The Nicest PR Agency You Will Ever Fire
Simona never said no. Every brief came back "brilliant". Every rejection got a cheerful "We'll fix it." She agreed with four contradictory instructions in a single week without breaking a sweat, and everyone at the PR agency loved her for it. Clients requested her by name. Colleagues called her a safe pair of hands.
In eighteen months, not one person on that account team can remember her raising a single objection to anything a client asked for, however questionable the reasoning behind it. She was, by every social measure, wonderful to work with.
The Meeting Where the Warmth Ran Out
Every month, Simona's report showed green: coverage up, sentiment positive, engagement healthy, three tidy charts trending in the right direction.
Eighteen months of good news, delivered on time, in a nice font. Then the CFO, new to the account and not yet charmed, asked the one question the reports never answered: how much of any of this had actually moved revenue? The room went quiet.
Nobody had been measuring that. They had been measuring activity, dressed up convincingly as progress, and everyone, including the client, had been happy to accept the substitution because the alternative was an uncomfortable conversation nobody wanted to start.
The Recipe, If You Want to Repeat It
It is not difficult to build this outcome, and plenty of agencies do it without meaning to. Hire someone charming, and let charm quietly become the entire hiring criterion.
Never question the brief, because questioning it risks a slightly awkward first meeting. Report on coverage, sentiment, and engagement, and let those numbers stand in gently for the one that actually matters.
Praise every piece of creative warmly enough that nobody thinks to ask what it achieved. Do all four, faithfully, and in about eighteen months, someone will finally ask the revenue question, and you will be the one left with nothing to say.
Why Lighthouse PR Often Ruins the Chemistry on Purpose
This is the exact failure Lighthouse PR is structured to prevent, and we do it by being mildly less pleasant in week one than Simona ever was.
Every brief's assumptions get interrogated against real audience intelligence and competitive analysis before a single deliverable is produced, and every reporting framework is built around the metric that actually matters to the client's business, not the one that is easiest to make look good.
It costs us a little warmth at the first meeting. It is precisely why the eighteen-month version of this story has not and will never happen on our accounts.
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Note:
Simona is a composite, not a real account director, but every agency has one. If nobody has disagreed with you in eighteen months, that is not proof that your strategy is flawless. It is proof that everyone around you stopped saying otherwise, and the invoice for that silence always arrives eventually, usually disguised as a very reasonable question from someone who has not yet learned to stop asking them.
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 is a leading PR agency in Romania that 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 business growth and business continuity 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.