Clients aren't doing DIY PR, they're doing what we sold them: Minari Shah

I read the piece in PRMoment India about how clients are opting for DIY PR. The agency leaders it spoke to made a persuasive case: knowing a journalist is not the same as knowing what to say, when to say it, or when to hold back. But the piece left out a crucial voice - What does the client think they are buying? And what have we taught them to expect?

For a startup, DIY often means something more consequential than writing its own press release. The founder or marketing lead decides how the company should be positioned, who it needs to persuade and what those audiences should believe. 

But the problem is that PR is brought in to secure coverage for a story that has already been decided. In my own recent conversations with founders, attention often veers quickly to how they prefer to focus on performance marketing as that has often an immediate bearing on their sales.

But as some of the agency leaders called out, the harder questions are about the company’s message and the audiences it needs to earn trust with. The problem is, founders may see that work as marketing rather than PR. And PR professionals in general, and agencies in particular (and yes there are exceptions), are quite culpable in helping create that perception. Too many agencies, large and small, still sell a media list, a press note and follow-up calls as the core of the service. If that is what founders experience, why would they expect an agency to help define the story?

Inside a larger company, DIY means something different. Mid-sized and large businesses have at least one dedicated communications person, often a team. They have access to the business conversations an outside agency may struggle to enter: a shifting customer problem, a leadership decision, a risk that has yet to become public. 

That proximity supports their inhouse focus on strategy. An agency can bring perspective the internal team lacks: a view across sectors and a sharper reading of outside audiences. But though agencies talk about this, the servicing teams are on a treadmill and rarely have the ability to offer such perspective. And the senior folks who have this knowledge are not available often enough to make this meaningful.

Moreover this requires the agency to go beyond the incoming brief and ask hard questions. Often it does not, or even more often, gives up when the client is unwilling or unable to give the answers. 

Rather than push the client to hear the hard truth, it is easier to go back to produce the release, pitch the story and report the coverage. The internal team concludes, quite reasonably, that the agency is there for amplification. That conclusion is built one tactical deliverable at a time.

Technology is making the distinction harder to ignore. AI can draft releases, pitches and bylines faster and influencer campaigns and paid placements offer sharper visibility. If an agency’s output looks interchangeable with an AI draft and a distribution list, the agency needs to introspect. Where is its distinctive diagnosis of the business problem? Which is the audience that matters, what belief needs to change, and what would count as progress and how are they helping the client reach that audience beyond just pitching a media story? How does it show a connection to business outcomes?

The article rightly calls out how good PR is all about judgment. But the judgment must be visible in the decisions it changes and the results it helps produce. From my years of experience leading inhouse teams in large companies and the current vantage point as an independent consultant, the market reflects this divide. 

Many large companies build their communications strategy internally and use agencies for execution or media outreach. Some smaller ones favour marketing and leave PR aside; others commission a project and stop. That perception problem hit me directly once I went independent. The same assumption, that PR means media access, followed me into client conversations. 

I had to intentionally build how I pitched myself before the projects that were actually meaningful and strategic started coming. In the past I saw this chiefly as a divide between agency and in-house teams. 

Training people on both sides since then complicated something I used to believe. I thought this was an agency versus in-house divide, one side stuck in tactics, the other undervaluing the work. It isn't. Too many of us, wherever we sit, stay in the comfort zone: the deliverable we know how to produce, the brief we fulfil without asking if it's the right brief. Leaving that zone means questioning a founder's positioning, pushing back on an internal team's assumptions, and saying when coverage is the wrong answer.

Clients do sometimes mistake a journalist’s contact details or even an easy relationship with couple of media folks for PR expertise. But agencies cannot demand to be valued for strategy while continuing to sell and measure themselves through execution. The way out of DIY PR is to show clients that they can provide the judgment and strategy, have the courage to ask tough questions and have the conviction to connect their work with business outcomes. 

Minari Shah is a brand strategy and communication consultant and former director, comms for Amazon in APAC