09 Apr Pace in PR: Destroying Creativity & Individual Thought?
Posted at 12:34h
in PR
For a while now there’s been a word in the PR lexicon that has been driving me ever-so-slightly mental. It’s a word that a former boss used to the point of tedium whereby it lost any sort of impact, and it cropped up again this week in Steve Earl’s otherwise excellent blog about PR departments of the future. The word is ‘pace’.
As Steve so eloquently sums up: “meeting the multitude of differing deadlines [of conventional and social media] can be like landing every plane in the world at Heathrow within the space of half an hour”. That, my friends, requires not only speed but supreme organisational skills. Ability and agility have to go hand-in-hand for today’s PRs, who not only need to keep on top of features planned perhaps months in advance but also be responsive to opportunities that arise with minimal lead times. The modern online media environment necessitates content generation and supply with virtually no notice – and that is where ‘pace’ is a prerequisite part of the job.
My issue with pace is not borne from contemporary media, and I’m certainly not bemoaning the fact that us communications professionals need to be on-the-ball and ready to respond at a moment’s notice. The dynamism is what I love about the industry and about digital media in particular. What does concern me, however, is that we’re losing the ability to step back and to think strategically. It worries me that individuals who take the time to sit and think can be frowned upon for not being ‘pacy’ enough. And I fear that rather than being accepted for what they are, the short deadlines of today’s media are being taken as a sign by some of the CEOs and MDs of communications agencies that every single action is time-sensitive and that every single piece of work must be completed double-quick. The word ‘urgent’ is becoming meaningless because everything is urgent.
This mindset creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where deadlines continue to get shorter and demands continue to get higher. It’s a downward spiral where creativity suffers and individualism becomes weaker. And all in favour of speed. Personally, I applaud those bosses who actively encourage their staff to take time out to think and not to interrogate timesheets to the point where any two hour free slot is filled with writing press releases or calling journalists. And when I say ‘actively’, what I don’t mean is simply paying lip service to the idea of time to think.
So how about it? How about we drop the over-reliance on speed, encourage space and freedom to think creatively and strategically, and consign the word pace to the same bin as posting press releases?
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