One of our favorite industry blogs, the Bad Pitch Blog, recently addressed the topic of “friendship PR” and whether that type of client-agency relationship is still accepted in today’s economic climate – where everyone is focusing more on ROI.

Friendship PR is the type of business practice that can give PR a bad name – that all we do is shmooze and entertain our clients – and get media coverage on the side. The alternative to hiring an agency based on personality and their level of kiss-butt is hiring an agency who can meet a company’s business objectives and demonstrate a return on investment.

From the Bad Pitch Blog:
“Effective representation means challenging corporate assumptions, understanding media in all its disparate forms, and never, ever saying ‘yes’ just because it is easy.”

While BLASTmedia has great relationships with our clients and we consider our long term partners our friends, many of our clients never meet us in person before beginning a PR campaign. What does this say about us? It says that we are not being hired based on our looks, our access to the best restaurants or how many comp tickets we can get to the next hot concert. Rather, our clients partner with us because we show them proven results and we have laid out a clear path on how we will help meet their business objectives – whether that be traffic, sales or new retail partnerships. We re-evaluate where we are with those objectives every month and keep a strong pulse on how the business is developing through our efforts.

As the PR industry shifts along with the economy, we are confident that large companies will begin to look outside of the traditional large agencies who offer the fluff, and instead look to smaller, more niche agencies like BLAST who can deliver realities.