Even amid the disruption, the PR retainer fees have remained fairly inelastic: Madan Bahal

Madan Bahal, Managing Director, Adfactors PR, is known for his forthright views on the communications. His brilliant insights find eager reception in the industry. Bahal far exceeded all expectations in his fireside chat with Bijoya Ghosh, Founder and CEO, Adgully, at the inaugural edition of IMAGEXX 2021, held yesterday (July 7, 2021), where he did a 360-degree indepth scan of the PR industry as it is today and where it is headed in the heavily disrupted new normal.

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The Adfactors PR journey

As Adfactors PR readies to celebrate its Silver Jubilee, Bahal looked back at the journey, which he called “a fun-filled and enriching experience”. He also mentioned the key developments that took place in the agency’s 24 years of existence, whom he called “the most eventful periods of human history”.

“I saw the ascent of big technology – Amazon was born in the year that we started and after us came Google and Facebook and everything else that disrupted the world. We saw the global downturn, the Internet bust, the pandemic, various ups and downs in the capital market – there’s been enough that we have navigated through,” he reminisced.

At the same time he also expressed his joy in serving thousands of clients, and pointed out that, “many of our client relations have lasted for more than two decades, such as L&T, Mahindra, State Bank of India”.

While the past has been eventful, Bahal found it difficult to predict what the future will be like. He remarked, “Life in business has become like river navigation, you can see only up to the next bend and we don’t know what is coming. Nobody can really have a big vision for the next 10 years today, but if you take one steady step every day towards what the future unveils, that consistency of travelling in that direction is important.”

He also confessed, “I genuinely feel vulnerable in these times, for myself as a leader and for my business and firm, because there is so much happening out there. In the next decade alone we will see flying cars, machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence, which we call singularity, there will be advances made in biotechnology, which could extend human life for another 40 or 50 years.”

He added that in such an environment, one had to just keep moving forward. “Our effort will be to remain relevant, with a superior value proposition for clients at all times as well as for our people. They must find what we do for them valuable,” he said.

The Pandemic disruption

Without doubt the global COVID-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on people’s lives, on businesses, on everything. Speaking on the huge disruption caused, Bahal said that it was a work in progress. Elaborating further, he said, “I don’t even have a correct sense of really how many things have got disrupted. I don’t think the impact of effect of everything has unfolded yet and it’s going to be an ongoing thing. We can say there is pervasive disruption and everything around us is disrupted. The stakeholders are changing, the consumers as we knew them are changing; the pace at which the consumer has accepted and adapted to technology is faster. So, the consumer is disrupting us, clients are disrupting us, as they are changing faster than us in many areas.”

He considered technology and digital to be the root cause of these changes. “As a result of this digital boom, the rise of the individual influencer, the role of data analytics, the new scale of business risks that lead to reputation risk are all that we are trying to come to terms with. Lastly, the workplace has changed – we don’t know if we are going back to the physical office and when are we going back and how many of us are going back – will we have half the workforce working from home and the other half returning to the office? There is a powerful compelling case for both,” Bahal noted.

Amid the gloom, Bahal also saw a silver lining – in that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity. “Like there is a disruption of business, there’s also a disruptive opportunity, and those of us who do a little bit of effort in trying to understand what it is and navigating this will be successful.”

At the same time there were many challenges, Bahal said, adding, “The biggest challenge is the inertia within. In some parts, I feel I live in an ostrich farm. But people are just not opening up to the massive scale of disruption that’s happening.” He also felt that in the industry there is a near crisis at the senior consulting level.

“The other problem is even while the whole world is getting disrupted, the PR retainer fees have remained fairly inelastic. There are large parts of the industry and many of us work for $5,000 for navigating PR and reputation in a country of 1.4 billion people with 40 languages, thousands of media houses and a million digital influencers. How do you do that? Therefore, I think there’s an agenda for the firm, for the individual, for the client side – everybody has to come together to stock and see what is necessary and what can be done,” he affirmed.

Watch the entire event here