Public relations as 'art'? Surely not

The subject is being celebrated by the V&A museum, triggering some happy memories for this former PR man

Dj Taylor
Saturday 25 April 2015 19:00 BST
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Margaret Thatcher, with her director of publicity Sir Gordon Reece, who helped her and the Tory Party to victory  in 1979
Margaret Thatcher, with her director of publicity Sir Gordon Reece, who helped her and the Tory Party to victory in 1979

Definitions of “art” have been on an upward spiral since the days of the post-Impressionists, but even so I was taken aback to discover that the public relations industry is now the focus of a special event at the V&A.

Advertising, I assured myself, you could just about make a case for as a subject of wider cultural interest, with its cutting-edge artwork, its histrionic creative directors and the occasionally inspired juxtaposition of slogan with image, but surely not PR, with its free admission ticket to a landscape of hopeful press releases, corporate glad-handing and anodyne mailshots? What is the world coming to?

But no, there it is – “Always Print the Myth: PR and the Modern Age” which opened last week, continues until 9 May and was the subject of an extremely up-beat article in The Independent, by the V&A’s theatre and performance department head Geoffrey Marsh.

Here Mr Marsh claimed that PR is “a very creative process” and “evolving very fast”, that it is additionally “a sort of performance” and “responds to a basic human need for stories”. Guest speakers, ranging from Lord Bell, communications adviser to Margaret Thatcher, to Bob Geldof, will be on hand to guide audiences through the show while “explaining how PR has affected modern culture”.

It all sounds jolly exciting and I shall certainly go, while carrying with me the memory that the reputation of the PR industry when I started working in it was not, as Anthony Powell might have put it, outstandingly hot. It was at about this time, after all, that the publisher Anthony Blond, as he recalls in his wonderful industry compendium The Book Book (1985), repaired to the poolside at Antibes with Robert Mayall, Mitsubishi’s PR supremo and a former US army colonel, to block out a proposal for the latter’s exposé of the profession. Nothing, alas, survives of this enticing project save its title, The Mind-F***ers.

It can’t be said that there was very much mind-f***ing going on in the small West End firm at which I was installed as junior account executive in 1983. For a 22-year-old six months out of university it was the most glorious place to work, an oasis of lunching out (the spoof outfit whose adventures were chronicled in the trade journal PR Week was called “Wine, Dine and Billit”) trips to the wine bar and attempts to anatomise the attractions of the latest item produced by our major client, the Palitoy Company. The general attitude was one of cheery cynicism, coupled with occasional bewilderment over market trends, symbolised by the director who, on seeing the first box of Trivial Pursuit cards to arrive in the UK, murmured “Nice little game. Might do well at Christmas”.

As for general principles, there were none. Our clients produced consumer goods (there was none of the abstract “psycho-marketing” bent on changing people’s opinions on issues of the day) and we were there to help promote them, either by harassing newspaper editors to print stories about them or by hosting events at which their merits could be urged on opinion-forming guests. That this would frequently involve saying things that were possibly not true, or at best exaggerated, was more or less mitigated by the feeling that not only had livings to be earned, but that the whole thing was at heart a glorious game, in which you might very well be found out but in which half the fun lay in seeing how far you could go before the imposture was detected.

None of it, in other words, was serious, or if so only in its implications. On the other hand, to tread the corridors of the City of London, to which I transferred in the mid-1980s, was instantly to appreciate just how important a role PR fulfilled in the fiscal and political manoeuvrings of the late Thatcher era. Deregulation was just around the corner, along with privatisation; American money was moving eastward and the old family-run stockbroking firms were being swallowed up by investment banks. All this needed the right kind of publicity, brisk, purposeful and intent, and I can still remember the six different press releases I wrote in advance of the merger that created Ernst & Young, each reflecting a possible outcome of the partners’ vote and each, it goes without saying, relentlessly positive.

All this was definitely, to go back to Mr Marsh’s comments about the V&A talks, a kind of performance, and it may very well have responded to a basic human need for stories – certainly, the most widely circulated work of fiction for which I can claim authorship is Ernst & Young’s 1997 Report and Accounts – but at its heart lay a belief in the advantages of what can only be called reality softening. A City firm would agree to sponsor, at vast expense, an art exhibition and the PR department’s finest would find themselves hammering out a press release which, hilariously, claimed some connection between subject and sponsor (“Like Manet, we are innovators in our field”) while talking optimistically about its determination to put back into the community something of what it had taken out.

Bob Geldof will be on hand to guide audiences through the show while “explaining how PR has affected modern culture
Bob Geldof will be on hand to guide audiences through the show while “explaining how PR has affected modern culture

As to where this middleman or woman hails from (and most of the really effective PR executives I came across turned out to be female) and why he or she bulks so large in contemporary public life, there are probably two main explanations. The first is that it is simply a matter of strategy, in this case the extreme defensiveness manifested by most large companies and institutions in the 21st century built on a suspicion that they may very soon end up being accountable for shortcomings of whose existence they are not yet aware. The second, on the other hand, is a tribute to the extreme complexity of the environment in which most contemporary business and politics is framed.

No modern politician, for example, understands economic theory in the way that, say, Anthony Crosland or even Nigel Lawson understood it for the details are too complicated to be comprehended by someone who doesn’t spend 12 hours a day labouring in the research department at Deutsche Bank. Their task is merely that of the efficient generalist, to communicate broad conclusions in a way that the non-specialist can understand. It comes as no surprise to discover that David Cameron’s only non-political job was that of director of corporate affairs at Carlton Television or that Michael Gove worked on The Times newspaper, for, like most contemporary parliamentarians, they are essentially conduits rather than instigators.

At the same time there is a suspicion that the reality-softening business is even more complex than this. Interestingly, the V&A event coincides with the publication of Wasted: How misunderstanding young Britain threatens our future, by Georgia Gould, daughter of Tony Blair’s strategist Philip Gould, who died in 2011. According to Ms Gould today’s young people, though keen on Thatcherite self-reliance, realise that this is the age of the system not the hero, that in any area from finance to scientific exploration no individual is more powerful than the processes of which, however efficiently, they are a part.

Seen in this context the PR man becomes not, as he once was, a barker standing outside a metaphorical music hall, but a kind of shifty interface between huge blocks of undigested and quite possibly harmful information and the public at large. No wonder Lord Bell and his bright-eyed descendants need an exhibition entirely devoted to their art.

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