S2 E5 RTO or WFH with Mary Hickey & Rich Leigh

We are joined by Mary Hickey, Senior Digital PR Manager at North and Rich Leigh, Founder and CEO of Radioactive PR.

The episode dives into the ongoing debate about remote work versus in-office work, particularly in the context of the post-pandemic world. Rich shares insights from his agency’s recent shift to a hybrid model, where employees work in the office Monday to Thursday and have the option to work from home on Fridays. He emphasises the importance of collaboration and creativity that comes from being physically together, especially for training and development of junior staff.

Mary, on the other hand, provides a contrasting perspective as a remote worker at North, where she enjoys the autonomy and flexibility that remote work offers. She highlights how her agency fosters a strong team culture, even with remote employees, and the importance of making an effort to engage with colleagues.

Throughout the episode, we explore the pros and cons of different working arrangements, the impact on creativity and collaboration, and the challenges of retaining talent in a competitive market.

Have a listen or read the AI transcript below – enjoy!

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Louise Parker:
Hello and welcome to the Digital PR Podcast with me, Louise Parker, and my lovely co-host, Steve Baker. Due to intense popular demand, we are back for a second season and we will be again chatting to some of the digital PR greats, discussing the ins and outs of our industry. This season, we’ll be touching on topics like crisis comms, freelancing, the great office debate, digital PR in America, and we’ll also be getting the perspectives of in-house clients and journalists on what they really think about digital PRs. Excitingly, this season we also have a sponsor! All six episodes are sponsored by our friends at Coveragebook. We all use Coveragebook in the Propellernet team, and so do agencies and brands all over the world. It’s an amazing tool that creates PR reports in minutes, drastically reducing the time that would typically be spent on reporting. Steve, would you like to know a fun fact?

Stephen Baker:
Yes, please.

Louise Parker:
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Stephen Baker:
For the first time ever, we’re excited to be joined by not one, but two guests. Firstly, Mary Olivia Hickey, Senior Digital PR Manager at North, and also Rich Leigh, Founder and CEO at Radioactive PR. We’ll be chatting to them both about what they think is best for digital PR, the office, working from home, or a hybrid of the two, a topic that generates a lot of discussion online. But before we get into that, let’s ask them to introduce themselves. Welcome both. Let’s start with you, Mary, if you could give a bit of an introduction into your background, your career and what you’re up to at the moment, please.

Mary Hickey:
Sure. Firstly, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. So I’m currently a Senior Digital PR Manager at North. They’re a Newcastle-based agency, but I work remotely. I’ve worked in PR, I was actually checking my LinkedIn for over 10 years now, which is pretty wild. I’ve worked in both traditional PR, in-house, and for the last five years, sort of agency side with a focus on digital marketing and digital PR. My main role at North is working in the senior team on our digital PR offering. We’ve got some really exciting clients at North, mainly in e-commerce, but food, retail, those sort of areas. Managing the team, who are great. doing amazing creative campaigns, working closely with the content team and just sort of thinking about the next, you know, month, few months ahead. That’s mainly what the senior team do. We’re always looking ahead and predicting what’s going to come up next. But yeah, absolutely love it here at Knorr.

Stephen Baker:
Thank you, Mary. Great introduction and thanks again for joining. Now over to you, Rich. Thanks for joining. Welcome. Give us a bit of an intro to yourself

Rich Leigh:
Thank you very much. Likewise, very, very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So richly, I’ve worked in PR for 15 years now, getting on for Christ 16. I started radioactive in 2014. So I was 27 at the time. And we have gone through various. So when I came into PR, actually, I should say 2008, it was a recession. And then thank you very much, the economy, they blessed us with a pandemic and everything that came since. So radioactive PR has been in good times market-wise, stressful times market-wise, and everything in between. And I guess more broadly, consumer PR mainly. I started in PR, as I say, 2008 with an agency called 10 Yetis. And I was the first employee at 10 Yetis. We owned digital PR. It wasn’t called that then. It was PR for SEO. It was link building. It was earning editorial links. We ranked page one number one for PR agency, public relations agency, and that wasn’t by accident. We did an awful lot around it, and it was almost a secret weapon for clients. We’d go in with a traditional response to a brief, and then we would take that and say, and we can get you links. And when we get you those links, it will help you with site visibility. And this is this sets this almost it was like a secret weapon, as I say. And then in the last few years, obviously, there’s been this, you know, bubble up of digital PR. And it was fantastic for us until everything started falling over, I guess, a few years ago, which is all good fun. So we got to about 25. As an agency, you know, not big, not small, you know, interesting from a management perspective. And I guess around that, I’ve always been quite nosy in the industry. I created PR Examples, which I sold a few years later as Now Famous Campaigns. It became the UK’s number one PR blog. I love stunts, creative campaigns, that sort of thing. And I also wrote a book called Myths of PR, which became the number one best-selling book in PR. And I just like to tinker. I like to create and like to have fun in and around the industry. I’m a bit of a knobhead, really.

Louise Parker:
way to finish the intro off. Actually, I should say, Andy Barr has been a guest on our podcast, and depending on the order of podcasts, either has already been up or is coming up. So yes, he did go through the details of the beginnings of digital PR, and it was very, very interesting. But for this episode, we are talking about the situation in terms of where you work from. Are you working from home? Are you working hybrid? Are you going into the office? I think it would be helpful just to lay out for both of you guys and the agencies you’re at or you own, what’s the situation where you are and how did you get to it? Because obviously during COVID, there was only one option and it was working remotely. So, Rich, would you mind just giving us an idea of what your kind of policy is currently and how you got to it?

Rich Leigh:
Sure thing. So in the last month, we’ve gone back to a Monday to Thursday, 9 to 5.30 in the office, Friday working from home.

Louise Parker:
And is that something that gradually happened since going from COVID when you obviously had to be at home? Or is it something that as soon as you could go back into office, it was like, right, we’re going back?

Rich Leigh:
No, it wasn’t. It was in response to making up as we go along, I think is the truth, and recognising the needs of employees, but also the needs of the business, recognising profitability, recognising the marketplace we operate in. And when I say that, I mean, it’s not been roses. We’ve got agencies, we’ve got big agencies, respected agencies, in and around digital PR, in and around traditional PR, if we want to define the two. They have struggled. There was a PR Week survey that said that 15% of agencies have either made redundancies or are making redundancies. We’ve seen big redundancy programs from the likes of Zeno and Edelman, the world’s biggest PR agency. We’re in a tricky spot. And particularly, I’ve written quite a lot around digital PR. I’ve been, as I say, working in and around it for 15 years. And I’d like to think that I know the space as well as anyone. This move towards multi-agency, throw some meat in the middle of a gladiatorial pit and watch you fight to the death for ever less meat each month and ever higher link report or KPIs, it’s not a fun one. It’s creatively lacking and it’s not been a lot of fun as an agency owner to participate in. And how does that tie with this? Well, I think I had to take a step back and think, why did I start this agency nine years ago? And what did it used to be like? And then what is it like now? Did I want to run an agency where our whole team, and I come from a sporting background where you are together, you know, you have got your arms around each other, you do work for and with each other. Did I want to run an agency where we are all remote? where we can’t learn and grow together, where we can’t socialize as well as, you know, unless it’s in an incredibly prescribed prison-like way, you know, where at this time you go to the hall and you have fun, or you go on Zoom and you have fun. And I just thought, okay, we’re out of the mandatory need to work from home. And I Again, it’s just what kind of agency do I want to run? I know when it was profitable I know when we were doing well and the game all I can ever speak to just like it’s on 2018 I think it was 2017 2018. I went to a four-day workweek When the first companies in the country to do it, it was a big risk to go four days a week for five days pay And we got a ton of coverage around it. And what’s funny, working in PR, everybody says, oh, you know, you did that for the PR. I promise you, there are so many more ways that we could get coverage and so many less stressful ways than doing that. But I would do it again, but for COVID and for everything that came with it. So I got to the stage in the last month, six weeks where I thought, you know what, I want to bring us all back together. And not everybody’s going to love that. I completely appreciate that. There’s horses for courses, there are agencies out there for everybody. But I can see from a marketplace perspective, I can see from an agency perspective, and also my health and happiness too. My team’s health and happiness is cool. I’ve had team members say that they absolutely hate being at home. They’re sharing desk space with three, four people there. They’re struggling to find their own time, their own space, especially people at an earlier stage in their career. And I thought, well, I know what I enjoyed when I was running an agency. I did not enjoy running an agency completely remote. Hybrid, of course, there are so many colours of hybrid, right? There are so many different flavours of it that you think, you know, there’s, again, not one such. We effectively, we work hybrid now. Yeah. You know, Monday to Thursday, plus a Friday at home. Pre-COVID would have been the most HR-friendly thing in the whole world. Yeah. And I get that that’s not the world that we live in now, but I can only come to this and say we have to do what works for us. We have to do from a margin perspective what works for us. And I almost think I can look a client in the eye and tell them 100% we are better when we are together than we are when we are not together. I know for a fact I can do that.

