Hidden Industries, Real Stories: Women’s PR work in Contested Sectors

Women in PR Podcast with Dr. Liz Bridgen

Summary (generated with a Claude AI project)

In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Bridgen discusses her research on the hidden aspects of public relations practice, particularly focusing on women working in stigmatized industries. She shares insights from her co-edited book “Women’s Work in Public Relations” and discusses the importance of studying lived experiences in PR beyond mainstream corporate practice. The conversation explores the challenges of editing a global collection, the complexities of PR work in contested industries, and the need to look beyond conventional narratives in PR scholarship.

Key Takeaways

  • PR practitioners in stigmatized industries often develop selective disclosure strategies about their work
  • There’s more meritocracy and opportunity for advancement in some “hidden” industries than mainstream PR
  • Planning in non-traditional PR sectors tends to be more flexible and agile
  • Global perspectives in PR research face language and cultural barriers
  • Understanding “lived experience” is crucial for comprehensive PR scholarship
  • Social mobility opportunities exist in unexpected sectors of PR
  • PR education needs to focus more on real people rather than abstract demographics

Transcript (generated with Riverside.fm)

Ana (00:04.105)
Hi Liz, thanks for coming today and welcome to the show.

Liz Bridgen (00:07.927)
Thank

Ana (00:09.654)
Some time ago, a book came out, but before we talk about women’s work in public relations, we need to talk a little bit more about how on earth you ended up in PR.

Liz Bridgen (00:21.207)
Well, I ended up in public relations by complete accident, I think like a lot of people and a lot of women in particular. So I always wanted to be a journalist and I worked as a journalist on a local newspaper in the days of local newspapers in Oxfordshire in England. And it was my dream to be a journalist. And I absolutely hated it when I started it. It wasn’t what I expected at all.

It was an awful lot of knocking on people’s doors when they’d had a tragedy in their lives and sitting in court for ages listening to stories of people who’d stolen pigs. Actually, that was quite interesting. And I thought there must be something else. And a friend at that time was doing some temporary work in a PR department at a big publishing company, Oxford University Press.

Ana (00:52.277)
It was.

Ana (01:00.203)
singing.

Liz Bridgen (01:20.065)
and she said, it’s really, really good fun working in the publicity department and it’s really well paid. You know, do you, you know, why don’t you apply for a job there? So I did. And I became a publicity assistant. within weeks, I was working on launch parties, selling in our authors and getting them featured on TV. And it was all very exciting and very glamorous. And I got hooked on it.

And then I had about 15 years working in PR, both in -house and in agencies. And I was getting a bit disillusioned. And then I had the chance to go and live and work abroad, which I took up. And my plan was that I was going to go to university, retrain and leave public relations. But instead I ended up

doing a Masters in Mass Communications and came back to the UK and became a PR lecturer, which sort of is where I’ve been teaching and researching public relations ever since.

Ana (02:30.867)
I was going to ask how did that go? Trying to leave and there you are. You went back to school just to get even deeper into the same area and topic. You mentioned stealing pigs.

Liz Bridgen (02:34.155)
You

Liz Bridgen (02:41.197)
Yeah, my plan was actually to do an MBA, but I was looking through the list of courses I could do and Mass Communications was next to MBA in the course directory and I thought Mass Communication sounds a lot more interesting than an MBA. I loved

Ana (03:00.107)
Okay, why?

Liz Bridgen (03:03.977)
I have always loved the media and I love the idea of finding out more about media production, about media reception, about audiences and the idea about learning just about businesses and how they worked actually left me a bit cold even though I knew it could get me a good career. So the two courses were the same price so I went for mass communications.

Ana (03:26.504)
and there you go. But wait, you said something else before. Stealing pigs?

Liz Bridgen (03:32.609)
yeah, was where I worked as a journalist. We used to attend the local magistrates court where minor crimes would be judged and dealt with. And so it was quite a rural area. So there was a lot of rural crime which involved stealing pigs, stealing tractors, all that sort of thing. That was quite interesting.

