Gorkana meets Lord Tim Bell

12 March 2010 | written by Celina Maguire

When I arrive in the fifth floor Curzon Street office of Lord Tim Bell, the most influential man in PR, I am hoping for a 30 minute chat to find out his thoughts on the industry, social media and the like. My luck is most definitely in as I find him in an expansive and reflective mood about the industry he loves.

As chairman of Chime Communications, Lord Bell resides over an empire that spans 19 PR companies and includes Bell Pottinger, Good Relations, Harvard, Stuart Higgins Communications and Resonate, some of the best known PR agencies in the country. Over the next hour and a bit, the man who helped found Saatchi & Saatchi before going on to mastermind many of the Conservative Party’s most successful campaigns opens up about all things PR…

Lord Bell thanks very much for your time today.
Please call me Tim.

Many people have credited you with being the founder of modern PR – what do you say to that?
I don’t think I’m the founder of anything – I don’t take myself that seriously. It’s true that I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’ve met a lot of people and I know a lot of people…and I’ve learned and I’ve listened and I’ve not had the arrogance to think I can do something better than my predecessors would have done it.

I think I probably had a very high profile because of the election work I did for Margaret Thatcher. That was a very successful period and because it’s a seminal period in the history of the British economy and the British country, I get attributed all sorts of garlands to which I’m not entitled. I do keep saying they’re not true but nobody believes me.

One of the things Maurice Saatchi [one of the co-founders of Saatchi and Saatchi] did was to talk about the advertising industry, how it works and the function of advertising in the economic mix and that always struck me as a rather more sensible thing to do than simply compete for the best idea. So I’ve taken the trouble to try and understand what communications is and how it works and I talk about it because if you’re going to have someone spend millions of pounds on your advice then it’s probably a good idea that you can convince them that you know what you’re talking about.

I don’t like the myths and the mystification of it. I think the jargon is silly and I think there are people who try and make PR sound fantastically complicated when it’s really quite simple – why try and use long words to make it sound more important than it actually is, and I don’t like people who demonstrate their ignorance by trying to sound like they’re highly intelligent when they’re not. These are all things I would say to my client about the way they communicate.

The great skill of our industry is that we take very complicated and complex issues and propositions and fantastically simplify them – that’s our great achievement.

Are you still hands on with accounts?
I spend around 70% of my time on client work. My skill set is that I’m a highly glorified suit. Suits are responsible for client relationships and relationships contain all sorts of things, from getting someone tickets for something to very big things like changing what’s written in a newspaper.

I feel particularly passionate about this industry and what it does and how it does it and I feel passionate about Chime.

I love doing pitches…and I’m extremely good at talking about this business and what we do and the industry and how it works so I spend a lot of my time visiting chief executives and chairmen and presidents and prime ministers and talking to them about communication and how it works.

Having a title is quite helpful – people quite like people with titles. For some reason they feel that means something.

What impact has the recession had on the industry?
One thing the recession has done is that people have discovered that they can achieve satisfactory results using internet communication and I think that habit will stick and I think the industry reacted to that by creating greater capability. And I think that is a structural change which is partly caused by the economic recession and partly by the technology connected to the internet becoming more relevant.

Markets have structural change and generational change. Commercial television and the internet are the two great generational changes in the British market and it’s a great mistake to think that social media is a generational change, it’s not.

What do you make of the advent of social media then?
Social media is just a distribution system of messages to a target audience and for some reason people have given them funny names…but to move them as though they are somehow more important than other forms of communication I think is a great mistake. Marshall McLuhan said in the early 50s ‘it’s the medium, not the message’. He was wrong then and he’s wrong now and anyone who repeats that now is still wrong.

Television at the moment, no matter what anyone says, is still the most powerful and impactful form of communication…Using what is effectively a television screen as though it is a newspaper (the internet) is, I think, a mistake.

I think newspapers are terribly important but not the most important thing in the world, I think posters are very important but not the most important and I think social media is important but not the most important and this modern debate of ‘shall we be digital or not’ is just fatuous.