Louise Parker:
On the flip side, Mary, obviously, I would like to stress this isn’t a which one is better argument debate that we’re doing in this podcast. It’s just getting two differing opinions. And also, it’s quite interesting that we have an agency owner and an employee as well, like to have a different perspective as well. So I guess on our flip side, Mary, would you like to chat about your working situation and how your agency got there?

Mary Hickey:
So I’ve worked at North for, it’ll be two years in November. So I got the job when we were kind of coming out of the end of the pandemic. So I am, I’m on a remote contract. So I live in Sheffield and the office is in Newcastle. So it’s just about two hours on the train. There’s not any sort of legalities in my contract but it’s really encouraged for any remote workers to attend the office at least quarterly. I tend to go up once a month and I absolutely love spending time with the team. You know as a remote worker I’m really lucky that sort of my travel and expenses and accommodation are paid for by the company when I come up so you know that’s not a huge expense or a huge stress and I’m not put off coming to the office because of that. As we know train prices are quite expensive in the UK at the moment. So I go up, I tend to go back once a month for two days and I absolutely love that time. I usually have a team meeting that day. I get together with the team but as I say primarily I’m remote. It works really well for me. I also get when I was at the start of my career I was like Miss Queen of the Commute. So I worked the majority of the start of my career back in the day down in London and lived in Essex commuted to London. I don’t know if anyone knows the the old famous commute into Liverpool Street commute because it’s at the Wild West. So I did that for years and then when I moved back home I got a job at a Leighds based agency. So you know about an hour up the motorway but I’ve worked out I basically probably spent about two hours commuting and I was at that agency when the pandemic happened. I actually went into lockdown a week before the rest of many of the country because i was pregnant and i don’t know if everyone remembers Chris witty standing on that podium saying if you’re pregnant stay inside or the worst thing in the world happened so i actually went into lockdown um a bit earlier so yeah i’ve been remote now for a number of of years for me it works really really well but the agency in north and there’s loads of people who are in the office. So we’re not a completely remote agency. I know there are some out there, but we have a fantastic office in Newcastle that a lot of the team go to. Tends to be sort of Tuesday to Thursday. And in my team as a whole, I’d say literally 90% are Newcastle based are going to the office. And then there’s sort of 10%, there’s a couple of remote workers. But one of the biggest things I always get asked about remote working. For me, it’s 80% has got to come from the employee who is remote. So North is amazing at making remote workers feel a part of the team. There’s really good technology for calls and for training. If you’re remote on team days, when they average lunch, you can get £10 back from the agency to buy your own lunch. You know, there’s a budget towards office equipment. There’s all those sort of things, which is great. But for me, it’s I really make sure that I make an effort to engage with the team. I’m an extrovert, which most people know about me. I’m very extrovert. But I make sure that comes across on Slack and in calls. And when I’m in the office, I will be that person that goes round desk bombing, talking to everyone, making sure I’m engaged with the people team, the affiliate team who sort of sit opposite us. That’s really what you’ve got to do as a remote worker. that’s one of the reasons I think it works so well for me is because I do make quite a big effort. I’m probably more chatty when I’m remote than I would be in the office because I’d probably annoy everyone but yeah that’s me at the moment um fully remote. I can’t really imagine going back to an office And I should say that when I saw about two years ago, when I was at my old agency and my life changed, obviously, because I had a baby. He’s almost three now. I was living in Sheffield and I knew I didn’t want to commute to Leeds again. And at the time, this was pre Rise at Seven. So there wasn’t a lot going on in Sheffield in terms of digital PR agencies. I knew that with a small baby I didn’t want to be going up and down the motorway to Leeds and back or Manchester which were more thriving. I mean there were some agencies obviously in Sheffield but obviously Rise at Sevens really put them on the map but I was just felt a little bit conscious that there wasn’t really an agency for me at the time so that’s when I started looking outwards and found North who were just like the best agency and to me they still are the best agency so Yeah, it really worked for me and from what I’ve found so far, for me the positives massively outweigh the negatives in terms of personal reasons and also performance and how I work and the results I get and everything.

Louise Parker:
We’ll definitely be like pulling apart a load of different things that both of you just said because you touched on like so many different points that are really spoken about around well I want to say remote and office but as you I think both have pointed out you’re you are both hybrid you’re just different styles of hybrid with different kind of requirements and things like that but I think that’s probably a more accurate reflection of agencies at the moment rather than 100% office or 100% remote so I think it’s probably a realistic view of how agencies can act currently.

Stephen Baker:
Yes, yes. And yeah, thank you both for sharing that. I think for complete transparency at Propellernet, we have a work where you work best policy. So we have some people in the PR team or in the agency who are almost like fully remote and we’d encourage them, we do like anchor days. So like once a month meet as a team and like we’re trying to Rich, I think you mentioned this earlier, like every business is kind of just making, or business leader is making up as they go along and just trying to figure it out because we’ve had so much change. Interestingly, for me personally, it only hit me this week with this episode coming up as well. Because Mary, similar to you, I had a baby, my first, right at the start of the very first lockdown. And I was like fully remote, hated it, and then loved the hybrid thing. But I’ve found I’ve just started to come back into the office every single working day, just naturally. It’s actually quite strange. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I just sort of almost felt compelled to come. And it’s obviously what I prefer. It’s going to be different for everyone, but just for transparency, that’s how we do things at Propellernet. The next question though is, more around the sort of digital PR industry and agencies, or PR industry as a kind of whole, and it is wider than the PR industry, but it hasn’t escaped our attention that it feels like there’s a lot of discussion about this and more and more agencies are sort of trying to work it out and almost starting to say, hey, you’ve got to come back into the office for a certain amount of time, whether that’s a five day a week model as it used to be, or for a set amount of time. Do you think we will see, it’s going to vary agency to agency, but Do you think we will see more and more agencies do that? Do you think that’s just going to become commonplace as we get further and further away from the pandemic? Rich, let’s come to you first and get your view on it?

