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Elements of Business Communication: How To Get Along Until You Hire Specialists

by Nelson Winkless

220 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #97-0004; ISBN 1-55212-081-3; US$17.95, C$27.95, EUR18.20, £12.60

The Elements of Business Communication (How To Get Along Until You Hire Specialists) shows the ropes to generalists in business who must take practical action on a hundred daily communications tasks. This handbook deals with practical matters from managing ad campaigns to selecting letterhead, and deciding how to cope with a negative newspaper story about the company.

The book's thirty-eight brief chapters answer questions like - How big is a BIG mailing? They point out non-obvious hazards, such as -Your ad agency may also become your banker, and neither of you will like it. They give advice that aids survival in big matters - Never fail to distinguish entering an existing market from creating a new market... and small - Before you distribute the business cards, make sure they are not cut cockeyed. On every page, the plain language and pointed examples are entertaining and informative.

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about the book     about the author     sample chapter     review by Paul Myers     catalogue info    

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About the Book

"Pure practical usability, in a clear and enjoyable form" -- Paul Myers, reviewing in Virtual Business News

The Elements of Business Communication (How to Get Along Until You Hire Specialists) is a practical handbook for generalists in business who must take practical action on a hundred daily communications tasks. Most companies are started by sales people, engineers, or other professionals with particular skills, who find themselves handling all sorts of work outside their own areas of expertise. In the months or years before they can bring in specialists to handle the different kinds of work, they must learn the ropes themselves, and do the best they can.

This small handbook, by a writer who has lived through the process repeatedly, deals with practical matters from managing ad campaigns to selecting letterhead, and deciding how to cope with a newspaper story attacking the company. This book does not tell you how to write an ad or a press release, but tells you why you might want to, lets you know what to expect when you do it, suggests who can help, under what circumstances. It points out the opportunities and pitfalls in phone systems, intranets, websites, trade shows, and many other matters in which the company will be involved.

The book presents and discusses "A Checklist of Basic Points To Consider" when starting any communications project, so the puzzled generalist has a familiar place to start on every task. Use of the checklist is demonstrated in several chapters.

Subtitled How To Get Along Until You Hire Specialists, the book's thirty-seven brief chapters answer questions like - How big is a BIG mailing? It points out non-obvious hazards, such as -Your ad agency may also become your banker, and neither of you will like it. It gives advice that aids survival in big matters - Never fail to distinguish between entering an existing market from creating a new market...and small - Before you distribute the business cards, make sure they are not cut cockeyed. On every page, the plain language and pointed examples are entertaining and informative.

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About the Author

Nelson Winkless has been a commercial writer and consultant in just about every aspect of business communications, and an executive in a number of companies. Based since 1970 in New Mexico he was a pioneer magazine editor in the personal computing field, has published several books with Harper's Magazine Press, The Robotics Press, and Dilithium Press, and has been a speaker internationally on such topics as changing climate, machine intelligence, and innovation.

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Chapter 12: Advertising and Public Relations Agencies

Using advertising and public relations agencies is a way of renting specialists without bringing them on staff, and creating a supporting structure around them. In theory, it is easy to drop one agency if it does not deliver what you want, and hire another. Ad and PR agencies (even one-man shows) are loaded with expertise and contacts that are usually not found in a young company bent on other business.

Agencies usually offer a wide range of services. They can sell you whatever you need, from handling the mechanics of advertising, such as laying out your ideas in the right size and materials, and arranging for their publication, to consulting on development of your entire promotional plan, and performing every chore necessary to carry it through. Your agency may be like your office supplies vendor, who delivers whatever you order from the catalog when you call. It may instead become your confidant and partner, doing research, anticipating your wants, telling you what you need, and doing all the work, subject only to your review and approval.

Ad agencies deal chiefly with paid display or broadcast of your material. PR agencies deal chiefly with the manufacture of news about their clients, which is passed on in the editorial sections of the media without a fee, because the information is interesting and/or useful. The functions of advertising and PR overlap significantly, but the key distinction is between paying money for treatment in the media and obtaining it by being interesting.