Ana (03:57.282)
I bet stealing pigs, I’ll definitely remember that. That’s a story I think everybody will read. But from studying mass comms and becoming a lecturer teaching PR, that doesn’t quite explain why your current focus in research is on women and women’s work. There’s still, I hope you agree, but feel free to comment on that.

There’s still a great, great support of mainstream theories that posit excellence, service to organizations and their goals and achievements, and maybe less reflection on what does this service do to the people who work in industry. But equally, there’s less of a soul search, if you want, of what happens to the people who do not work in the glamorous, the top of the iceberg, the highly, highly successful businesses.

Liz Bridgen (04:49.442)
Anon.

Ana (04:52.822)
that we all look up to and invite at conferences and tell their stories because they’re big, right? They’re the Goliath, if you want, of businesses. So how come you ended up looking at the Davids, if you want, in PR and not the Goliaths that we’re all used to?

Liz Bridgen (05:12.107)
think it goes back to my MA studies because when you’re researching the media you’ve got a real focus on audiences and reception and how people read and understand your text so you’re very much thinking about people. You know are studying media organisations but in a way that was just maybe a couple of modules of my studies. So my dissertation was on how women in public relations were represented in the media.

So I did content analysis of lots of British daily newspapers to see how women were represented and you know to cut a very very long story short it wasn’t great and that really sparked my interest and the interest which stayed as I developed as a researcher when I started teaching PR because obviously in English universities you’re encouraged to research as well as teach, less so now but it certainly was at the time.

And so I did become increasingly interested in how people worked in PR rather than what PR did. And that, I think, has always been my focus. And that’s always been where I’ve really looked at doing research, finding out more. And also, and I think we’ll come on to this bit more detail later, you know, trying to ensure that

the lived experience, the public side of PR, the people side of PR, isn’t forgotten because otherwise we’re just talking about organisations, how they work and we’re talking about PR as a sort of thing that happens, a bit like a car engine rather than forgetting that there people behind it.

Ana (07:00.706)
That is really interesting and I would imagine tough to tease out of people. It’s way more comfortable and easy to tell you how an engine works and focus on strategy and tactics and measurement and all that sort of and all that lingo and speak far less about how you manage with that always 24 hours on sort of culture with managing your life because

I think public relations practitioners do have a life outside of their work and office. But I think it’s way more hard, know, it’s tougher to get people to open up and tell you about the challenges because we also have a social expectation of glamorizing PR and PR work.

Liz Bridgen (07:34.699)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (07:49.057)
Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s harder in a way to research some of the lived experience because you’re relying on people talking to you in it and sometimes opening up about things which might be quite painful or awkward or upsetting to them. But, you know, as a person with quite a short attention span,

I actually find this sort of research far more interesting. And if I was doing something like measurement, I probably would never ever finish my first article because I just don’t find it interesting. So I think to be a good researcher, you’ve got to research things that you’re interested in. And it is harder to find people to interview about a certain theme. But you are backed up by so much good

media, sociology, sociological organisation of work theory. mean, if you just think about something like Goffman’s front stage and backstage and things like that, and also ideas about emotional labour, you you’ve got all the theoretical kind of heavy labour has been done for you in a way. And so the interviewing people, the writing things up, they having those, you know, those moments when you realise what people are really telling you.

that gets really, really interesting. And also, you know, what you’ve got to remember is public relations can’t be done without people. And a lot of these people, especially at junior level, in the, I was going to say the English regions, but obviously, you know, in all that, you know, outside any capital city in any country, I just ignored in research, but they’re the ones who doing that work that gets written about elsewhere. just kind of…

Ana (09:17.302)
Look.

Liz Bridgen (09:43.415)
brush them under the table which is wrong I think.

Ana (09:47.073)
Let’s go back a moment because you’ve mentioned backstage and front stage. What is that? What does that mean?

