In defense of the ‘pay for performance’ model

One of the great ironies I’ve noticed over my forty plus years in the PR business, is in periods of national and even global stress, companies invariably return to the basics in their practices—back to not just what they know, but what has proven to work over time.

The COVID pandemic, we all agree, is a generational transformational event. It’s turned everything upside down and then knocked us sideways. We’re off balance and frightened for ourselves and families, but also for our businesses and economy.

Change is no longer the desired idiom. The “next new thing” can wait until we steady our course. It’s not just that what is old is now new. It’s what has been shown to work, still works.

Such is the situation with public relations, and in particular, media relations. An old way of doing things is landing great stories for clients—and of PR firms being compensated for landing those stories in the media—is making a solid comeback in this crisis.

Pay-for-performance PR, where a client pays for actual media results and not just for the effort, has been around since the dawn of public relations a hundred years ago. The modern version of this “revolutionary” compensation model has been around for over twenty-five years (since I founded INK PR back in the early 90’s).