Delivering spinning logo

If you're fortunate to have the time to spend an hour or two at the cinema, tell me, how much attention do you pay to the ticket? Ten seconds perhaps?

A quick check on the screen number then you hand it to the usher, he squints at it, hands it back and you put it in your back pocket. It's a pretty humble document, the cinema ticket. In public relations the equivelant document, ranked in humility, could be the press conference invitation. Journalists just need to know the 'when, where, who and why' of a particular event before deciding whether the content, company or menu merits their attendance.

I have spent a lot of time discussing media invitations with clients in the Middle East. Maybe too much time. I can understand the appeal of an attractively designed, technologically clever invitation to a press event. No Friends of the Spinning Logo will find an enemy in me if the invitation is appropriate, easy to execute and doesn't distract from the overriding purpose of the event i.e to deliver compelling messages to stakeholders in an engaging manner.

If, however, the invitation is the subject of two meetings, one lost weekend and the appearance of a single grey hair then too much effort has been expended on it.

There is a word, a functional, inelegant word with which virtually everyone who works in public relations is familiar. That word is 'deliverable'. In context it generally relates to an agreed set of actions that the agency will undertake on the clients' behalf. Taken together the list of 'deliverables' constitutes a 'scope of work' (SOW). This is an important document since it spells out the type of activity that will be undertaken as part of a public relations programme. The SOW is an important document but it should not be the only word. It is possible to become overly fond of your SOW and to berate the agency if you haven't had your monthly ration of four press releases and two features for instance.

When it comes to reviewing activity at the end of the month it is very easy as a client to forget that you absorbed two man days of agency time fine tuning the detail on the spinning logo of the invitation to the press breakfast. Perhaps your account manager would have been better utilised pitching features to four tier one titles during that time?

If there's one favour that client and agency can do for themselves today it's to ask, discuss and agree the answer to the question 'what are the three most important things we need to achieve in the next month to build and/or protect (the clients') reputation?' And they should make this chat a regular one. How about every month? And they should review honestly whether they have achieved their monthly target.

If they jointly decide that a key priority is ensuring that a specific press release is 'poetic', as a client once memorably remarked to me, then let's get the Muse to work. Or maybe the region's newspapers would be content with a little less adjective and a little more fact.

Perhaps the time spent adjective-hunting could be devoted to finding out a little more detail about the specific initiative being launched. If this caught on then the true humility of press releases could be acknowledged, not as semi-sacred documents that require endless fine-tuning before being unleashed on a thousand in-boxes. Their role as initiators of inquiry and discussion rather than as substitutes for same could be recognised. Then you'd have plenty of time to discuss the speed of the spinning logos.

Hang on a second, though. Just got an email inviting me to attend a conference call on the speed of a spinning logo.

- The writer is a regional client services director at Hill & Knowlton Middle East.