What's in the ad agency catalog?

Ad agencies sell knowledge of the media. They know where to buy print space and broadcast time, and how to get mass mailings done. They know how to make economical buys, getting the best terms. They know how to select media to reach exactly the audience you need to reach.

They sell creative services, taking your knowledge of what you want to present, and packaging it so that the right message gets to the right people through the media you pay for. They sketch the ideas, work with you, show you what your ads will look and sound like.

They produce the advertising materials. They buy services from photographers among their contacts, buy artwork, hire audio and video producers, contract with printers.

They send materials where they need to go at the time they should be there. This logistics function may be the major service that an agency can provide, depending on the volume of your activity. In practice, everything is in a state of change. Somehow, the stuff you produce, and plan to use in a single form in a lot of places, becomes complicated. Phone numbers change, and tag lines, and distributors, and goodness-knows-what. For example, you may decide to run an existing ad in a British publication that gets a lot of U.S. distribution. You make the commitment, and realize after the fact that their standard European page size is different from the standard U.S. page size, so you have to lay out the ad slightly differently, perhaps making new color separations. (Oops, that's "colour" for the Brits.) Mistakes can be expensive, and slipped schedules can blunt the effect of your advertising. An agency worth its salt has a department dedicated to sending the right stuff to the right place at the right time.

They know the mechanics of print, radio, and television production. They know what materials and services to buy, where to buy them, and they can judge the quality and pace of the work. A good agency has the showmanship necessary to help you sell your mutual ideas to the management of your company, and the status necessary to protect the ideas from your top management's urges to tinker with everything. An ad agency may also include public relations services in its catalog. The ad agency may offer to become your PR agency as well.

What does a PR agency do?

PR agencies help you to convey information, ideas, and attitudes by methods other than buying space or broadcast time for presentation of your messages.

What's in a PR agency catalog?

A PR agency helps you develop a coherent body of information to presentÉ helps you figure out how to explain what business you are in, who your people are, what your company's goals are. The agency helps you express that information clearly, so that your own people understand it, and outsiders can quickly understand who and what your company is.

They help you to develop a program for presenting that information in a consistent way, specifying a course of action to follow over a period of time. They help you prepare background materials--reports, brochures, videos--"white papers" describing the size, nature, history, and probable future of the business in which your company operates.

They contact editors, reporters, and other opinion-makers on your company's behalf, getting them personally acquainted with your management and with working contacts in your company. They write and distribute news releases about specific projects and products developed by your company, usually coordinated with advertising, so that you have the advantage of editorial as well as advertising exposure... and they help prepare the followup of information you'll provide when people respond to what you put out.

They help you respond to special situations. For example, if you have a chemical spill, or an employee is injured in an accident that attracts press attention, or your company is sued in some matter of public interest, or receives unwelcome regulatory attention... the PR agency can help you make clear, non-inflammatory statements. They can help keep your feet out of your mouth, and keep your excitable people from spilling gasoline on the fire.

If your company is public, a PR agency can help you communicate effectively with shareholders, the public, and regulatory agencies, assuring timely disclosure of substantive information as the law requires.

What do agencies cost?

Ad agency charges to clients are a constant source of soul-searching, controversy, and confusion. Much of this arises from the history of ad agencies.

Back in the olden days, when an advertiser wanted to place a notice in a publication, he'd tell the publisher what he wanted it to say, and the printer would set the type with appropriate headlines and illustration, often giving advice to the advertiser on how to improve the ad. This inevitably turned into a lot of work for the publisher's crew.

As technology changed, and it became possible for advertisers to design and present ads of their own making, ready for the press, publishers were eager to encourage advertisers to do it themselves. They began to offer discounts to advertisers who would provide ads ready to print without further discussion. Eventually, a 15% discount became conventional. This opened up another opportunity.

