MaxTB.com

A PR career is a funny thing. The account exec role births you into a chaotic world of frenzied media relations and client report deadlines. But no sooner do you get a grip on these fundamentals than the skillset gives way bit by bit to a dynamic of planning, strategy and deeper client management.

In my experience, both requirements are deeply satisfying but in enormously different ways.  What I’m wondering is if there’s a sweetspot somewhere along the career ladder where you get the best of both worlds. After all, there are only traditionally so many positions available- AE, AM, AD/ AssD, MD.

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Graham Goodkind’s recent piece on why PR timesheets should be scrapped seems to over-simplify the issue.  Certainly, they’re an imperfect system as demonstrated by his stats showing how they are inevitably filled out with less than ideal accuracy.

But so’s democracy – as Churchill famously stated, it’s the “worst form of Government except for all others that have been tried” – and you don’t see us turning our back on that institutional bastion.

Instead, Graham focuses on the idea of selling ‘value’ as opposed to simple hours.

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Hello anonymous blinking observers.

It’s time to announce that as of Monday the 15th of March, I’ll be leaving my role at the magnificent global PR powerhouse AxiCom to join the team of thrusting young things at Wildfire PR.

Raising the Temperature

You may be familiar with the agency online via such noted Wildfirers as DannyWhatmough and DebbyPenton ( or have met them in real life as Danny Whatmough and Debby Penton respectively…) Alternatively, I’d be surprised if you haven’t read the brilliant Wildfire blog or indeed Danny’s own.

For many of you this will mean business as usual except for one logical alteration: what once was @maxicom is now part of my wider web presence as @maxtb.

There will be no encores…

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The writing of this post was accelerated by today’s launch of An Inconvenient PR Truth, a marketing campaign from RealWire with its own clever take on the PR spam situation.  It’s easy on the eyes, cleverly tied in with RealWire’s colours and even comes with its own journalists’ Bill of Rights

But of course, it’s just a nice idea.  If the problem of PR spam could be solved by education alone then God knows there are enough training courses and articles out there for it to have disappeared a long time ago.

I think there may be a better solution out there…

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