Liz Bridgen (09:52.172)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (09:55.947)
I’m going to oversimplify it terribly at this point, but essentially it’s how you behave in a certain situation versus how you behave in your own home life. it’s been written about and adapted over the years, but you have your front stage where, you know, if it’s a lecturer, you’re up there, you’re confident, you’re authoritative, you’re living a very…

particular life you’re bringing maybe your own personal experience into your teaching and showing people how great you are or you’re a really good academic and then there’s your backstage life where you might not be like that. So I mean that’s a terrible oversimplification and I’m sure there’s sociologists are going to be screaming at that but essentially you know we’ve got many different faces that we present to people.

in different circumstances so that the way we’re behaving now might not be the way we would behave if we were talking to a student or talking to a relative or talking to one of our friends at a night in a bar. We put on a different face whatever, in all different situations and especially in public relations that really, really does happen because you might be

I don’t know, pretending to be an expert in, you know, automotive design or something and talking to journalists about it and trying to come across as serious and professional. And actually, that’s not you at all. And you’re dying inside and actually find it incredibly boring in real life. But you can’t show it because it’s your job.

Ana (11:40.834)
That’s tricky because for a few years now we’ve heard way more about alignment of personal values with organizations. And this is kind of a known secret, right? That people work better and they persuade better if they have a product, a service, an organization or issue that they believe in.

Liz Bridgen (11:53.484)
Yes.

Ana (12:07.904)
Right? So this goes in a sense, this alignment recognizes there a values alignment. Well, one of the things that I kept saying is that the result of this alignment and values and working with organizations that we like meant also that we started building, we started building walls, right? We’re very comfortable then into our own bubbles. And then we start to harden these borders that we have, leading therefore

A work like that, while it is, I recognize, you is more successful in its values, it can also lead to more division. And so I see a paradox personally into how public relations that has portrayed itself as a facilitator or desires itself to be a facilitator as a profession manages to actually just bring us into our comfort zones and get us there very, comfortable.

Let’s go back to the book. So recently, Sarah Williams and you, you put together a book called Women’s Work in Public Relations, and it’s an edited collection that features a lot of articles from around the world, including professional stories about how it is to work in PR. But you have taken on board exactly what you’ve said, global perspectives,

personal experiences and even more so marginalized identities. And you try to put together in the book towards the end of it through your colleagues and your writings a framework, a theoretical framework to make sense of the ordinary. How did the project come about? And what is your highlight of the entire book?

Liz Bridgen (14:02.637)
The project started as a conversation in a cafe with Sarah Williams who I’ve known for a long long time and have worked with on a few other projects before and we were saying wouldn’t it be great to actually talk about the lives of women who worked in public relations and this was always our and this must have been I don’t know 2017 2018 we started having these conversations and

Then of course COVID got in the way, we kind of persevered with this project trying to find authors who would be interested in contributing to the book. And we wanted it to be global because so often you look at something that claims to be a global collection and it’s very American and it’s very European. It’s not really global at all. So…

We spent so much time liaising with authors, persuading authors that we really wanted them. And it took, it literally did take, I’d say, I’m trying to think about this, I think three years from the initial idea to getting the, getting a list of authors together and getting accepted by publishers, a publisher. And then of course, the book had to be written.

which was probably another good couple of years, I think. And, you we kept having to extend deadlines because certain authors didn’t deliver, then certain authors dropped out and then we had to find more authors. It was actually quite painful at times, as anyone who’s done an editing collection knows, but also incredibly invigorating and enlightening because we learnt so much. We learnt so much about ourselves.

about working with people. I’d worked on a book before, but that’s actually been quite straightforward. But this one, some of our authors were quite new to academic writing, so there was a lot of editing involved in some chapters. Some chapters were just amazing and literally like almost as we’ve received them. But it did allow us to learn so much about

Ana (15:56.8)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (16:18.871)
putting a book together about liaising with people, about thinking about global perspectives in PR and understanding more about how PR is published around the world. And, you know, it’s hard to think of a highlight because in a way there were lots of highlights because, you know, even after you submit the manuscript, there’s then loads and loads of queries and corrections to go through.

But I think actually the highlights have been doing, you know, we’ve been involved in a podcast. This is another podcast. We did a series of extracts on LinkedIn, which went down really well. So it’s hard to think of one highlight, but I think actually getting to know a whole load of new people is really the highlight.

