Smaller rabbit holes
Dream Catchers
Why I was wrong. About so many things
2 mins
Confession time: I used to think that 'PR for marketing agencies' was the commercial equivalent of a dream catcher.
You know.
Lovely idea, theory makes sense. Very decorative - covered in fluff and feathers. Certain people spoke about it with surprising conviction. They Believed.
But really, when it came down to it: handcrafted bobbins and really just a way to extract money from people who were having trouble sleeping at night.
So yeah, when it came to actually growing an agency, it's fair to say I wasn't buying it.
My world was much more... tangible.
Calls. Meetings. Opportunities. Pipeline. Pitches. Wins.
You could point to those things, count them. Improve them. Review them.
PR, on the other hand, always felt a little... wispy.
Quarterly reports proudly announcing twelve pieces of coverage across publications with a combined readership of several million people.
Brilliant. Now show me the opportunities.
I wasn't trying to be difficult, I just genuinely couldn't see the mechanism.
Then something changed. Not PR, me.
Over the years I found myself working alongside some genuinely brilliant PR people.
Not the stereotype I'd unfairly built in my head. These were thoughtful, commercial, strategic folk. People who understood that the article itself wasn't really the product.
Their articles did help catch dreams. Because suddenly my cold outreach wasn't so cold. It wasn't introducing an agency from scratch because I could reference client coverage in Retail Week.
Prospects had heard of us, conversations started a little warmer, trust arrived a little earlier.
Nobody could point to one article and say: "That one generated £250,000."
That was never its job. Its job was to make everything else work a little better.
Once I'd seen that, I started noticing commercial dream catchers everywhere.
Founder visibility. Thoughtful content. Speaking at events. Interesting partnerships. Publishing useful ideas. Being known for Something.
None of them, in isolation, reliably create opportunities on a Tuesday afternoon, at least not in a directly attributable way that you can pinpoint as you would be able to from a cold call / email.
But collectively... they all make those same Tuesdays opportunities happen more often.
That's the mistake I made. I was asking them to do the wrong job.
Some commercial activities generate demand. Others create the conditions in which demand is more likely to appear.
The older I get, the longer my list of commercial dream catchers becomes. And funnily enough… They're usually the things I used to dismiss as fluffy.
Confession time: I used to think that 'PR for marketing agencies' was the commercial equivalent of a dream catcher.
You know.
Lovely idea, theory makes sense. Very decorative - covered in fluff and feathers. Certain people spoke about it with surprising conviction. They Believed.
But really, when it came down to it: handcrafted bobbins and really just a way to extract money from people who were having trouble sleeping at night.
So yeah, when it came to actually growing an agency, it's fair to say I wasn't buying it.
My world was much more... tangible.
Calls. Meetings. Opportunities. Pipeline. Pitches. Wins.
You could point to those things, count them. Improve them. Review them.
PR, on the other hand, always felt a little... wispy.
Quarterly reports proudly announcing twelve pieces of coverage across publications with a combined readership of several million people.
Brilliant. Now show me the opportunities.
I wasn't trying to be difficult, I just genuinely couldn't see the mechanism.
Then something changed. Not PR, me.
Over the years I found myself working alongside some genuinely brilliant PR people.
Not the stereotype I'd unfairly built in my head. These were thoughtful, commercial, strategic folk. People who understood that the article itself wasn't really the product.
Their articles did help catch dreams. Because suddenly my cold outreach wasn't so cold. It wasn't introducing an agency from scratch because I could reference client coverage in Retail Week.
Prospects had heard of us, conversations started a little warmer, trust arrived a little earlier.
Nobody could point to one article and say: "That one generated £250,000."
That was never its job. Its job was to make everything else work a little better.
Once I'd seen that, I started noticing commercial dream catchers everywhere.
Founder visibility. Thoughtful content. Speaking at events. Interesting partnerships. Publishing useful ideas. Being known for Something.
None of them, in isolation, reliably create opportunities on a Tuesday afternoon, at least not in a directly attributable way that you can pinpoint as you would be able to from a cold call / email.
But collectively... they all make those same Tuesdays opportunities happen more often.
That's the mistake I made. I was asking them to do the wrong job.
Some commercial activities generate demand. Others create the conditions in which demand is more likely to appear.
The older I get, the longer my list of commercial dream catchers becomes. And funnily enough… They're usually the things I used to dismiss as fluffy.