People who were good at creating ads contacted advertisers, and said "We'll design and produce your ads for you, if you'll let us keep the 15%. That way, you get our services effectively free, and the publishers are delighted to get professional looking ads to make their publications look good, without so much work. We'll be your agent for advertising."

It was such a good deal for everybody that it became standard practice to use ad agencies. Agencies also banded together in restrictive guilds whose ostensible, maybe even actual, purpose was to certify "real" ad agencies so that advertisers would not be abused by opportunists masquerading as professionals. The guilds worked with publishers, who were glad to get out of the admaking business entirely, and eventually began to offer the discount only through agencies, not directly to the advertisers.

The effect was to set the agency's fee at 15% of its client's "billing," the gross cost of the ad space or broadcast time purchased for the client. This led to some other complications. If the client was spending $100,000 to run ads, the agency had $15,000 to work with... to design the ad, produce it, make the media buys, and distribute the materials. That $15k was a lot if the work was applied to a single ad running repeatedly in one or two publications. However, if the client ran ten different ads in several different places, the amount of work involved was significantly greater, and the $15k didn't seem like much.

Further, the cost of producing ads varies. Classy artwork and photography cost more than clip art. Carefully crafted copy takes time to produce. Media research and studies of advertising effectiveness also don't come free.

Agencies make a practice of charging for services they purchase (such as art and photography) by marking the cost up 17.65% before passing the bill along to the client. That made the markup 15% of the total invoice presented to the client... in line with tradition. They also began to bill for many of their services, such as copywriting and conferences, on an hourly basis. The 15% discount on media buys was considered to be a retainer and the fee just for handling the media.

The upshot is the confusion mentioned above. Costs tend to be competitive for comparable work, but, of course, judgment of what's "comparable" is highly subjective. Ask around. See what others are paying, and negotiate. Again, you can buy specific services from an agency; you don't have to hand over all of your work. How much do you want to do internally?

Make sure that all of these matters are clear, and everybody understands the relationships of the parties involved. These relationships change, of course, and must be reexamined. You don't have to search your soul every day, and call constant meetings, but you want to be careful not to let changes occur without thinking about them.

Note also that the media organizations are not monolithic in their attitudes toward giving discounts only to accredited agencies. Many, especially publishers of trade, rather than consumer publications, will give the discount directly to advertisers, requiring only that the material is ready to use. This is driven chiefly by changing technology. For a few tens of thousands of dollars now, any company can acquire computer capability unimagined as recently as the mid 1980s. The advertiser doesn't need the special equipment of lithography houses, and other production specialists. The skills of those specialists are now largely embodied in software. Anybody can now do in a small office the design and production work that once required a troupe of skilled professionals and a complex business infrastructure.

Somebody with taste, judgment, a good ear, a good eye, and some imagination is still necessary to create worthwhile stuff, but that person can produce the finished elements anywhere--in the advertiser's house, in an agency, at a photographer's studio, wherever things happen to work. The old structure is changing.

Some considerations in working with agencies

Don't expect to save time or money by using an agency. You can gain reliability, perspective, and professional effectiveness by using an agency, but don't look for savings.

You will have meetings and more meetings. You will spend time and money to go to their place; you will pay them to come to your place. The time necessary to travel between your offices becomes significant. Electronic communications have sharply reduced the need to send messengers running back and forth with papers, but you simply must talk face to face frequently.

When an agency offers both ad and PR services, the arguments to use the same agency for both functions are mighty appealing. After all, you don't have to train two different organizations in the business of your company and its markets. PR and ad campaigns can be coordinated easily when the same people are handling both. Photo sessions can easily produce materials for both ads and PR. The ad agency already has extensive contact with the media, knows the editorial schedules, usually knows the editors, can do mass mailings, knows how to get materials designed and produced. It often makes sense to lump the activities with a single agency. Many companies do buy both advertising and PR services from a single agency.