Ana (17:04.789)
But tell me a little bit, you mentioned there are two things that piqued my interest. Trying to capture global perspectives has led you to understand how PR works and is published about elsewhere. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Liz Bridgen (17:25.268)
I think we were always aware that public relations, if you’re a woman, can be hard. think what we didn’t realise and maybe guessed but didn’t actually know for sure is that how hard it can be. So one of our chapters is on public relations agency life in Turkey and it’s brutal. You know, I complain about English agency life, but that is nothing. And obviously you’ve got

the culture there, the way public relations is practiced. You know, there’s some really heartbreaking interviews with women in that chapter who, you know, can’t be with their children when they’re ill or who don’t feel they can have children and have a career in public relations or whose work is sort of overlooked or devalued because of the men in that department. You know, there’s and it’s just it sounds like incredibly hard work.

There’s other chapters from elsewhere in the world but I think we have a chapter on academic public relations academics in Spain which

shows the problems that they have but also hints towards a solution there because the public relations academics have their own union and so they are collective as well and as a collective they can actually be stronger and more powerful because public relations is marginalised as a subject anyway and if you’re a woman you’re marginalised anyway so

getting things like professorships is incredibly hard, but they have joined together to try and overcome this. So there’s, you know, there’s a lot in the book which, you know, points to problems in other countries or ways that problems are being overcome in other countries. I mean, I think one of our big issues with this, with the book was that we didn’t end up with any chapters from Africa.

Liz Bridgen (19:38.795)
We nearly did, but the unfortunately dropped out and we haven’t really got any Asian experience either. And I think that’s an oversight. we are talking about doing women’s work in public relations volume two, where we hope to address that.

Ana (19:56.31)
That is exciting. Let’s go back to the other point that you have mentioned, which is the editing process. Having worked on several editorial projects where English is being considered the spoken language, there’s an expectation to receive incredibly good copy. And I found it

Liz Bridgen (20:15.255)
Mmm.

Ana (20:22.102)
Quite challenging personally in the past. This has turned into my own editing project, into a contentious point of discussion, something that I didn’t want to drop out, that people need help with English. They can’t be dismissed for not submitting an article that is coherent in English and be penalized because a second, third, or whatever fourth language they might be speaking is not perfect.

Liz Bridgen (20:37.441)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Ana (20:52.268)
But that, from the editorial perspective, ended up requesting far more time, which sometimes is limited, far more time in trying to get this structured and probably way more frustrating on both ends. Who as an author likes to be pestered back and forth about their sentences and clarifying and rephrasing? But I think…

you know, commitment is necessary to support someone who has the thoughts, has the experience, has the insight, but maybe not the language. How did you manage in the process? I mean, for you, English is your native language, right? It makes sense with all its spellings and phonetics and its expressions. So how did you navigate that process with the many authors that you have dealt with?

Liz Bridgen (21:50.925)
mean, it’s fair to say we didn’t have a strict process. mean, maybe in hindsight, and this is what we’re talking about for the next book, we would have a different process in place where we would start a lot earlier with the authors who weren’t native speakers and maybe ask for earlier drafts. anyway, I I think it evolved sort of

It depended who the author was, whether they were an experienced academic who basically just has trouble structuring and writing in English, or whether they were new to academic writing and maybe needed a bit more help with that. So it was it was just a question of writing hundreds of notes and give it not just right to saying, no, this doesn’t make sense. But then you have to actually explain why something doesn’t make sense.

and actually at times completely rewording something and saying is this what you mean? And in academic work you’re rewording something and you might actually get the meaning wrong because you’ve misunderstood because you’re not aware you’re not so familiar with maybe that particular theoretical perspective they’re using and it’s really hard so I’m sure in the book there’s some of my rewriting of bits which actually

Ana (23:08.224)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (23:14.621)
on necessarily what the author intended but they may not have had the English to know how to say actually you’ve missed the point slightly so it’s really really difficult and I’d love to you know I’d love to know how other editors address this especially within the confines of academic life where you’re you know essentially editing a book

Ana (23:24.885)
Yeah

Liz Bridgen (23:42.623)
as a side hustle alongside all the teaching, all the meetings, all the management, all the marketing, all the student queries, all the extra training you have to go on to deal with student issues. know, and it’s, it’s hard, you know, ends up being a little sort of that thing you do at half past four in the afternoon for an hour, rather than doing it as your full time job.