Rich Leigh:
I know for a fact it’s happening. Yeah, okay. It’s happening behind closed doors and people aren’t talking about it because it’s one of those things if you talk about it you are a dirty, dirty capitalist It only cares about using humans as resource. And you don’t care about people and their lives at home and what we’ve had to go through over the last few years. I can tell you five agencies right now that are bringing their teams back in more often than they’re not. Because for many, contracts didn’t change. And I think that’s the thing that we need to consider here. For many agencies, contracts didn’t change, just the way that we worked did. And I mean, even when we went from a five-day week to a four-day week, as I say, for five days pay, contracts didn’t change to reflect that. It was, I can only do this, I can only commit to this for as long as it’s okay for clients, for as long as it’s okay for us as an agency in profitability. So when I’m on the phone, legitimately on the phone to an agency, I would be crying because I have to let people go, saying the only way that I can make this work is by bringing people back in because we are better together, in his words. And again, this is somebody you don’t know. I know for a fact it’s happening and will continue to happen, again, to varying degrees. You just said there, I don’t know anybody that’s bringing people back in five days a week. So I think that’s something to talk about. But Zoom, Microsoft, big agencies are all bringing people, slowly but surely, back to the office. And I’m on every subreddit that speak anti-work and all those things, like everybody else is. And I’m on Twitter all the time, as everybody else is, or less so, obviously, recently. But you see it. And I think what’s happened in its it’s hard to talk about because again people it’s one of those topics you touch on it right at the top it’s a very controversial topic because it almost feels like it’s an us versus them employees versus employees again for me my team are my colleagues they’re not my you know they’re not my employees they’re my colleagues they you know we work together i i promise you i took less out of the business for the first five years than i paid anybody you know so that’s The commitment that employers make, and it’s particularly small businesses, and the majority of PR agencies are small businesses, are small to medium employers. So I think if we can just take a step back and realize that this is employers trying to do the best they can for the business to ensure that there are jobs for people to have, which again, 15% of agencies in the industry have made redundancies or will make redundancies in this last business year. So I think what’s happened in the last few years has been quite an employee-centric recruitment. I mean, you possibly felt it. We’re all senior here. I think that’s worth saying. Mary, you know, you’re 10 years in the industry. You know, I’m 15 years in. You know, Lou, I know you’re, you know, you’re probably about the same. It’s, you know, 20? Is it 20? No, but do you know what I mean? We’re speaking from a different perspective here to somebody that’s two years into the industry. And I’ve got to look after those people too. So, I think, to your point, will there be a move towards people coming back to the office? Yes, we’re already seeing it, whether you’re hearing about it or not.

Louise Parker:
It’s interesting you say like, oh, the response, and we will talk about that as well, but like, that it’s maybe the employers that are the ones saying it and the employees are like, grumbling about it. But actually, completely anecdotally, but like on my TikTok feed, and this is so different to even six months ago, I’m seeing more people, probably in their early 20s, talk about how they’re like, working from home is not working for me, I can’t wait to get back to the office, or I’m loving getting back to office, my routine, yada yada. So I’m starting to see the shift now in the employee part, which I think has happened obviously later than the employer part, but there’s definitely are people in there who have it as their preference.

Rich Leigh:
I think it’s been a balance hasn’t it? So I spoke on weird, this was actually quite a while ago, 18 months or so ago, I spoke on Five Live. And I was again put as the, you know, how do you feel about, basically, you say that we’re better together. And then I followed a man who was blind and really struggled to commute to, he said, actually, work from home’s been a God’s end for me. It’s been the best thing in the world. And then somebody had spoken before him, a 22, 23 year old recent grad working in marketing, I think it was, in advertising, saying that her home was a prison. She literally used the word prison. And then, you know, I come on and they say, so rich, you think that everybody should work together? And I said, Whoa, I was like, what? Like, don’t make me follow that guy and make me sound terrible. We’re all just working this out as we go along. And what we’re trying to do is the best client work we can do. I always say, I want to make money and I want to have fun doing it. Yeah. If we can do those two things, how do we do that? And we’ll get on to reasons that I might have made the choices that I’ve made. Again, nobody likes people that make decisions that ultimately they might not have made or that, you know, are big decisions. I think we are in a very interesting place in and around PR and, you know, let’s, let’s tack digital PR onto that as well. You know, we’re in a really interesting place and I think us and our seniority is, I mean, I did some, I was doing some research the other day. 80% of people earning 50 grand or more work from home or work hybrid. For people earning 30 to 40, half of people work from home or work hybrid. So basically the more you earn, the more likely you are to be working hybrid or at home completely. So when you’re right at the beginning of your career earning less, and let’s not forget as well, PR, we’re in a privileged position. We get paid money to do cool stuff, and I never forget it. I think I’m very, very fortunate to do what we do. The majority of the world, to many people in the UK, this is a very privileged position to be in and a very privileged conversation to be having.

Stephen Baker:
And you quite rightly point out that it’s kind of different. And that five live anecdote is great because it just shows it is different for everyone. Everyone’s coming at this from a different perspective. And at Propellernet, just the example that I’m living is that every single year since the pandemic, we’ve changed something. We’ve tried to tweak something. We’ve introduced unlimited holiday, which is a completely separate debate. We’ve sampled that. We’re trailing different things. We’ve got the anchor days. We’re trying to release budgets so people can meet more. But Some people don’t want to. Some people really do love working from home. Some people don’t. But Mary, you spoke very passionately and eloquently about your working from home experience, which works tremendously well for you. So I was keen to get your take as well on where you think the digital PR or PR industry is going. Do you think we’ll see it more? Are things changing each year at North? Are they tweaking policies? What do you expect to see?

Mary Hickey:
Rich has probably got more insight on me as an agency owner and probably talking to other agencies and obviously the decisions that are made at a sort of contractual level are a bit above me but I’ve got sort of two points of view here. The first one being that It was really interesting what Rich said about, you know, younger people wanting to be back in the office. And when I look back, when I first graduated and I was working in London, I literally felt like Carrie Bradshaw, like, tottering off to my PR agencies, you know, earning less than I could afford to pay in rent. I would never ever want to take that away from me. I think graduating, working in London and then I worked in Leeds absolutely loved being part of the office. I think that when you leave university you feel like an adult but you’re actually sometimes like 21, you’re still learning, you’re still developing as an adult and those conversations that you have with different people, I learned so much from being in the office. Obviously, my life’s changed now, the world’s changed, and working from home and being remote does work for me. But I think that what’s really tricky, and I completely can get where Rich is coming from, you’ve got to kind of look at it from an agency point of view and, you know, putting clients first. But I think one of the things you referenced, Rich, recently is, you know, agencies making big decisions. And I, you know, I don’t want to name any names here, but I know an agency recently went to bringing everyone back in. And it was, I don’t think she’d ever want me to say at the expense, but I know that that agency lost one of who I think is the most talented people in our industry. You know, she’s now freelancing. She’s absolutely thriving. But for me, if I just looked at my immediate team and if anyone in my immediate team was like, hey, Mary, I’ve had this opportunity, I’m going to go and live. in Cornwall, my partner’s got a new job, I’m going to go live in Cornwall, for me what she brings to her job seat or what he brings to that job seat is so brilliant that I would just be more than willing to accommodate them because for me not having them in the office when everyone else in might be stressful and there might be things that clients aren’t seeing them enough, but actually recruiting talent and someone who works as hard as them and hits performance targets. For me, I’d want to accommodate them more. So I think when you’re smaller, you can look at individuals and be like, right, who is in that job seat? Whether they’re remote or not, who is in that job seat? I guess when you get bigger, you can make decisions on a group basis. But I hope we don’t get to a point where all agencies say, right, come back in the office. I mean, I’d be out of work. So yeah, I really wouldn’t want that to Yeah, I think so many people would. Yeah, so many people would and so many agencies would lose so much talent. You know, there’s still so many London-based agencies who are offering remote work and paying big salaries. We know that because quite a few really talented people from North have gone on and that’s really amazing. They’ve gone on and found new jobs. But, you know, sometimes a Northern agency can’t compete with London salaries. But the reason we’re doing this podcast, and it’s a conversation that’s talked about a lot, but I think there’s so many more important conversations that we should almost be having. I mean, I’m making this podcast sound redundant. I don’t want to do that. But I think it’s really important that we discuss it, but also look at bigger things as well that are really, really important. But I can’t give it a point of view as a business owner at the moment. And if I was to look at my books, Rich, and I noticed that when people are in the office, money was going up and when people left money went down, I can’t talk from that point of view. But I think that if you’re, you know, in an agency, if you have everything in place to make sure that remote workers feel part of the team, they get good benefits, you’re going to have people that work really, really hard. I don’t think I’ve never worked as hard and I do at North. You know, I work so hard, I bring so much to the agency and the other remote workers do. We’ve got one guy who lives, I think it’s down in Slough and he is a tech SEO and agencies, digital PR, finding really, really talented tech SEOs is really, really hard. And he’s amazing. And he brings so much to the team. He’s brought so much talent and it’s great. So it’s a really, really tricky conversation. I hope that it never gets enforced and I hope that people just appreciate that there’s so many different working styles, but also, you know, I think if you’re young, if I was to give advice to anyone who was coming into their career as a young junior exec working in digital PR or content, I would encourage them to find an agency close to them because there’s some of the best and most exciting years of your life and get in the office while you’ve not got any dependents or massive mortgages. That’s what I would encourage.

