It’s time for PR to stand up and be counted says Telefónica UK’s comms chief

Communicators finally have the opportunity to stand up and prove how great they are to company executives, Telefónica UK‘s director of corporate affairs Nicola Green said yesterday.

During a panel Q&A session at the London leg of the Cision World Tour, Green said new innovations mean PR professionals now have the opportunity to demonstrate the impact their work has on a company’s business objectives.

“When we can deliver against our business objectives then, I can guarantee, that’s the one time a board sits up and listens,” Green explained. “This is our opportunity – we’ve been waiting donkey’s years to get the board to realise how great comms is.”

Also, during the panel session, which Jason MacKenzie, CIPR president, chaired,  Lucy Hart, head of influence at Mischief, said she was seeing how clients were increasingly coming to the agency with bigger PR spend available as support for influencer marketing continued to rise.

She added that the role of communications is broadening to include elements of paid media.

“What I think probably needs to change is a little more flattening out of where those other disciplines belong,” said Hart. “We’ve started to do quite a lot of paid media as well to support the content we’re creating and I think more and more of that should be happening within the PR universe.”

She commented: “We have to loosen up a little bit and be willing to be more innovative and pushier and take our slice of the pie. Because what we do a brilliant job of is creating dialogue, conversations and creating content that people actually sit back and watch!”

MacKenzie agreed: “I think we need to stop being hung up on what we call what we do. You can call it influencer relations, you can call it PR, you can call it strategic communications. The client, or your boss, doesn’t care. They want results.”

• The Cision World Tour is a series of events exploring the future of communications with leaders and influencers in the industry. The next event takes place tomorrow (June 8) in Paris. You can follow the debate on Twitter via #CisionWorldTour.