Ana (24:02.05)
It’s relentless, isn’t it? Now, in the book though, I mean, it’s a commendable effort and it’s a great book. I think we’ll go back and talk about it maybe in several editions. I’ll definitely include it on my reading list in the courses that I teach. But in this book in particular, you have a chapter of your own. mean, you wrote the introduction, which is expected, together with Sarah.

Liz Bridgen (24:05.015)
Yeah.

Ana (24:30.722)
You have a chapter of your own that is based on this methodology of the lived experience and you promised that you’re going to tell us a little bit more. And it’s not only that it’s based on the methodology of the lived experience, it looks at an industry and people working in an industry that we would very often not want to talk about. Tell me a little bit more about your chapter and

Liz Bridgen (24:33.474)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (24:37.164)
Yeah.

Ana (24:55.457)
Start maybe first to say what is it, how did you go about these lived experience interviews? You mentioned that a bit earlier, but let’s let’s reiterate and then take us into the story of your chapter and the insight that it has given you.

Liz Bridgen (25:10.101)
Okay, my chapter is on the lives of women who work in public relations in the adult or porn industries. And I think this is something that a lot of people find very awkward. And there’s some really interesting writing about academics who write about the adult industries that they feel they can be ostracized within their own work environment.

that people are unhappy about them writing about it because of all the issues that, you know, we’re all aware of. But this chapter takes, there’s a writer called Heather Berg, who makes the very, very good point that when we write about adult industries, we need to actually, what she calls, unexceptionalize it. So we need to actually think about the people, the processes, whatever we’re writing about.

in their own right and in a way divorce them from what they’re actually doing because otherwise you end up in this tortured kind of methodological black hole about whether you should be researching it or not, whether it is exploitative or not, and that can be like 10 000 words before you’ve even started the research paper. So you know, Hethberg’s view is that you know you should

Ana (26:31.809)
is that you you should

Liz Bridgen (26:36.359)
not focus on the product as she calls it, but focus on the process in order to actually think about the people who work in the industry and the problems they face rather than the problems of the industry themselves. So I took Heather Berg as a start point because

Ana (26:37.505)
product.

Ana (26:42.187)
success.

Liz Bridgen (26:58.763)
I wanted to find out about the lives of women who worked in PR in the adult industries. There’s been very, very little writing on them. There’s been some writing on, know, bizarrely things like human resources in the adult industry and on the what’s called the talent themselves, but very little on those backstage people. And how did I first get interested in this? I think I first get interested in this because I know from my

bizarrely from my sporting life and I’m someone who works as a cam girl and was quite interested in how they actually lived their life and promoted their work. So, you know, that’s just an aside really. So.

I wrote this chapter to find out more about those who worked in public relations. Now, the issue was, and this is something that’s come up in other writing in this industry, is that it’s very hard to find people to talk to. And this has been compounded in the last 10 years or so with social media in that a lot of people do their PR

Ana (28:02.249)
is that.

Liz Bridgen (28:15.967)
alongside their job because they’re just working on social media or people who did PR their jobs have now been turned into you know social media management or digital marketing so they’re not so many pure PR people or even comms people left you know I spoke to someone who said yeah I used to know some lots of people but you know they’ve left the industry or their jobs have changed they’re not really doing PR anymore so I found

Ana (28:32.908)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (28:44.749)
I interviewed two people which isn’t really enough from some perspectives but it is, if you look at some of the literature or methodology, enough to get an idea of what people are doing and then

Ana (28:51.489)
too.

Liz Bridgen (29:07.251)
I did a very extensive literature review, found some other writing on people working in PR and comms in the adult industry and kind of brought all of those together. And really, just to try and find out what were the lived experiences of women working in PR and comms in the adult industry and how they actually did public relations. And

What I found was really, really interesting was in a way how, you know, the enjoyment these women had in their work, also how diverse the workforce was and also how

Liz Bridgen (29:57.119)
It was a debt. was far more of a meritocracy than a lot of PR agencies you see or a lot of PR organization or lot of organizations you see in that people really were promoted based on their working talents and also got the chance to explore and practice different kinds of public relations earlier in their career. So I spoke to one woman who had been a basically an admin assistant.

and she had moved into becoming a PR comms assistant. And actually, because public affairs is such a massive part of working in PR and the adult industry, she became involved in public affairs work really early in her career and was now developing that side of things.