I think the PR industry is prone to attracting people who want to claim that they can do something or understand something that other people can’t or don’t and so they catch on to something new and they try to be the people who can use it better than anyone else. The problem is that quite a few PR people bother themselves with discussing whether PR is better than advertising or advertising is better than direct marketing, which is just a completely silly conversation.

Everybody in the communications business should be channel neutral and they should seek out the channel which is most cost effective and most likely to deliver their message to the right people in the most economic way. To write down rules to say that x is better than y is just arrogant, silly and rather stupid without substance.

When commercial television started everyone predicted that newspapers would close but actually more opened. When the video recorder came along everyone said that people would stop watching television but actually they increased the number of hours they watched. As the internet emerged everyone predicted again that newspapers would disappear but they didn’t, they went online.

Because the internet is simply a distribution channel. I keep saying this and nobody agrees with me and they all think it’s very boring but that’s what it is – it isn’t anything else.

What do you think about professionalisation of the PR industry?
To be honest with you I’m the wrong person to ask because I don’t have any educational qualifications of any substance.

I learned doing the job and I think that’s probably the best way to learn it. I’m not convinced that people with MBAs or degrees in marketing or communications actually have any idea about how to apply that learning in the real world. The fact that you’ve studied theoretically doesn’t mean you know how to do something practically.

What’s your newspaper of choice?
The Times.
I’ve developed the ability to speed read – it’s something you learn to do. I’m not saying it’s a substitute for reading at length and reading properly but every day the newspapers are spread out in my office and I can glance at them and pretty much know what’s going on.

How are you feeling about the year ahead?
I think 2010 in the UK is going to be a very difficult year because there’s a general election, there’s a ridiculous political debate about what economic policy should be followed, the country is bankrupt, it’s very, very hard to see how the levels of public expenditure can be sustained when we aren’t creating sufficient wealth in the private sector to fund that. And there is of course the issue that if you do that through increased taxation you demotivate people which in itself reduces the GDP.

Is Chime on the acquisition trail? I’ve read elsewhere that you’re looking for a healthcare agency?
No that isn’t true – I didn’t ever say that.  I’m neither looking nor not looking. Naturally I’m not going to tell you the company’s strategy. But ask me if I’m going to grow the company through acquisition and the answer is no. I’m going to grow it by organic growth but if acquisition opportunities come along that would expand our services or make them better or higher quality, and if I could do it at the time, then I’ll do it.

What kind of chairman are you?
Bloody irritating. Ask anyone who works with me and they would say bloody irritating. I interfere too much. Part of my DNA is that I’m very interested in detail. It’s equally true that, over the years, I’ve become very good at looking at things on a macro level.

I interfere a lot, I ask a lot of questions, I push people, I chivvy people. I am what I’ve always been – I’m very interested in communication.

I’m not a great visitor to my empire – I find it a rather boring and stupid waste of time. I don’t think it’s my job to go around and see all my companies. I have very competent people in charge of those companies.

How do you think the industry is faring with evaluation?
Evaluation is the area that the industry is least good at or least wanted to be good at. Everyone in the world quotes Lord Leverhulme who said 50% of communication is wasted – he said it 50 or 60 years ago and since then nobody has enhanced that position. It’s still true that nobody knows what proportion is wasted.

Evaluation of course can’t be done without knowing what the objectives are but it’s more about the preparedness of people to be evaluated. I happen to think it’s very important for us to evaluate our work because otherwise why should anyone have any confidence in the relationship.

We have a research division and recently bought a data analytics company and we’ll start to use data analysis more than we previously have.

Do you have a Blackberry?
No. I have a very old Nokia – it’s about 15 years old. It’s the best designed phone there has ever been. It happens to have the best battery life of any phone.

I don’t need a Blackberry because I don’t want emails. I don’t want to receive acres of spam.