Louise Parker:
I feel like it seems like such a simplistic question, but actually it kind of gets to the point of what I think a lot of people listening to this podcast would want to know. But it’d be really interesting to know from both your perspectives, the positives that you have seen from your current setup and also the negatives. So maybe a couple of pros, a couple of cons. So for you, Rich, it would be the four days in the office and the Friday flex and the Friday, you know, working from home. What’s the good and what’s the bad with that?

Rich Leigh:
I’ve got three, because of course I’ve got to bring it to the team. In doing this, every decision I’ve made, to your point there, Propellernet, there are changes constantly. There have been changes constantly in my agency for the last few years too, and every one you come into it with hopefully the best of intentions and explaining it, communicating it internally as best as you possibly can, which you’d hope as communicators we can. Just to the point there, Mary, about your team. Of course, that’s a consideration. Nobody wants to lose great talent. Nobody wants to lose great talent, but equally, you have to then consider, okay, well, what does it look like if everybody’s treated differently? you know, there will always be, I’ve always said, I’m super optimistic about the industry. Endlessly so, perhaps kind of ridiculously so. Even in the tougher times, even I recently wrote something about digital PR has reached the end in the race to the bottom. Fundamentally believe it. I do believe that. But that’s a good thing, because I’m saying, guys, let’s not let clients gang up on us. Let’s not let them treat us like, as I say, just people to throw into a cage and fight each other until somebody comes out with 20 links. My optimism is boundless, but also realistic and tempered with, or aligned with, as I say, the business reality. So I think, yes, of course, it’s a consideration losing talent, but these people signed contracts that were, you know, in a particular, you know, were Monday to Friday in many cases, only two, three short years ago. Life stages, of course, happen. You have children, I’ve got three myself. You know, being a business owner and being a parent is incredibly complex, as you’d imagine, and, you know, balancing it all. So I completely understand that life stages happen, but I want there to be jobs in PR for people to have. and my stance is that we are better together and appreciate that this isn’t a one or the other thing. And again, I can only speak for my business, just like I only ever could. The four day thing, the number of people that said, basically, do you want to be the poster boy for four day? And I was like, I am not the Pied Piper for this. I know what works for me and I know what works for us and I know what margins we’re working to. No, thank you. Go find somebody else. Because if I’d say to another business, hey great and then they fall over that’s on me so you know i’d feel very very responsible um but to speak again to positivity and to to some of the positives creativity never ever ever happened to our zoom Never, never as well as it does in person. Collaboration, we are fundamentally designed to bounce off of each other. We are, I think, creatively so much better. There’s something in being in person. Even, you know, even this, as I say, I’ve just started doing my own podcast. Every single episode’s in person. You build rapport like nothing else. So collaboration, creativity in person. And that’s before we get to the point about on-the-job training, you know, younger employees. Collaboration, creativity. I guarantee a creative session coming up with ideas on insert video platform here, and a creative session coming with ideas in person. That one wins out every time in terms of quality of ideas. And that’s what clients come to us for. And I’m a consumer PR person. Creativity has been my thing. We have, again, through the whole race to the bottom, I talked to that. I spoke to that in that blog that I wrote. Creativity is lacking in and around the industry because clients are afraid to pay for it, because clients are afraid to do anything that steps outside of a get paid extra to do. Why? Because they’re ever higher link targets. Why? Because they’re being pressured ever more from up top. So creativity, collaboration, doubtless better together. And that’s where when I do say, I promise you, if I’ve got somebody who’s 100% remote here and we’re four days a week in the office here, I could look a client in the eye and I know for a fact they can’t in the same way. And I can say, we are better for you in person, collaboratively as a team. So that’s, I know that’s super direct. I know that’s controversial. People won’t like that. I get that. But again, I can only speak for my business. And again, who do I need to impress here? Well, not impress, who do I need to, it’s our clients. That’s who pays us, that’s who we support, that’s who, and a client at the end of the day. If somebody’s there and says, yeah, we work in 15 different time zones, and all my guys are in the office working together, oh, did you hear this in the news? And then that leads to a creative insight, and that creative insight leads to an angle, and that angle leads to result, output, and that output leads to results. That might never have happened had I been sat listening to Radio 1 while I’m working remotely. And yes, you’ve got Slack, and yes, you’ve got all these tech workarounds, and yes, you’ve got these kind of whiteboard-style… I forget the names of them now. We’ve been through them all when we had to. So creativity, collaboration, one. Two, this is where we get to on the job for training and early years progress. I also founded something called the High Flyers PR course. So it’s a training course. So I speak to big agencies, medium agencies, small agencies all the time about their needs in terms of training. And almost to a person, they’ve said that training and development has absolutely halted with people being remote, especially first three to five years. It’s kind of, you know, years one, two, three, four, five. And that’s because every agency has got a different way of training people. You’ve then all of a sudden, we’ve got to create a product agency by agency of training and development that you’d hope you had something of internally already. But that’s something in a difficult marketplace, very, very difficult marketplace. Again, people don’t speak about it. We know agencies that are letting people go. I mean, it’s rough. It’s been so rough out there. And yet these people, these agency owners, these people in tough positions, people at mid to senior level, are expected then to put together packages of training for their team and their colleagues, and especially people coming into the industry. It’s a really tough spot. So training development just isn’t as good. And I know, again, I know agency owners that would disagree with that. I’ve seen this disagreed with on Twitter. And then I know some of those agencies whose employees might have been remote, might have worked in different countries as a result of having been remote, and are now all freelance. And so those agencies have lost that talent anyway, eventually. Because you get these people, senior people, generally, senior people with great experience will, in many, many situations, in many cases, go down the road of freelance. and go down the road of, especially when life stages happen and you’ve got the position to work more flexibly. You know, that’s always been the case pre-pandemic, pre any hybrid or working from home. So on the job training, just that osmotic ability to say, okay, well I just heard Rich on the phone to insert journalist here, or I just heard him on the phone to, or we were just on that call with that client. I said three words, but I was on that call with that client, or I was in that room with that client. And you know, you pick things up that you just can’t. otherwise. And then the third thing, I recently had a senior member of the team go to another role. Mary, you spoke to it, go to another role that’s fully remote and London wages and all that stuff. I love this person, yet I can’t and won’t compete on that basis because I knew what I was doing in terms of bringing everybody back into the office. But in putting together her kind of… I always like to say goodbye in weird and wonderful ways to people, especially people that have been at the agency for a long time. We put together a video of the kind of agency memories together. That video does not get made in 2023, in the last two, three years. It doesn’t. Memories don’t get built. You know, that working for and with each other. So the Rugby World Cup’s about to come up. Rugby is very much, as I said at the top, you know, something I love. I mean, the Football World Cup’s happening right now. England in the final on Saturday. Did that team build that camaraderie by having a few Zoom calls, getting together for a bit of a kickabout, and then you think that they just accidentally progressed to the final? That’s not how life works. That’s not how team collaboration works. That’s not how memories are made. Life is short. If you’re going to dedicate, and you should, your first few years especially, but any time to something professional and something where you can really, you’re tied by your curiosity effectively and your willingness to learn and your ability to be coachable. In PR, I really apprenticed myself. I did everything I possibly could. I promise you, I knew every… I needn’t have, but I knew every employee in agencies, I knew every agency, I knew every award, I knew every client, I knew who they were with, I knew what campaigns they’ve been working on. It was weirdly, it was weird about it. Really weirdly encyclopedic and geeky about it. but you learn everything you physically can and then you have fun while doing it. Again, make money, have fun doing it. Can you make money and have fun doing it working remotely? Because I would argue that whatever we defined as socials during the pandemic, during the work from home process, you know, the first few years of running the agency when we, you know, we were still small enough to every Friday go to the pub or go to, you know, the escape room or, you know, go karting or whatever it is. And you’re building those memories, that’s how teams get built. And memories get built. That video that I created does not happen, which is why, again, it’s all about the business that you run, the business you want to run. I want to run a business where my colleagues and I feel close enough that you really do ride those high highs and low lows together. And there has been a disloyalty in the last few years, you know, people jump agencies for two rounds pay, you know, and that’s it ever was, especially in London, right. But, you know, that, that’s, I just think, you know, what, what is an agency and what is an agency’s character and what is an agency’s culture, if everybody looks exactly the same, because they pay more or less the same, their hybrid or, you know, work from home policy is exactly the same. And the work is more or less creatively lacking and all the same. And that’s, so those three. So, you know, just, this is bringing back collaboration, creativity, on the job training, early years progress and memories. That’s fundamentally why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Louise Parker:
I’m going to push you later for a con, because there must be a con.