So there’s a chance to get involved, there’s a chance to get promoted. There are also people who moving into the industry into PR. And I know this will shock some PR people without any PR qualifications. But they and then they learnt on that there was a lot more learning on the job. Whereas some people have gone in with a big PR, you know, a good PR background and were using those PR skills in different ways. So it was was fascinating.

Ana (31:11.842)
But I’d imagine you mentioned lived experience, right? So this idea of the back stage and front stage, as you’ve mentioned earlier, that does start to make sense. And as you’ve indicated, the adult industries are an industry that will lead quite a lot of moralizing or very judgmental perspectives because the focus is on the product rather than on the people.

Liz Bridgen (31:23.521)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (31:32.759)
Yeah.

Ana (31:40.957)
Yet in your conversations, you did talk to them. You touched upon social mobility. You also have managed to tease out of them the discrepancies that they need to address in their family circles, friends and families. How do they deal with that? Working in PR, in an industry that is contested.

Liz Bridgen (32:06.19)
Thank

Ana (32:11.073)
What did they say? What did you find out?

Liz Bridgen (32:15.581)
quite interesting because a lot of them felt they couldn’t really talk about their work. I mean you know it’s difficult talking about public relations anyway but then talking about the adult industry one person said that she basically closed her group of friends down because of, totally, so she reduced her circle when she was talking about her actual job and to acquaintances she just used to say something vague which didn’t mean anything and then people would just pass on.

Another one said that she actually got quite fed up with people making jokes about what she did and you know was a bit got you know she I think what I’m trying to say is both of them really got very tired with justifying what they did explaining what they did to a wider group of people with the result that they really closed down the circle of people who they would talk about their jobs with because

It becomes tiring, becomes stressful and to constantly be on the back foot and defending an industry that you know there are some things in it which are indefensible and wrong, but there are some things in the industry which you might think are good and positive. But to actually explain that to someone who maybe has a very negative perception is tiring and you probably don’t want to do it just when you’re, I don’t know, queuing up in the supermarket or whatever.

Ana (33:42.038)
you

Liz Bridgen (33:42.731)
Yeah, they did have a problem with that aspect of their job. was more they felt people didn’t understand what they did and why they did it.

Ana (33:53.141)
So it’s interesting that you say that as a coping mechanism, basically what they’ve developed was the shutting down. They were weeding through their contacts and figured out who is worth picking this conversation with and elaborating upon and who is not worth the time and the effort.

Liz Bridgen (34:12.117)
Yeah, and I think with one of women I spoke to, she was very vague about her job with a lot of people and would only talk about her job with detail with a really, really small group of people. And I think actually, if you think about, you know, if I think about my life as a PR academic, I do that anyway. I think most of us do it who work in industries which aren’t very well understood because you work in public relations, people have a view of PR and it

can just be quite tiring to explain what PR is and what it isn’t and why it’s problematic and why it’s not problematic. So you actually, you know, think we can all actually relate to this. I don’t think it’s unique to people who work in PR in the adult industry at all.

Ana (34:47.934)
Yeah.

Ana (34:56.501)
But one of the other things that you’ve mentioned in the chapter is the issue of social mobility, something that has been brought up in the interviews and basically moving either in or out of the industry. Do you recall? I mean, you’ve mentioned one of the things that there’s a meritocracy and people get promoted.

Liz Bridgen (35:04.107)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (35:23.767)
Mm -hmm.

Ana (35:24.938)
more fairly if know fear has a more to it. But what else have you noticed? Why social mobility in particular and not career mobility or you know professional progression?

