Stop Hiring PR Agencies. Start Hiring PR Partners.

The way most businesses buy PR is familiar. A brief is written, agencies are invited to pitch, credentials are assessed, and a decision is made — often with price as a significant factor.

The contract is signed. And within six months, in a pattern that repeats across the industry with depressing consistency, the client is quietly disappointed.

The brief was the problem.

What the Procurement Mindset Produces

When a business procures PR as a service — with a defined scope, specified deliverables, and a negotiated price — it gets exactly what it asked for: a supplier. An organisation that will produce the specified outputs, meet the defined deadlines, and manage the relationship in a way that protects the contract rather than the client's commercial interests.

An agency that executes the brief rather than challenges it. An account team that tells the client what they want to hear, because renewal depends on satisfaction, and satisfaction in a transactional relationship is produced by agreement rather than honesty.

The result is communications activity that is technically delivered and commercially inert — coverage without consequence, and a relationship renewed annually, not because it is generating return, but because switching costs feel higher than the disappointment of staying.

This is not the agency's failure. It is the structural consequence of applying a procurement model to a discipline that requires something fundamentally different.

What a PR Partnership Actually Requires

A PR partnership is not a procurement with better chemistry. It begins with a different kind of brief — one that defines the commercial objective the communications programme is designed to serve, rather than the outputs it is expected to produce.

It requires genuine access. The partner agency needs to understand the business — its strategy, its vulnerabilities, its competitive pressures — at a depth that a supplier managing a defined scope rarely achieves. This means real conversations, not just briefing documents, and the agency being present in strategic discussions before the communications decisions are handed down to execute.

It requires a different kind of honesty. The partner that tells clients only what they want to hear is not protecting the relationship — it is eroding it, because advice filtered through the anxiety of contract renewal is the advice least likely to serve the client's interest.

And it requires shared accountability for commercial outcomes — not the supplier's satisfaction at delivering specified outputs, but genuine co-ownership of whether the business is better positioned as a result.

The Selection Process That Finds the Right PR Partner

The standard pitch process is almost perfectly designed to select suppliers and screen out partners. It rewards presentation skill over strategic depth, and makes price a deciding factor — the clearest possible signal to the selected agency about the kind of relationship it is entering.

A better process begins with a conversation rather than a brief. It evaluates the quality of the questions the agency asks, not just the answers it provides. It assesses the willingness to challenge — to push back on assumptions, to say honestly when a planned approach is unlikely to work.

The agency that wins this process is not always the most prominent or the most competitively priced. It is the one whose thinking is most genuinely aligned with the business's commercial interests.

The PR relationship that produces a genuine return is not bought at the best available price. It is built on the right foundations — from the first conversation.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.

About Lighthouse PR

Lighthouse PR works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners. We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.

Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.