It would be difficult for anyone who was at last night’s PR Week Awards to not claim that the PR industry seems to be in rude health.
Gigantic venue – check. Actually famous host – check. Copious evidence of spare money to spend on hair and nails – check. Queue at the (really quite expensive) bar – again, check.
Of course, as an industry, we’re all about the image, and it’s always good to take people’s tales of how amazingly well they’re doing with a slight pinch of salt – after all, no-one turns up to these things and spends the evening telling people that they’re lurching from one disaster to the other.
But there was also genuinely a sense of an industry still pushing itself to do better things, in better ways. Yes, there were a lot of the ‘traditional’ names on the winners lists, but agencies such as Unity, W Communications and John Doe are all relative newcomers, and showed they can more than compete with the established players.
And some of the work really was stellar. I’d be justified in disliking Ogilvy’s multi-award winning Gnome Experiment for Kern & Sohn, as it relegated one of my own projects to highly commended – but promoting scales through a mass participation experiment weighing gnomes around the world is simply brilliant. I loved Golden Goose’s work for Sea Containers at the time, and still do; Unity’s #CowellMustPay work for Rhythmix was also top notch fast-reaction campaigning (and done pro-bono too). Oh, and then there was the Olympics. Nuff said.
It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day of the PR job sometimes, and it can take nights like the PR Week Awards to see the big picture. Hopefully the hangover of seeing what a dynamic, creative industry we work in will help most people through their actual hangovers today.