Rich Leigh:
Oh, it’s only been a month since we’ve been back. I mean, again, you’ll lose talent. You will lose talent. Inevitably, you will lose talent right now. And I hasten to add this. In six to 12 months, do those fully remote jobs, do they exist at a higher salary? And I say that as somebody that knows the industry inside out, that knows the finances of the industry inside out. that knows agency owners and their finances inside out. If we talk two, three months ahead, we’re not talking far enough. If I talk a year ahead, do those very shiny, oh, actually, I get to do exactly what I do now, but for 10 grand more, and I don’t have to go anywhere, that might work for some people. Those jobs will hopefully be, I want them to exist. But what if they don’t? What if this is we are in a very temporary, right in the midst of something big changing marketplace?

Louise Parker:
Mary, this is now your opportunity to give your perspective because I know you spoke at Brighton SEO about how training for example and managing you were doing that remotely and the tips you had off the back of that so what in your opinion are the pros and if you have a con that would be great to share as well because I think that’s normal.

Mary Hickey:
Yeah, definitely. So you asked the question, best things about working remotely, you know, I won’t touch on too much about the hours you get back commuting and that sort of thing. I think I would really try and focus on like my team and what I get from them. I think one of the most important things that I have found by being remote, I like to say remote-ish, because obviously I’m in the office once a month and having a team that are remote or in the office, One of the most important things I’ve seen is they have so much autonomy. So obviously I’ve worked in offices before, I’ve loved it. Some of the team are in the office, some work from home and we’re also a PR agency so we have big ideations and all that sort of thing. But there’s some times when they need to, Beth who is the Associate Director of North and she’s brilliant, she gives a lot of the team autonomy. So if you want to go and develop a service, a process, she’s really big on the team being like putting their hands up whether you’re a junior exec or your senior manager I want to have a go at this and when you’re remote you sort of have that autonomy to go and figure things out on your own independently if someone’s got to go and put their head down on a really sort of bitty task that it’s got loads of moving parts and they can’t work it out yet Having a day at home, working from their kitchen if that’s where they work best, working from an office, instead of being in an office and being pulled from post to post and having a big ideation going on next to you which is great but sometimes just people use their brains in different ways and I spoke about this at Brighton about you know the colours of your personality, you’ve got blue people, red people, green people, you need all of those elements for an agency to work. I haven’t got enough blue which is like the admin and the detail and if I was in the office every day as a super yellow extroverted person I’d be sat trying to get my head around some really important bits of data and I’d hear a conversation going on next to me or a big ideation I’d want to jump into that whereas sometimes you just need to sit in your own four walls and get your head down and try something new and make mistakes in private. And that’s one of the things I’ve really seen the team thrive at doing is having the autonomy. Another thing that I think is so brilliant about remote working is you work with people who don’t necessarily look like you, who don’t sound like you, who have different cultures. And we’re not big enough on that at the moment at North. I think, you know, this whole topic of diversity is really, really tricky. Obviously, we’re in the Northeast. The majority of the team are Geordies, which is great. Some of the best people I know. I love all the Geordies. But we also have someone who is Portuguese, who lives down south. We have me working in Sheffield. I’m not talking about massive cultural shifts here. I’m just talking about different perspectives. We have our data journalist who is amazing. She is from Liverpool. I think sometimes having people working a little bit further means you’re just working with slightly different people and having different perspectives. So that’s my second thing. And then also my main client is based over in Berlin. So I, you know, spend time in there. They’ve got another head office down in London. And I have always been heavily involved in pictures. It’s probably my favorite part of my role. So in my other agency, I was going to pictures about once a month, traveling all over, which is tiring, you know, when you log time, which is probably another podcast time tracking, you know, you’ve noticed you’ve done eight hours of traveling that month, whereas that’s great. And I love going to see clients post pandemic, going and spending time with clients is amazing. So I think that remote workers, if you’re working from home the majority of the time, it’s so much more willing and having more time and excitement to go and do those client face-to-face meetings. And that’s one of the things I love the most. So they’re the sort of three things about me and my team. And in terms of cons, there’s definitely cons, of course. from a personal point of view i’m a pretty beth uh my social director will definitely laugh at this i’m quite a reactive person so that’s in a good and a bad way so i might see oh my god that celebrity’s just got engaged we’ve got a jewellery client quick jump on it and i’m it’s firing out slack messages from home whilst they might the whole team might have just be getting to work and having a coffee at the desk and I’m like go go go I am super reactive and also if I see a mistake I might jump on slack straight away instead of going into the office kitchen and you know having a bit of a moan with a fellow colleague I might jump on slack so I can be too reactive working from home and it’s something I’m really working on I think a second thing, people who saw my Brighton SEO talk will know that I’m a super emotive manager, I’m super tactile, and it’s sometimes hard to gauge my team’s well-being when working from home. You know, life happens, horrible things happen, and I want to be there to support my team. When you’re in the office, of course, you can see, you can see that you can give people a hug if they’re huggers like me. Some people aren’t. But one of the things I’ve sort of worked my way around this is, you know, one of my colleagues at the moment, she’s amazing and she’s going through a bit of a rough time. And I just say every day, let me know where you’re feeling on the percentage scale. If you’re 100 percent, you’re great, you’re veering to go. If you’re struggling that day, if you’re 50, that’s fine. If you’re 20, that’s fine. Just let me know. That’s one of the things I’ve done. So the third thing, again, which is probably a bit more personal thing, when you’re remote work, I think it’s sometimes really hard to switch off. my commute is walking to my desk and i sometimes find myself literally pouring a glass of wine at 5 15 to just end the day and start my personal time but i’ve started doing things like i just go for a walk i walk my dog i do the nursery run by foot just to break the day up a bit I know a lot of people would say that the biggest con of working from home is lack of team socialising and all that stuff, but I just don’t get that. I’m always on Slack, chatting to the team. We have so many calls. I’m there once a month. We have quarterly socials. The owner of our company took everyone off to Prague last year. So I feel like I spend so much time with the team. I very much feel like a part of it. I’m part of the woodwork. they all know me. The remote works have got to do that and got to make that work but I wouldn’t say that was a con because for me I’ve never felt more of a team than I do at North and that’s a testament to them and also the effort I put in.

