What is the future for the Public Relations Agency industry?  The debate started across on Forbes, continued on FIR and we add our own suggestions from an interview taken for the source material for our book, “The Creative Agency of the Future“, being written now.

What is the future for the PR industry? We asked Robert Rosenthal, founder of Mothers of Invention

Questions: What are you doing differently in the past 2 years in….

I decided to wind down an agency that was web-based but doing direct marketing and had begun in 1989 as Rosenthal Direct Response and ran for 8 years and as it began to develop integrated and online campaigns it renamed to Passaic Parc (my childhood neighbourhood  and now we’re still doing measurable direct marketing with integrated campaigns.  It ran under that for 8 years and I added more capabilities online and changed it to Mothers of Invention in 2006.  Starting 2008 the downturn hits and it starts to get considerably harder – a lot of the direct marketing was changing and a lot of brands were taking work inside to their internal team.  At first quarter 2012 we had a bad quarter and I decided to use this as a chance to run it down – we had a couple folks on payroll and the rest on project basis.  I could do things differently by taking a job.  But requests came in for me to provide marketing services so here we are 4 months later – I’m taking advantage of knowledge I had at the beginning of the year.  I surveyed my database – what marketing services they’d be buying in for 2012 – top was content marketing.  Social web, video and lead nurturing.

Content Marketing Services businesses – people come to me for something special – so this is for people who want content where they want it to be special, extraordinary work.
I got the old excitement back.

You’ve got to tear these businesses apart periodically – blow the thing up and rethink it.  Get the enthusiasm back.  Everything I’ve learned over the past couple of decades will be applied to content marketing programs.

Marketing automation is one of the big drivers of the need for content.

“Evolve or die” was a term I coined a while ago – the need to change and keep reviewing what you’re doing and improving on it has to be obvious to anyone earning a living here.  If you don’t the competition will.

Posted in: Future Agency.