As we near the end of the second semester of the PRmoment Leaders Agency Programme, it’s gratifying to reflect on another excellent set of masterclasses completed. Our cohort of senior agency people have thoroughly enjoyed participating in interactive sessions with industry experts delivering bespoke insights, knowledge and learnings.

The second semester has featured high quality masterclasses from the following industry experts in our PRmoment Leaders faculty:

• Alex Aiken, ex-Govt Comms: Agency feedback session: How agencies can improve their offer

• Kwaku Aning & Jakob Rasmussen, FTI Consulting: How to future-proof the skills of agency businesses

• Caroline Fisher, ASICS: How PR is taking the lead in integrated campaigns

• Paul Smith, Amber Group: Harnessing personality types for agency success

• Lee Nugent, Archetype APAC: How to build agency culture

To give a flavour of what we’ve covered, I’ve taken the liberty of rather radically chopping down the wide-ranging and nuanced knowledge imparted by Alex, Kwaku, Jakob, Caroline, Paul and Lee into the 5 key takeaways below.

PRmoment Leaders Agency Programme - Second semester key takeaways

1. The future for our industry looks bright:

• PR continues to evolve at pace and the remit is expanding into exciting new areas:

  • The latest campaign work by ASICS across Europe is powerful evidence that comms-led, earned-first storytelling can drive exceptional integrated activation

2. While AI is fundamentally transforming our world:

• Among other effects, it definitely calls into question the traditional pyramid agency structure

  • PR is ripe for smart disruption - it’s time to seize the opportunities arising

3. However, PR agency leadership will remain human-centric for some time yet!:

• Studies show that AI cannot yet positively impact business problem solving, which continues to demand uniquely human skills, not least emotional intelligence

4.The same applies with the agency-client relationships at the heart of our business:

• Honesty and transparency remain essential to build trust and agencies need to act accordingly

  • E.g. agencies must never be tempted to promise they can deliver when lacking sufficient fire power, especially because of insufficient budget

5. And therefore agency culture still matters, a lot:

• Agency culture is maintained by a mix of top-down and bottom-up factors, built on the base of a shared sense of belonging:

  • Leaders must be role models who properly live their agency values - that’s non-negotiable

  • We all need to be ‘conscious communicators’, properly understanding our own communications preferences and those of the people around us - hey, we’re in comms after all!

We have a great cohort of mostly director and associate director level agency people taking part enthusiastically in both the learning and the peer-to-peer networking within our programme. The new semester starting in mid-January is an excellent moment to join in as we start a new semester.

If you’re interested in boosting your preparedness for leadership, get in touch with me directly at will@prmoment.com. It’ll be great to talk.

Thanks,

Will Hart

CEO, PRmoment Leaders