Fisher Public Relations: What Separates Good PR from Forgettable PR

Fisher Public Relations is a name that comes up when people are looking for PR that goes beyond press release distribution and media monitoring reports. What actually separates agencies like Fisher from the broader field is not a unique methodology or a proprietary process. It is a consistent commitment to treating communications as a commercial function, not a creative one.

Good PR earns attention that matters to the business. Forgettable PR earns coverage that looks impressive in a monthly report and does nothing else. The gap between those two outcomes is wider than most marketing directors realise until they have lived through both.

If you are building or reviewing a PR function, the broader landscape of strategy and execution is worth understanding in full. The PR & Communications hub on The Marketing Juice covers the full range of topics, from how elite agencies operate to how PR and performance marketing interact at the commercial level.

What Does a PR Agency Brief Actually Need to Contain?

I have seen a lot of agency briefs over the years, on both sides of the table. When I was running agencies, we received briefs that were essentially a list of publications the client wanted to appear in. When I was on the agency side pitching for business, we would receive forty-page documents that told us everything about the brand’s history and almost nothing about the commercial problem we were being asked to solve.

A PR brief that works contains five things. A clear articulation of the business problem. A defined audience, not a demographic sketch but a real description of who you need to influence and why they are not already behaving the way you want. A timeline that is honest about when results are needed. A measurement framework that the client and agency have agreed on before work starts. And a budget figure, not a range, not “we’re flexible”, an actual number.

The reason briefs so often fail is that the client has not done the internal work before they bring the agency in. They have not aligned on what the PR programme is actually supposed to achieve. So the agency, trying to win the business, fills the gap with assumptions and presents a plan that looks comprehensive but is not anchored to anything real. Then six months later, everyone is disappointed and nobody is quite sure why.

Fisher Public Relations, and agencies that operate at a similar level, push back on vague briefs. That is not awkwardness. That is professionalism. An agency that accepts a brief without interrogating it is setting itself up to fail, and it is setting the client up to be disappointed.

How Do PR Agencies Actually Win Business, and What Does That Tell You?

There is something revealing about how a PR agency pitches for business. The pitch process is, in a sense, the agency doing PR for itself. If they cannot articulate a clear narrative, demonstrate genuine understanding of your business, and make a compelling case for why they are the right choice, that is useful information.

When I was growing an agency from around twenty people to over a hundred, one of the things I learned is that the pitch process tells you more about an agency’s culture than any credentials document. How do they handle questions they cannot answer? Do they push back when the brief is unclear, or do they just nod and promise everything? Do the senior people who showed up in the first meeting stay involved, or do they hand the account to a junior team the moment the contract is signed?

That last point is one of the most common sources of client frustration in PR. The bait and switch is not always deliberate. Senior people genuinely do win business and then hand it off to account managers who are capable but less experienced. The fix is to ask, directly, who will be working on the account day to day. Get names. Ask to meet them before you sign.

Agencies that win on the strength of their thinking rather than their showmanship tend to be better long-term partners. A pitch deck full of case studies from other industries and a lot of enthusiasm is not a strategy. A pitch that identifies a specific tension in your market and proposes a communications approach to address it is.

What Is the Right Way to Think About PR Retainers?

Most PR work is sold on retainer. A fixed monthly fee in exchange for a defined scope of activity. The problem with retainers, as they are commonly structured, is that they can become activity-based rather than outcome-based. The agency delivers the agreed outputs, sends the monthly report, and the relationship ticks along without anyone asking whether any of it is moving the needle.

I turned around a loss-making business once by doing something similar to what I would recommend clients do with their PR retainers: I went through every line of expenditure and asked what it was actually producing. Not what it was supposed to produce, what it was actually producing. Some things survived that exercise. A lot did not.

A PR retainer should have a review mechanism built into the contract from day one. Quarterly reviews where both sides assess what is working, what is not, and whether the scope needs to change. If an agency resists that kind of structure, that tells you something. Good agencies welcome accountability because they are confident in their work. Agencies that avoid it are usually protecting themselves from scrutiny.

The retainer model also creates a particular dynamic around new ideas. An agency on retainer has a financial incentive to keep the relationship stable. That can mean they are less likely to challenge the client’s assumptions or propose something genuinely different, because disruption carries risk and risk threatens the contract. The best PR relationships I have seen are the ones where the agency feels secure enough to say “this approach is not working, here is what we should do instead” without worrying that honesty will cost them the account.

How Does PR Integrate With the Rest of the Marketing Mix?

One of the persistent failures in marketing is treating PR as a separate discipline that operates in its own lane. In most organisations, the PR team has its own budget, its own agency, its own reporting structure, and its own definition of success. It rarely talks to the paid media team. It occasionally talks to the content team. It almost never talks to the sales team.

This is a structural problem that produces a practical problem: the different parts of the marketing function end up working against each other, or at best, working in parallel without any compounding effect. A piece of earned coverage that could have been amplified through paid social sits in a media report. A thought leadership piece that could have been seeded through PR gets published on the company blog with no distribution strategy attached to it.

The brands that get the most out of their PR investment are the ones that treat earned, owned, and paid media as a single system. A story that lands in a major publication gets amplified through paid social to the exact audience that needs to see it. A product launch that is supported by PR also has a search strategy running alongside it, so that the people who read about it can find it easily. The Forrester perspective on disruption and integrated strategy is worth reading if you want a framework for how these elements interact during periods of market change.

Fisher Public Relations, operating in a competitive agency landscape, will be most effective for clients who have already done the work of aligning their marketing function. An agency cannot integrate PR with the rest of the mix if the client’s internal teams are not talking to each other.