Stephen Baker:
I’m not just saying this, I really am not, but you guys are amazing. You’re speaking, both speaking so eloquently, passionately about this subject. I do want to pick up on one thing, something that I found as the biggest benefit during the pandemic was recruitment. So Rich, I’m going to come to you on this one first because you’ve obviously changed model slightly over the years, but we found it so refreshing not having to hire people that could come to Brighton every day. It just massive pool of talent suddenly, and we’ve got people dotted around all over the country, and it’s been brilliant. And Mary, you made that point as well, that you just get people from different backgrounds and it’s benefited us massively. Rich, how have you found it because we are starting to just change our thinking on it. Like we want people that are a little bit closer because it does make it easier. But how are you finding recruitment or how have you found recruitment now trying to get people back into the office sort of more regularly? Has it changed things drastically?

Rich Leigh:
So I guess I can go all the way back to when I started the agency and I used freelancers to start off with. everything just said is in relation to, you can work with people from both, you know, from a diversity perspective, you can work with people all over the world from all sorts of different cultures without having to have them working from home. And that’d be a non-fixed cost. We talk about fixed costs, non-fixed costs as business owners. You don’t need to ensure that you have a, you know, fully remote or, you know, even a hybrid model to be able to employ great freelancers that bring that diversity of thought. I decided to go against the idea of bringing in, you know, of solely staffing based on, or, you know, solely kind of resourcing based on freelancers, because I wanted to build that team. And again, I can only speak to myself. I know what I wanted and it isn’t this, or it wasn’t that. From a recruitment perspective, it did, it opened things up. But then do you know what that does? It removes the geographical nature of salary branding. And there are… Why do the ONS, whenever they come out with their salary bands, exclude London from the rest of the UK? Why do they pick it up, put it over there? Because there are inherent differences in terms of what those… If you work in London, let’s say, let’s throw… Let’s just throw a 50k salary that might be 35 in Gloucestershire, or 40 in Gloucestershire, it might be 42 in Sheffield, let’s say, whatever. That 8 grand is a big difference for an employer to find. So all of a sudden what you do is, if you amalgamate everything, then what was a business margin that worked for an agency in Sheffield, or an agency in Liverpool, or whatever it is? all of a sudden, yeah, it’s great, you’ve got access to all of the talent, but where are the talent going to go? They’re going to go to the highest paying, so the geographical banding all of a sudden is thrown out of the window. And as an agency, you are immediately thrown. That’s an immediate cost consideration. So it’s, you know, it brings with it’s a double edged sword. Yeah, brilliant. I can find somebody this London person is what’s at this agency for 10 years, this phenomenal, I’ve always liked this person, and we’ve always got on, and I can bring them into the company. Cool. But then all of a sudden, you know, expectations changed in terms of salary. And as I say, there’s an inherent disloyalty to it, because you haven’t built that culture. And that’s not to be unkind to the employee. That’s just to say, if I was an employee still, I would do the same thing. If somebody said, Rich, instead of working five days a week, do you want to work four, and I’ll pay you more, and you’re at home all the time, and I’m an employee with three children, and for me, at that point in my life, it works better, I will do that. But I will question how long that opportunity is going to be there. But then maybe that’s a, that’s a future me problem. But so from a recruitment perspective, all I can say is it’s about finding people that as you know, I mean, I’ve recruited, I’ve got a new person started Monday, I got a new person starting in three weeks. Both of them are incredibly excited about the fact that it’s in the office. And both said, both of the, both the people, one right at the start of her career, one three years in, said that her last, so the one three years in, said her last agency was completely remote and she hated it. And that wasn’t. And again, everybody’s different. I completely get that. But it was lonely. Yes, sure, we meet once every month or once every three months, whatever it is, but it’s not enough to make me feel part of the team. And I just think to my sports analogy, it just doesn’t build the kind of culture and the kind of team that I wanted to build.

Louise Parker:
I think it’s been mentioned before, and particularly Rich, you were a little conscious of the fact that you don’t want to come across, I guess, negatively for having people back in the office and stuff, even though it is happening a lot, but you’re saying it’s not being spoken about and things like that. I would imagine, and taking a guess, the reason why people might not want to be openly talking about it is because it can spark this huge debate online and it always gets quite heated. Why do you think that is? I will start with Mary first just because obviously she’s got less skin in the game. So from like, you know, an employee’s perspective, why do you think it gets so heated and why do you think people get so angry about it when people start just discussing it and discussing the options?

Mary Hickey:
I think it’s because people are super protective of what their ideal is. say you’ve got two people and person A is someone who wants to be in the office and thinks everyone should be in the office, that person sort of needs everyone else to be on board with their thinking in order for that sort of office vibe and fun and creativity to happen. So I think that person A sort of needs everyone else to get on board Whereas person B, say, who is someone who is remote and finds that being a remote worker works best for them, the minute that they hear people saying, I’m going to take this away from you, their backs get up, they get overprotective, they get defensive. And I think that it’s not a blurred line, it’s pretty, one is in the office, one isn’t, unless you’re hybrid or there’s both like me. I think me and Rich are slightly different in this conversation, only because we’re not like, I’m not speaking from a remote only agency where every single employee is remote. You know, there’s a brilliant office at N21 and I get to spend a lot of time there, but I am primarily remote and Rich isn’t fully five days in the office. So we’re sort of like, the blurred lines, but I think that this is what I love, do not take it away from me. This is what works for me, do not take it away from me. We need more hybrid people speaking out, maybe like me, maybe I should get more involved and say, hey, I’m in the middle here, I do both and it works. There’s reason there’s so much debate because I see a lot of it and I do see a lot of like pretty vicious debates on Twitter sometimes and I have to back off because it’s just, we work in digital PR, we’re not on the front line. I have one of my best friends works in A&E and she complains a hell of a lot less about her career than people in digital PR do. You know, we need to just take a check. And like Rich said, what we do is ridiculous. It’s so much fun. I think people just, like I say, get overprotective of what is theirs. And the thought of anyone coming in and taking it away out of their control, their backs just go up. Yeah. I think that’s ultimately why there’s so much debate on it. We just need to have conversations more. I always say this. whether it’s politics, whether it’s big issues in the news, whether it’s just stop oil, whether it’s climate change, whatever you believe in, I’m getting very deep here, but whatever you believe in, go and have a conversation with someone who thinks the opposite of you and talk to them more. That’s what we need to do more. Oh my god, I sound like Michelle Obama. But that’s what we need to do more. We just need to talk like, this is so good, me and Richard having this conversation and just get different perspectives. Stop seeing it as something that’s been taken away. Think about the benefits. You know, if the owner of North or N21 was to say to me like, Mary, right, we need you to come in three times a month now, twice a month. I wouldn’t go, I will absolutely not doing that. I’d say, right, let’s meet in the middle. I’d love to. What are the benefits? What do you think that would bring for me? What would it do for the agency? We just need to have conversations without the alarm bells going off, I think.