And yet... many don't, as a matter of policy. The reasons are not always clear, but the underlying reason seems to be that advertising departments and editorial departments operated by publishers and broadcasters are philosophically separated in our society. There's a persistent feeling that, while a free press depends upon advertising to relieve its dependence on patronage from governments, the editorial function should be independent of the advertising, too. Beyond altruism, it's a matter of style, approach, and a desire for simplicity.

Mind you, the woods are full of editors who eagerly sell their covers and run feature stories as part of their deals with advertisers. Some advertisers demand editorial coverage in return for placing ads. Still, the widespread conviction is that advertisers should be buying access to an audience, not control of editorial. It's tough for an agency that handles both advertising and PR to keep the functions separate. Some manage; some don't. It's often simpler to separate the functions sharply by working with different agencies. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Your agency may become your banker

An ad agency can become your biggest creditor, for comparatively large amounts of money, in no time flat, and the consequences should be considered before it happens.

When the agency places an ad for you, the agency is responsible for paying for it. Yes, your young company is responsible also, but the media go first to the people who actually placed the order. That fifteen percent doesn't look so big when you realize that the agency is on the hook for the other eighty-five percent as well. When the agency places advertising for you, your company is borrowing the agency's credit first, and actual cash next.

Suppose you begin a campaign, running five half-page color ads a month in trade magazines, at an average cost of $4000 each. Payment isn't due until the ads run, so you start easy. You pay the agency for creative and production costs as you go, but in the bustle of launching new products, building a sales organization, and traveling, your young company becomes a bit strapped for cash. When the media bills come in, your accounts payable department prudently stretches payment to ease the strain on cash flow. If they drag out payment for a couple of months, you owe the agency $40,000, and the agency begins to get nervous. They don't want to endanger their relationship with you, especially in the middle of big new activities, so they don't press at first. As the bill climbs to $60,000 the amount looks even scarier to your accounts payable people, and they become even less enthusiastic about paying out gobs of money. It's easy (one reports from experience) to run up a hundred grand in media bills almost without noticing. It is not (one also reports from experience) a happy situation.

The problem becomes especially severe if the company's marketing people are not in constant communication with the company's financial people, and fully aware of how things stand. The company communications person may call the agency one day on some routine matter, and be unable to reach the account exec there, being passed instead to the agency's financial person for a discussion of overdue bills. "What? You mean we haven't been paying you? There must be some mistake." The shocking discovery is often followed by an internal battle between the marketer, who feels betrayed by the financial people, and the financial people, who feel the communications people are spending vast sums irresponsibly. Sensible planning avoids a lot of this, of course, but in adventuresome young companies, governed largely by emotion, these problems do occur remarkably often.

An alert agency won't let this happen, but they are not necessarily smarter or more virtuous than you, and agencies also let these things get out of hand with depressing frequency. An incautious agency can bankrupt itself with horrifying speed... which brings up another hazard: if you pay them, and they don't pass payment on to the publishers and broadcasters, a lot of people will be very cranky about running your ads, and not being paid. Lawsuits follow, but they don't help anybody extract blood from turnips. If the money's gone, and the key players are bankrupt, there's little to do about it.

Consider another negative possibility. A wealthy agency may happily cover the costs of advertising, building a promising client's business, and then, when the client is really strapped for capital, take payment in stock, driving a very hard bargain.

Your young company may find itself with a strong, demanding partner, possibly even a controlling partner, whose influence is unwelcome.

Further, while it's easy in theory to stop buying services from one provider (an agency), and start buying from another, it isn't easy in practice. Becoming disentangled is complicated by a thousand compromising details: who owns what? what work is in progress? who has the necessary contacts? Emotional ties are also binding. Changes are tough. It can be disconcerting to discover that you are not in control of matters for which you are responsible.

Keep your wits about you. Know where you stand. Young companies work successfully with agencies all the time, with both parties profiting happily from their association. Just try not to leave the matter to chance.

