…I do know the importance of keeping it real! I’ve been in a number of meetings lately and it always surprises me when people commend the fact that what you see is what you get with Open Communications.
We’ve been going for nearly five years now (phew – where did that time go?) and we’ve always done the same. The business has evolved but our values have remained the same – if you want a PR agency that can do the job and do it well then our number is on the contact page, if however you want air kissing and champagne then we’re not for you.
It’s not that we aren’t friendly, far from it. I’d like to think that many of our clients have become friends over the years and that this has meant that we have genuinely long standing relationships, which mean we work as an extension of their teams – as if we were internal. This in turn makes it easier to provide honest advice that will help them to develop creative campaigns that meet with their objectives.
We’ve never been a PR agency that goes along with something we don’t believe in, we don’t say ‘yes’ to a contract because it’s there, we feel that being passionate about what we work on is really important and is another reason we are able to do a good job. Our accountant may not agree but there have been times when we have turned work down because although the contract would have been lucrative it didn’t fit with our values or we simply couldn’t see the campaign meeting with the clients expectations.
There has been a lot of news lately about the reputation that the PR industry has and I’ve always been very honest in that I feel many agencies offer the world and deliver very little. The unfortunate situation here is that brands have a bad experience with one agency and then never commission an agency again – and that’s not just the agency who handled the account badly in the first place, it’s any agency!
So for all those who want to work with an agency that DOES delivery and WILL work hard to achieve the results that have been promised, we are here and the kettle is on.
In all seriousness it shouldn’t be surprising to find a PR agency that is open, honest and willing to offer advice and guidance that makes sense. Until our industry realises that then ‘we’ will go on having a reputation that in some cases is very much undeserved.