Stephen Baker:
I completely agree. I think, you know, there’s been so much change in the last few years that anything that kind of deviates from what people have got used to is quite scary. So whether that’s like come into the office more or we’re going fully remote or, you know, is that going to be a hybrid model and you have to do certain things? It’s going to scare people. Plus, I think social generally, social media or Twitter can be bit of a sort of a cesspit where people just argue because they’re sort of behind a computer rather than properly debate but Rich what’s your what’s your view on it because you’ve talked about this very openly and honestly and and you know it’s a subject dear to your heart but why do you think it kind of gets so heated online? You spoke to it there, people love to argue.

Rich Leigh:
In other words, the world’s in a polarised place. I mean, I agree, Mary. I think that more conversations between two people that don’t think exactly the same is a wonderful thing, but I don’t think that social media is the place in which to have those conversations. At no stage does anything get solved. Has a tweet ever solved a problem? Has a Twitter conversation ever solved anything? Things like this help because, again, and I’d argue that if we’re in person, it’s even better because you get the humanity of the situation, the personality of the situation. I think the reason I said that, Lou, to you is because anybody that looks for a second like they’re batting on the side of taking something away from people, to Mera’s point, And I’m not, I’m saying, okay, I’ve got to do what works for us. I need and want there to be a thriving PR industry. I need and want there to be money in my business so I can continue to employ people. I need and want there to be. So why? So I can make money and have fun doing it. Let’s come back to that every time. Make money. And you know, whatever size that we, you know, we are as an agency, whether we’re a handful of people, 50 people, a thousand people, you know, we need to, if we’re making money, I want to be having fun doing it. why am I doing it? Of course, I’m only 35 or something, I’m 90. But I just feel like you set yourself up to be a target. And also for something that, again, I’m on the side of ensuring that the team are happy. My whole thing is I want a happy team doing great work with happy clients. I’ve said that for nine years since I started the agency. you know, happy team, great work with, happy clients. The with is important there. It’s a cycle. If the team are happy, they’re doing great work. If they’re doing great work, clients are happy and it comes around. I would argue from a policy perspective, I’ve moved the industry on. I would argue from even the four-day perspective, I’ve moved things on, the conversation on. So this isn’t coming from a Scrooge McDuck, I’m diving into my gold. How did he never hurt himself? I’m not coming into this from this. I don’t have a monocle and a mask on. What I am doing is thinking I need to protect. There is some self-preservation here from an agency perspective. And so and so I’m I come from it from that financial perspective of well, I know when margins are down I know, you know, when did I last feel in control? And that’s a really key thing. Again, not everybody loves a decision maker. And that’s the reason there aren’t many of them. That’s the reason that everybody does this. Because you make a decision like, okay, we’re going fully remote. Some people will love it, some people will hate it. You make a decision like, okay, we’re going fully in the office. Some people will love it, some people will hate it. You’re never going to please everybody and nor should you try. All you can do is what’s best for you, for your business, for your agency, for your employees. your team with the hope of retaining the best talent you can retain and doing the best work you can and having the most fun you can whilst making the most money. That’s, you know, none of this is a charity and even charities have to make money for God’s sake. So, you know, I just think we need to have those conversations where we’re saying, right, People aren’t honest because PR as an industry, I mean, why is Twitter so quiet right now, right? I guarantee, you go on Twitter right now, there’s nothing like the conversation there used to be six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, whatever, where people are really proud of what they’re doing, where people are creatively excited, where people are shouting about them and celebrating each other. That used to happen a lot more. Now, why isn’t that happening? Well, my working theory, more than anecdotal theory is, I know that people are shedding talent at a rate of knots. and nobody’s talking about it. I know that the industry is in a bad way. I’d argue that this last Q1, Q2 has been way, way better than it has been. And perhaps maybe I’ve got some exposure to business realities that other agencies don’t. You know, you look at an Adelman though, biggest PR agency in the world, they still are going through, you know, redundancy shifts. You look at small agencies I know, I mean, you know, there’s a big consumer shop recently, I won’t name because it’s probably unfair to, you know, that really, really struggled in an incredibly difficult marketplace. And these are good people, they’re fantastic at what they do. Nobody got shit at PR all of a sudden. Nobody got bad at this. So I think one of the reasons why it’s hard to talk about this is because employees don’t, you know, we’re operating with a full deck of cards and employees aren’t. Yeah. And that’s possibly, that’s, but that sounds like a prick thing to say, you know, that sounds like I’m being really dismissive and I’m not, I’m just being completely honest. And of course, nobody wants what is, you know, then become the norm to them to be ripped away from them. But, you know, we, we could be working the 10 PM to 6 AM shift at Tesco stacking shelves. We’re not, we’re coming up with fun ideas for clients, getting paid a ton of money to do it in most cases, where the money is there in the industry and You know, that’s the reality of this. My background is not this. Yeah. So I look, I look at my family and I, and you know, I think, okay, yes, I’m stressed, but like, let’s, let’s take a step back and be realistic here. That’s that’s so I get passionate about it for that reason. Yeah.

Louise Parker:
I was going to say, I feel like you and Mary kind of both kind of ended on a similar point, which is like, I think that’s the thing.

Rich Leigh:
There’s always that middle ground. There’s always the understanding and appreciation for each other.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah. And you kind of led nicely onto our final question, which we’re asking of all guests this series. So what do you think the future of digital PR is? So you can relate it to what we just talked about, but it can be obviously bigger than that. And Mary, we’re going to come to you first. I know it’s quite a tricky question. I haven’t even answered this myself. Maybe I’ll do it on a future episode because it’s not one for now. But Mary, what’s your thoughts? What’s the future of digital PR do you think?

Mary Hickey:
I love this question. I think it’s, everyone in the Q&A sessions of Brighton SEO were asked this question and it’s something that I hear on a lot of podcasts. I’m going to answer it slightly differently. So for me, the future of digital PR is so unknown and so many things are happening. Advances in AI is an answer I hear all the time. Endless updates is a question I hear all the time. I say this a lot, and this is a topic that Beth Nunnington at Journey Further is the queen of, and that is, of course, relevancy. For me, we cannot control what happens next in digital PR. Rich, I remember your article about digital PR, which I found really interesting. But I do think AI is going to continue to advance. There’s going to be more updates. What digital PR needs to do is just focus on what they can control, and that is continuing to put out brilliant work that we’re really, really proud of. AI is going to keep advancing. Google is going to keep updating. I think there was one month where there was like two updates in that month. We can’t always keep up with it. We need to just get better at putting out campaigns that are super relevant for our brands. I spoke about this on another podcast and I think that with targets getting bigger and clients cutting spend and it getting harder to cut through the noise of the media, more and more brands, and I’m not naming and shaming any industries here, but I keep seeing brands putting out campaigns that are just not relevant to them at all. I have one, one of our clients at North is one of the biggest sort of food brands, probably in the world. And every year we put out a campaign about pancakes. It’s about pancake toppings. and we were ranking below a brand that had done a similar campaign that had no relevancy to food whatsoever. That’s just ridiculous and it’s annoying for consumers and it makes it more difficult for everyone else. So I just think everyone just needs to remember one of the things I always say to my team is think about your campaign and write a headline for it and insert your brand into that headline. Does it make sense? If it doesn’t, that campaign is not for that brand. So I think that we need to just welcome everything that’s going to happen, welcome AI, welcome Google updates, welcome new search experiences. There’s all different names for all these different things. What we can do is focus on what we can control. I guess that’s quality assurance. So putting out campaigns that we’re proud of, let’s get bigger. And like Rich, I love stunts. There’s not been enough recently. Let’s get back to big, bold, out-of-home stunts are super relevant. Let’s remember why we all do PR. It’s ultimately telling stories. I think that we just need to stick to our guns. not worry about everything else, focus on what we can do and it’s just putting out word that we’re proud of. That’s my, what I think the future should be.

