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In 1967, the p.r. field is harder than ever to delineate, for a p.r. man may be anyone from a $100,000-a-year vice president to an operative with a mimeograph machine and a credit card. But certain trends stand out. The virtuoso has given way to committees, with a memo-writing style involving such terms as "idea transference," "posture of receptivity," and the "multiple-channel approach." Specialization is on the rise: there are firms for proxy fights, firms for staying out of trouble on civil rights, firms to get the New Rich into society, firms oriented toward culture or sports.
The newest specialty is represented by the rising political public relations firms. Spencer-Roberts of Los Angeles is the best known because of its highly successful labors on behalf of Governor Ronald Reagan—labors that include speechwriting, committee building, primary programming, and electronic data-processing to determine the hottest issues and project voter reactions.
The largest p.r. companies offer whole teams of specialties within their walls, not unlike systems engineering or medical group practice. A case in point is Hill and Knowlton, today's biggest p.r. firm, with a client roster that includes the Iron and Steel Institute, Procter & Gamble, and Svetlana Alliluyeva. Explains H. & K. President Bert Goss: "Suppose a client walks in with an antitrust suit on his hands. One of our financial men can draft a memo to stockholders immediately; a writer will do a speech for the company president; another will huddle with a law professor and prepare a backgrounder on the legal aspects."
Growing specialization is also characteristic of the p.r. setups inside big companies. Today, many top executives are looking for men who have had a solid grounding in business administration or finance. Of the 750 largest U.S. companies, 84% now have a public relations department, half of them headed by a vice president. How much influence they have still varies widely among firms. In a survey two years ago, Professor Robert Miller of American University's School of Business Administration found that only 31% of top corporation heads consulted their p.r. men on major policy matters. That situation, Miller finds, has slightly improved as the quality of p.r. personnel has been upgraded.
There are ill-defined border areas where p.r. blurs into other activities, notably promotion, as in the creation, out of thin air, of a thin ephemeral wonder named Twiggy. Or else p.r. may be used as a label for image cosmetics, as when a p.r. firm is trying to make Frank Sinatra seem more civic-minded and Bobby Kennedy's press secretary is trying to make him seem less ruthless. Thus it is never easy to tell exactly what p.r. practitioners do. One of their most important functions is the least publicized; it lies not in interpreting the client to the world, but the world to the client. A recent Utopian short story in the Atlantic envisioned a community supervised not by censors but "sensors"—men who sense what the public is thinking. The best p.r. men are sensors.
Businessmen & Gypsies