INTERVIEW: Lou Hoffman, CEO, The Hoffman Agency

A major topic this year has been the need for the PR industry to become more creative. How important do you think it is for PR agencies to appoint creative directors?

Lou Hoffman: This is a topic I’ve been struggling with for 24 years. It has been tough to balance creativity with the daily grind. But appointing a GM for North America has allowed me to spring into a more creative role—to propagate ideas, organise storytelling workshops. Building the curriculum of these workshops is like a form of R&D: it’s a revenue stream that also makes clients more effective. I have so many ideas that I’ve never been able to act on. One of those [I am most passionate about] is applying storytelling techniques to communications.

‘Storytelling’ has become a buzzword in PR, but do you think the average PR  professional really knows what it means?

LH: No, most people still do not understand storytelling. Look at the press materials developed across the PR community. If you could aggregate those and then look at what journalists need to write interesting stories, is there any bigger disconnect? Why are we still putting out this corporate drivel? Part of it is clients not understanding how the world works. Sometimes as long as the URL is distributed, they are happy with it even if it’s ignored by every journalist in the free world. The PR community doesn’t spend enough time developing content. But I think storytelling can be taught. You don’t have to be Hemingway. I’m starting to really drive this through our organisation. Our size is an advantage—it’s not a massive undertaking.

Some might see The Hoffman Agency as relatively traditional. What are you doing to build expertise in the digital space?

LH: Our work out of Hong Kong tends to tilt to the traditional side, but we’re doing our damndest to change that. We need to get on board in helping clients build their digital presence and that cannot be accomplished through traditional PR activities [such as media relations]. Up to 80 per cent of traffic to media properties is coming through search. It’s a whole different behaviour that you have to deal with. Often, clients [in general] might have innovative programmes in the US, but not necessarily overseas. To be crude, it’s that the funding isn’t there. A lot of the time in Asia, the communications function is under-funded, so people tend to apply typical building blocks to get the best ROI out of a programme. If you take the ‘high risk, high reward’ approach, spend half your budget and the reward isn’t there, heads can roll.

Do you believe PR needs to become more ‘scientific’?

LH: A lot of people in PR think [the industry] isn’t capable of handling the technological side of communications. People want you to believe there’s this ‘black box’, but it’s just not true. We need to have an understanding of the fundamentals of SEO. There’s no greater vote that content is good than if people are sharing it. Link building the right way—organically—and boosting abilities in SEO to attract traffic all feed off each other.

We are constantly seeing more activity in the area of corporate/brand ‘journalism’. Do you think this is living up to its promise? Is it credible?

LH: I don’t know if credibility is as important as the content achieving its goal. That might be to entertain or to educate. It’s still early days but this is on its way to becoming an important part of what we do. Journalists are not going anywhere but the idea of companies being media properties is just at the tip of the iceberg. [Ultimately], people just want good stuff—because there’s so much dreadful stuff out there. It doesn’t matter if it comes from journalists or not. I would say that content [itself] is not king; compelling content is king. The winning hand is when you can do it the right way: so few people can.

Now that you have more time to devote to the network outside the US, what do you plan to focus on?

LH: We like being independent but size gives you incredible clout to make investments that we can’t make. We’re a small agency. One thing I have been thinking about is: could we find like-minded agencies with a global footprint in areas such as healthcare, for example, and form a consortium where we are all chipping in, to then address some big problems or wins that individually we could never go after. That is something that intrigues me. A way that allows us to out-compete the big [networks] where intuitively you would think they have a leg up on us. The challenge is that there just aren’t a lot of agencies like us that [also] have a global footprint. Being global is critical because operationally it’s as big a driver as anything. But the world isn’t set up to help little companies that want to do things on a global scale.

Our aspirations are becoming more McKinsey-like. It’s a long road but in terms of skillset and the type of people we are looking for, we are paying more attention to critical thinking and problem solving. The best assignments involve clients putting something on your desk that they can’t figure out on their own. In future, more of our people will need to come from outside PR and mass communications. We’re going to have to recruit at a more senior level too. It’s going to require salesmanship on our part to put a proposition together to grab that sort of A-player.