The telephone is a natural extension to my ear – I’m on the phone all the time. The internet has helped me absorb information but I don’t use it for communication. It’s a monologue and I’m more interested in dialogue.

Email has almost certainly been responsible for a reduction in communication rather than increase which is one of the things that I find quite funny about it. People say it has improved communication but it hasn’t. It has become a sort of tool in order to show off to other people.  The important thing to look at with any email is who it’s copied to because almost certainly the key point to the message is not to you it’s to the other people. And it’s very dull all that stuff.

Any plans to retire?
None at all. Do I want to stop working? No. Do I love it? Yes. Do I enjoy it? Yes. Do I get a buzz every day? Yes. And I hope that will go on.

I hope that my senior colleagues will turn around one day and say ‘you can’t do it anymore’ and that I’ll stop before I make a complete pillock of myself. There are people who probably think I should do that already.

What would you consider to be your career highlights?
The thing that I’m most proud of is working on the post-apartheid election in South Africa in 1994 because it was a genuine world-changing event. Equally important was the work that I did for Mrs Thatcher. I’m not claiming credit for it, but what she did was change the world – she brought privatisation to the fore, she brought forward the concept of free market and did a wonderful job for this country. It has all been undone in the past 15 or 16 years.

Tell us about Margaret Thatcher…
She’s a proper person. She believes in employing people for their expertise and on their subject they are regarded as the experts. Where you get into trouble is when you step out of your area of expertise and start trying to be a smart arse about things you’re no good at and that’s when you got hand bagged.

I was hand bagged several times and it’s a salutary experience. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously, being hand bagged is actually a very good learning curve.

I see her regularly. She will remain a very significant person in my life forever, just as Charles and Maurice Saatchi will. They were very big influencers…

How are things looking for Chime this year?
We made budget in January, we’ll probably make budget in February. At the moment the first quarter looks good but I am apprehensive – and I use this word deliberately – about the rest of the year. I’m apprehensive about a double dip in the recession, I’m apprehensive about the impact of purdah [the pre-election period when politically contentious announcements cannot be made] on parts of our business and I’m particularly apprehensive about the distraction of the election campaign which seems to be going on forever. And I rather suspect that what Brown might be going to do is let there be an election campaign without an election date the way things are going.

It’ll be May 6 if Brown allows us to have an election. He may decide that we’re in a state of emergency and therefore there shouldn’t be an election – he’s got that level of arrogance. He could try. He wouldn’t be the first politician who has tried.

The business outside the UK is growing, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. The reality is that if you’re exclusively dependent on the UK then I don’t think you’re going to have a great year.

Any words of warning for the industry?
In the early 2000 we got involved in a lot of dot comery. We got involved with people with ideas but no funding. There were people offering us a percentage of equity in companies that were worthless.

There is a similar outburst happening at the moment with green projects. There are an enormous number of people coming up with ideas about creating new energy sources, creating renewable energy and new ways of creating energy and our industry gets sucked into doing all sorts of presentations and proposals and work and actually many of those things are never going to be funded and they’re never going to be paid. And I’m trying very hard to be once bitten twice shy because the dot com period cost us a great deal of money.

We are involved in a great number of green projects willingly and happily. What’s more likely to happen is that conventional businesses will become greener rather than a raft of new green businesses.

Any final thoughts?
I think it is a pity that the popular view of our industry is brought about by newspaper comment on people like Max Clifford. I don’t blame Max for it – he’s pursuing a living doing what he does but he’s not in the same business as us. Equally I think it is a great pity that people think that what we try to do is make a rat look like a squirrel. I think it’s perfectly true that we try and take out some of the good bits of a rat, if there are any, and try and talk about those. I think it’s a pity that too many people in the industry think that’s a good way to describe us and they’re rather proud of it.

I think Max is in the business of personal publicity and that isn’t the same thing as public relations or communication. There’s plenty of room for people like him and he’s the dominant brand. Publicists are not the same thing as communicators.

Lord Tim Bell was speaking to Celina Maguire, Gorkana’s Consumer Director.