What Does Good PR Measurement Actually Look Like?

PR measurement has a credibility problem. For years, the industry relied on metrics like Advertising Value Equivalent, which attempted to assign a monetary value to earned coverage by calculating what the same space would have cost as paid advertising. The metric was widely criticised, widely used, and eventually widely abandoned, though not before it had done considerable damage to the industry’s reputation for honest reporting.

The replacement metrics are better but not perfect. Share of voice. Message pull-through rates. Sentiment analysis. Website referral traffic from earned coverage. These are all more meaningful than AVE, but they still require careful interpretation. Share of voice tells you how much of the conversation you own relative to competitors. It does not tell you whether that conversation is influencing purchase decisions.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that struck me was how rarely PR-led campaigns could demonstrate a clear connection between the communications activity and the business outcome. The best entries could show the chain of causation: the campaign created awareness, awareness shifted consideration, consideration drove trial, trial drove revenue. Most entries showed impressive coverage numbers and then made a leap to claiming commercial impact without the evidence to support it.

Honest PR measurement starts with agreeing, before the campaign begins, what the commercial outcome looks like and what leading indicators you will use to track progress toward it. It accepts that some of the impact will be unmeasurable and does not pretend otherwise. And it uses the data that is available, including tools like behavioural analytics platforms to understand what happens when PR-driven traffic arrives on your site, to build a picture that is honest rather than flattering.

How Do You Evaluate Whether a PR Agency Is Actually Performing?

There is a version of this question that most clients ask, which is: are they getting us coverage? And there is the version that matters, which is: is the coverage they are getting us doing anything useful?

The two are not the same. An agency can generate a significant volume of coverage in publications that your target audience does not read, covering angles that do not reinforce your commercial message, in formats that do not drive any subsequent action. That agency will have a full report to show you every month and nothing to show for it in the business.

Evaluating PR performance properly requires you to go back to the brief. What were you trying to achieve? Who were you trying to reach? What did you want them to think, feel, or do differently as a result of the coverage? If you cannot answer those questions, you cannot evaluate the agency’s performance, and that is not entirely the agency’s fault.

Assuming the brief was clear, evaluation should look at a combination of outputs and outcomes. Outputs: the volume and quality of coverage, the relevance of the publications, the accuracy of message delivery. Outcomes: changes in brand perception, website traffic from earned media, inbound enquiries that reference specific coverage, sales team feedback on whether the PR programme is making conversations easier. None of these are perfect proxies, but together they build a picture that is more useful than a spreadsheet of clippings.

One thing I would add: the best indicator of PR agency performance is often qualitative. Are they bringing you ideas you had not thought of? Are they telling you things you do not want to hear when the situation calls for it? Are they proactive when there is an opportunity, not just reactive when you brief them? Those behaviours are harder to measure than coverage volume, but they are much better predictors of long-term value.

What Makes a PR Agency Relationship Last?

Long-term agency relationships are rarer than they used to be. The average tenure of a PR agency relationship has shortened as procurement processes have become more rigorous and as clients have become more willing to put accounts out to pitch. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Complacency is a real risk in long-running relationships, and a competitive pitch process keeps agencies sharp.

But there is something valuable in continuity that gets lost when relationships are churned too frequently. A PR agency that has worked with a brand for three or four years understands the organisation’s culture, knows which internal stakeholders are difficult to work with, has built genuine relationships with the journalists who matter in that sector, and has institutional knowledge that a new agency will spend the first six months trying to acquire. That knowledge has real commercial value, and it is worth factoring into any decision to put an account out to pitch.

The relationships that last tend to share a few characteristics. Mutual respect, which sounds obvious but is less common than it should be. A shared understanding of what success looks like. Honest communication in both directions, including the client being honest about internal constraints and the agency being honest about what is and is not working. And a willingness to evolve the scope of the relationship as the business changes, rather than locking into a fixed retainer that no longer reflects current priorities.

Brand language plays a significant role here too. Agencies that deeply understand how a client communicates, not just what they say but how they say it, produce better work and require less revision. There is a good piece on brand language as a strategic asset on MarketingProfs that is worth reading if you are thinking about how to brief an agency on tone and voice.

What Should You Ask a PR Agency Before You Hire Them?

Most client-agency selection processes focus on the wrong things. They evaluate the quality of the pitch presentation rather than the quality of the thinking. They assess chemistry with the senior team rather than the capability of the people who will actually do the work. They look at case studies from other industries rather than asking how the agency would approach the specific problem in front of them.

Here are the questions that actually matter. Ask them to describe a campaign that did not work and what they learned from it. Any agency that cannot answer this question honestly is either inexperienced or not trustworthy. Ask them how they handle a situation where the client wants to pursue a communications approach the agency believes is wrong. The answer tells you whether they will be a genuine partner or just a vendor. Ask them what they will need from you to do their best work. Good agencies have clear views on this. Ask them how they measure success and what they would do if the agreed metrics were not moving in the right direction.

And ask them about their journalist relationships. Not in the abstract, but specifically. Which journalists in your sector do they have genuine relationships with? When did they last speak to them? What do those journalists think of the agency? Media relations is still a significant part of what PR agencies do, and the quality of those relationships varies enormously. An agency with deep, trusted relationships in your sector is worth more than one with a larger but more superficial media list.

The Forrester perspective on agency compensation structures is also worth reviewing when you are structuring the commercial terms of a new relationship. How you pay an agency shapes how they behave, and that is a conversation worth having before the contract is signed rather than after.

If you are working through how to build or restructure a PR function, the full collection of articles on the PR & Communications hub covers everything from measurement frameworks to crisis communications to the relationship between PR and performance marketing.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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