’t crop up as a module on the environmental engineering degree I took. I’d gladly take calls and feel no shame letting PRs know that I knew nothing of their client or their field of interest. As I matured I started to dread the media audit, thinking somehow that my lack of knowledge was a cause for embarrassment. After a while I became numb to the embarrassment. Frankly, not only did I not care that I didn’t know about obscure tech firms, I was quite proud of the fact. I was pleased that the marketing of the firm to date had absolutely no effect upon me, and I wasn’t afraid to let PRs know it. These days I just say that media audits are against company policy.

I got a letter this morning from one firm informing me that as a valued member of the media my views were sought. I was informed that a market research firm would be calling any day now and that the call would only take 45 minutes.

Forty five minutes! You’ll be lucky to get four to five seconds love.