Stephen Baker:
Lovely. What about you, Rich? Are you ready to welcome our robot overlords with open arms? Or do you have a slightly different take on it? What do you think the future is? I mean, you could broaden it out to PR generally.

Rich Leigh:
I will do. I’ll speak about both if that’s OK. Digital PR is going through a period of shrinkage, and a necessary one. There was an oversupply for the amount of demand. And what that did is it put the power in the hands of brands, I was going to say clients then, of, and actually not even brands in most cases, websites, people that were previously kicking the tires of Fat Joe, buying links left or right, and then they come to the industry and they think, well, if I spend five grand, I get X links. If I spend 10 grand, I get Y links. And then they bring that to an industry that is inherently difficult to predict where there is a very, very fine balance from a media relations perspective of the relationship between the journalist and the PR person, and they’re then, and I will say it, predominantly SEO people coming into an industry, and with zero respect for that relationship, zero respect for the ability or the gatekeeper And the necessary gatekeepership of a journalist to their audience and instead thinking they can just swing money around and wave money in their faces of publishers and think that should equal links. And then what those people do is they leave the industry when they realize, OK, I’ve you know, just like they did with link buying. Shouldn’t be doing it, but they do it. They go, they buy links, they then come into an industry, they find small to medium-sized agencies, they think that they should buy those links or, you know, should be, should, you know, they’re entitled to those links. Why can I not get a link on the mirror? Why can I not get, you know, insert publisher here? And for all sorts of reasons, they come in with a dick-swinging mentality of, I’m paying you, you must get me X links or else I go elsewhere. Or I bring in other agencies to do the exact same job you’re doing and I will make you fight for it. Again, I’ve spoken about this, I’m super passionate about this, because I think that we need to respect ourselves more. So what happens in digital PR is, I think we lose the shit people. We lose the people that don’t know what they’re… And because there’s been that, there has been that kind of bloat, that swell of people that allege that they are suppliers of digital PR, and then they guarantee everything to a client that’s only too ready to buy it. And there are people like me in the background going, I’ve been doing this far too long. You know, I am not promising you a damn thing, you know, because I know for a fact, I can’t, the queen could die tomorrow, I used to say, and then guess what she did. And, you know, Charles could die tomorrow and all of a sudden every, you know, best laid plans, you know, entirely put to waste. So I used to use that, you know, that line of, I’m not going to guarantee you a thing, but there are people out there that will guarantee it. And then guess what? Buy cheap, buy twice, you’re coming back to me in six months time, or you lose faith in PR entirely, which is what’s happened. And you too, I guarantee you’ve dealt with that. I know for a fact you’ve picked up the pieces of a previous relationship with somebody that defined themselves as a PR person or a digital PR person. But they weren’t. What they did is they had a subscription to insert journalist database here, right? And spammed a thousand journalists a day and said, why, you know, give me link. And so what we’re doing, we’re going to lose those people because they’ll go and they’ll find a different way of scamming money out of somebody. And, you know, great, brilliant. They can fuck all the way off. And then some more. Yeah. So that’s digital PR. It will get better. And clients, let’s stop letting them, you know, again, you know, some of these brands, we know them, we’ve spoken about, you know, like privately we’ll say the names. We know the ones that treat people like shit and expect more ever, you know, every month, every week there’s, you know, higher targets. Well, do you know what? They, people will stop wanting to work with those people. And they should. So digital PR, it’s been in a rough spot. It was swollen and there was a lot of money in it for a minute. It became very productized in a way that then meant that there was a conflation between outcomes and outputs, and output being a release, a story. I think creatively, again, I’ll say it is lacking. We all know that there’s a compendium of every digital PR campaign that gets done in every given month. Is it creative? Arguably, go through that list and tell me that anything that’s getting done in the industry is especially Like I said in that piece again that I wrote, you don’t build brands through digital PR. I cannot tell you one brand that’s been built through link building. I can tell you brands that have been built with great out of home, that have been built with great stunts. So this I think speaks then to the more broad comms and consumer PR I speak to, industry, and that is a shift towards brand-led comms. And that doesn’t always mean media relations. It never did. That doesn’t always mean social. That doesn’t always mean digital PR. That doesn’t always mean stunts. That doesn’t always mean digital out of home. That doesn’t always mean influencers. PR is as simple to me as, let’s find your audience and let’s find out how we reach them best. And let’s persuade them, let’s convince them, let’s do the job of a good PR person, which is to tell them the virtues of you, your product, your service, and convince them that that’s exactly what they need to put their hand in their pocket for. It’s nothing more. I don’t think it’s anything more worthy than that You know, we are marketers at the end of the day. We are an interruption everything we do should be fun informative creative educational Insert, you know, not not not every one of those things but one of those things so PR I think shifts away from I hope anyway, and maybe this is wishful thinking this absolute bloat and desire to keep feeding clients links As to Mary’s point then, we don’t know what Google’s doing. Do no follow links count? Do they not? I’m bored of it. It’s boring. I think that’s where I got to. It’s boring. And I don’t want it to be boring. It never used to be. So we’ve come through a difficult market. I think the people that are left you know, we’re here to pick the pieces up and keep things moving. And I say that there are top 50 agencies that, you know, that won’t touch for a second. I do think digital PR, obviously spoken to that, there are fantastic people in it, but I think we need to stop kidding ourselves, it’s creative. and anything other than let’s just quickly get, you know, like we’ve all done weird requests, we’ve all done job stories, we’ve all done, you know, products, not limited to different products, we’ve all done lists, we’ve all done Instagram rich lists. I’d like to think that we created that, but that’s for another day. You know, we’ve all done these things. Come on, like, you know, where’s the, like, where’s, where’s anything unique happening? And, and, you know, for me, it’s in that it’s, it’s a mix between in real life stunts, I dubbed them and, you know, where, where then that then kind of crosses over with having to force the link for, you know, to recite from a digital perspective, but PR more broadly, um, comms will be okay. You know, and I think it is, it is moving more towards brand building again. And that’s a very fortunate place to be. as and when we get there, because that’s not been the case for a lot of clients in the last three years, particularly.

Stephen Baker:
You’ve come full circle, which is brilliant, because you talked about being relentlessly positive about the industry, and that’s a lovely, positive way to finish. Rich, you’ve been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us. If you’d like to hear more from either of our guests, so you can follow Rich Leigh at RichlieghPR on Twitter or X. I mean, do we still call it Twitter? I don’t know. Stick to your gums. Yeah, of course. I can’t call it X, seriously. Calling him on X. And you can follow Mary Olivia Hickey on Twitter again, at Mary Olivia Hicks. Thank you to both of you. It’s been an absolute pleasure, like genuinely so much more we could say on that topic. But I think we got stuck in and sort of had a good debate. So thanks. Always a pleasure.

Mary Hickey:
Thank you.

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