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Review by Paul Myers

Paul Myers reviewed The Elements of Business Communication in his online newsletter Virtual Business News. [To subscribe to VirtualBusiness News, send an email to:Weekly@TheOffice.Net with the Subject: subscribe]. Paul Myers can be reached at paulm@virtualbusiness.net

Copyright © 1997 Paul Myers. All Rights Reserved. Republished with Permission.

The Elements of Business Communication

Every once in a while you hear an idea so good that you wonder why it hasn't been done before. And you hope that it lives up to it's promise, knowing that most of the time it won't.

Books like this are the ones that make it worth hoping.

Most people, when they first start companies, find themselves doing things that are outside their area of expertise. Most of this is in the area of communications. Often this leads to blunders that can be easily avoided, given the experience or forewarning. This book helps to provide both of those vital elements.

It should be pointed out up front that Elements is not a "How to" book in the usual sense. It puts more focus on the process of communication and shows the issues to consider, rather than emphasizing tiny details. The aim is to get the reader familiar with the role of a communicator in the business process. Show you the ropes, so to speak. And warn you about the trip wires.

The first thing you almost don't notice is that Mr. Winkless knows what he's doing. Most books on communication are such dreary things, buried in their own theory, that they are difficult to understand for anyone not well versed in the terminology. The authors seem to understand the theory of practical communication, but miss something in it's practice. You may admire their writing style, and marvel at their seeming depth, but actually *use* the stuff? Not likely. You spend a lot of time thinking about the book, and very little thinking about the subject.

Mr. Winkless goes straight to the subject and it's practical application and he stays there, keeping your attention with him. When he gets into theory, he does so with such clear and relevant examples that you barely notice you're actually ... (heavens!!) ... Learning!

He begins with a checklist of questions to ask yourself on each facet of communications, ranging from business cards to corporate videos and PR. The surprising thing is that these questions fit no matter which end of the spectrum they're used on. I couldn't think of a communications scenario where they wouldn't fit. (This checklist is a very useful tool all by itself.)

He then takes a few pages to cover the changes that have occurred in business, as far as their relationship to communications. Simple reminders, but very useful in light of the subjects covered, which range from business cards and forms all the way to email and intranets. Even when (and how) to keep quiet!

Each of these subjects is covered in clear terms, and in brief. The chapter on newsletters which was used here two weeks ago is a fair example of the type of material in the book.

Humor plays a big role in the value of the book. The author seems to be a master at making things enjoyable and useful at the same time. As an example, his fanciful beginning to a press release:

   Acme Fictitious Whistle Manufacturing Company is the world's
   leader in production and distribution of electronic whistles that
   warn dolphins to stay away from the nets of tuna fishermen, while
   attracting tuna to the nets. The company has received awards from
   both environmentalist and industry groups, and currently has a
   contract with the government of Nicaragua to develop whistles
   that repel sharks.

This little gem was surrounded by some of the most practical commentary on the value of press releases that I have ever read.

Most of the chapters on solid, concrete topics had that one thing in common. Pure practical usability, in a clear and enjoyable form.

The more abstract chapters are equally informative. They touch on the main points that anyone in charge of a companies' communication should be aware of. Having been involved in communications for many years, the examples and warnings stirred a lot of "Yeah. I can relate!" responses. Especially the potential for mistakes. (Ahhh, if I had only known then ...)

This book fills a very important void in business education. It shows a lot of ways to avoid the pitfalls of business communication (there are a lot of them). It gives examples that aid in developing intelligent thinking in the decision making on those areas. And it tells you what to expect as you advance through the various communication systems that young companies need.

The distribution method is somewhat unique in itself. The books are printed on demand, from digital files at the publishing company. In keeping with the awareness of changing communications styles, the book has it's own support web site, where the author answers questions and discusses matters relating to the book.

I highly recommend Elements for anyone starting in business, or anyone who simply wants to improve their business communications skills and savvy. I am going to make a point of re-reading it myself, at least once.

Make sure to visit the support site at www.swcp.com (Note: This is presented for review purposes. I have no financial involvement with this book, it's author or publisher... Paul)

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Catalogue Information

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