After my mini rant about the death of PR (at least as it's come to be perceived) I then come across an agency that feels somewhat the same way, but which has the balls to fight for PR's rightful place in the marketing landscape. It's Unity, and this from its website:

Time for a change
Public relations? It’s a strange phrase isn’t it. For some, it represents spin, double-talk and propaganda and for others it’s the poorer, slightly fluffier relation to the big daddy of advertising. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

For us, relating to publics is an holistic process, involving all the marketing disciplines, often unified around a single, compelling theme and aimed at creating greater clarity and understanding. Sometimes a brand is misunderstood, sometimes it’s only too well understood and sometimes it’s just not being heard. Whatever the problem, we’d like to think we can help. The thing is, we also think it’s time our industry looked beyond the obvious.

Advertising can achieve “good PR”, so can direct, ambient and guerrilla marketing – in fact the possibilities are almost endless. Which begs the question, why do so many agencies immediately reach for the press release?

To a certain extent, we’ve only got ourselves to blame. We let other disciplines lead the thinking, we focus on the process (let’s do some “PR”) rather than the outcome, and we often lack the courage to pitch the client the big idea.

So we started Unity to challenge the way people think about PR.

Lovely. Some nice pics on the website too.

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