DJ Taylor: Micro-publicist Danny Pugh never makes very much money from his calling

(Silje Eirin Aure)

It is always instructive to hear 27-year-old, shaven-headed, goatee-sporting Danny Pugh talk about his job, for he does so in an engagingly messianic way.

Public relations has changed, you see, since the days when people sat in West End offices trying to get pictures of expensive waistcoats into colour magazines; it is faster, more responsive, more media-savvy, more focused on the "micro-communities" whose take-up is necessary to shift products in the modern age. Danny's "hub" – a somewhat cramped three feet of desk space – can be found in the Dalston flat he shares with four others. Facebook is more important to him than tabloid features desks.

And what items, friends will sometimes enquire, does Danny actually promote? Just now, he is working on a new brand of highly exclusive white rum whose manufacturers are anxious to get it into a dozen or so upmarket watering holes – a task that involves the creation, and then abandonment, of hundreds of fake Twitter accounts. Last month, it was a campaign for a kind of scrunchie used to mould or otherwise constrain the newly fashionable "man bun". Happily, a sympathetic broadsheet journalist was on hand, and the resulting article, as Danny was able to assure his client, realised no fewer than 414 comments on the paper's website.

A fraught life, this, requiring early starts, late nights, constant surveillance of the shifting tides of social media, and an ear for the latest jargon. Danny doesn't, for example, talk about "endorsements" any more. No, he wants the perfumes or the designer shoelaces he promotes "authenticated" or even "valorised". And no one mentions target markets, not now the Dalston lofts have found out about "demographic intersections".

Unsophisticated people, Danny's older relatives among them, sometimes assume that all this is a poor reward for someone of his undoubted drive and talent, and that his London Business School MBA could have been put to better use. Certainly Danny never makes very much money from his calling – £20,000 a year is his average return – but it would be wrong to imagine him dissatisfied. For, as he reminds himself – looking round the flat, where, such is the paucity of space that the press releases sometimes tumble into the cat litter – this, indisputably, is the future.