Are your stars aligned?

It’s always interesting to read about the latest all powerful political/business stars to join the ranks of our industry’s largest agencies. Today’s news focused on Karen Hughes (the president’s former top advisor) being named a vice chairman at Burson-Marsteller. Beyond the obvious star attraction that she could bring to Burson’s most important global client organizations, this firm’s strategy is clearly to create a more balanced, political reputation for itself (one that offsets CEO Mark Penn’s strong Democratic ties.)

Throughout the years, I’ve witnessed/heard/read about many of these stars comings and goings. Often, they will parachute in with great fanfare and publicity to the likes of Edelman, Burson, Fleishman, etc. Then, a year or two later, we’ll quietly hear about how “it just didn’t work,” or “he/she helped in a key area and it was time to go.” And, it makes you wonder if the egos and chemistry never allowed for success to take place. Or, did the firm never really understand how best to leverage value from the celebrity executive in the first place.

Green is our industry’s favorite color (and that only partially has to do with money.) Now, most every agency has jumped onto the environmental bandwagon. Because of this, we’re now witnessing major recruiting efforts by our industry to find those “green stars” who can make their sustainability communications practices grow like weeds. You know, these are the guys and gals who have spent years working as high level bureaucrats in either the DEP or Department of Energy, or some other top environmental government or think tank spot.

I’ve met with a number of colleagues who’ve hired these green kingpins. From our talks, it’s clear that while these people have star power and often look good in prospect meetings, very little business has actually been procured through these newly found relationships. One problem is that our typical clients (communications executives) are not usually the right functional executives to offer these services to. That said, most senior agency executives learned a long time ago how to navigate around/through their clients’ organizations to find that one manager or executive who is the right target. Still, I believe the bigger issue here is that most in our industry aren’t very skillful in creating the right packaging around their own new products or services (this is kind of amazing since we help to package client stories to the media all day long.) Take this issue at hand though – it’s one thing to hire a bigwig for a new Green PR practice, it’s quite another to be able to articulate what services he/she can offer that are different than all the competitors and how this offering will truly bring value.

We’ve certainly brought aboard some high level, credible executives from non traditional backgrounds to deliver completely different services than that is typical in our industry. That’s been extremely exciting for Peppercom and has paid off in countless ways. But, to date, we haven’t gone the executive celebrity route because our culture probably wouldn’t accept it. One can never say never… but it sure is hard to get those stars aligned.