Liz Bridgen (35:30.325)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (35:44.065)
think it’s all of them really because it’s in some of the… this wasn’t in the interviews, this was some of the part of the literature I reviewed that people from actually quite disadvantaged backgrounds were getting their first role in the industry maybe just in an incredibly you know low -grade clerical or you production role and were…

then moving into PR, moving up and then had the money, the status to perhaps move on into different careers or to carry on in that industry. So it was possible to be, you know, to come in from different areas to be promoted. And apparently this isn’t typical of just PR and media in the adult, sorry, PR and comms in the adult industry, but it’s the case with a lot of different.

different sectors within it, whether it’s HR, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s video, sound, lighting, whatever. There’s a lot of getting your foot in the door, not so much scrutiny at the lower level because it’s more that you’re willing to work and you’ve, you you can, you’ve talked to the right people. And then after that, it seems to be quite a meritocracy. I’m sure there’s examples where it’s not at all, but

Ana (37:07.359)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (37:08.587)
This is just in the literature and in the interviews that I did that this seemed to be the case. And I’m sure there’s examples where it’s not the case, but this seemed to be a common theme that came through.

Ana (37:21.149)
Okay. And one more thing that you notice in the chapter, and you discuss it quite extensively, are the similarities and differences with mainstream practice. You say that in some sense, the tactics are the same. We’re talking just about a different organization and or a different product if you want. But there are some differences that are quite noticeable.

Liz Bridgen (37:40.45)
Mm -hmm.

Ana (37:50.727)
One of them I remember from reading is the lack of planning. Can you recall and comment a little bit more on the differences and why do you think they are so important and start?

Liz Bridgen (38:04.587)
Yeah, I mean, there was planning. was just planning done in a different way. think and I think in a way this is an issue with some organizations and PR teams in that elaborate plans are produced, which they never ever looked at again. And certainly during my time in PR, I produced some wonderful PR plans, which were simply works of fiction and never really happened or bought out at the end of the year. And yeah, OK, we’ve done that. We’ve done this. We’ve done not done that. Not done that.

whereas a lot of the planning tended to be a little bit more, I wouldn’t say short term, but it was less detailed, it was okay we’re going to achieve this and we’re going to do it that way and how you get there was more, I wouldn’t say done on the hoof, but done in a more sort of unstructured way and it’d be interesting at some of the really, I didn’t talk to anyone at a

I know I actually spoke to one person at a very large organisation, but I think maybe if you spoke to some of the lot more large media based organisations, you might find there’s more planning because there has to be. But, yeah, the planning tends to be quite brief and it was also quite flexible as well because things would always come in. Government legislation would come in, which then had to be discussed.

things can happen within the industry where suddenly a shift is needed. yeah, there was planning but maybe it wasn’t done in the same way as in mainstream people.

Ana (39:43.979)
So a lot more flexible and agile, this is what you’re saying, not in the sense of elaborate Excel sheets or more planning tools as we might have seen in bigger organizations. What do you take out of it? mean, when you’re teaching, I assume that you are including some of these insights into your teaching. What is it that you take?

from your own research that you bring into your own teaching to your students. Any warning signs, any life lessons, things to pay attention to as they move along.

Liz Bridgen (40:24.151)
That’s a really good question. it’s for students always to be aware of what they are doing and how people react to them and I think it comes through a lot actually just talking about PR planning. In PR planning it’s very easy when you’re with students to ask students to write a PR plan. They write a PR plan.

and they’ve only considered people as massive and morphous groups like mothers with children or old people, people over 40 who can’t use the internet and you’re just thinking hang on these are real live people have you actually spoken to any of these people do they think that way and do they and so it’s actually a lot of it is about getting students to understand that

If they are working in public relations there will be problems but they are not alone and they need to understand what problems they are and how they can face them but also the opportunities there are and the ways they can take advantage of them. But also when they are doing public relations they’ve actually got to think about individuals rather than about putting people into massive groups of millions of people because that is a sure way to fail in any PR campaign.

Ana (41:51.361)
Have you figured a a recipe to have them think of people? Because it’s always much easier to reduce people to, well not even people, to think of groups that are in sketches, right? So very, very broad lines as you’ve described. Elderly over 40 using the internet. Genzies, I’m listening to you.

Have you figured a way that you recommend them to go about it and seeing them as people?

Liz Bridgen (42:20.959)
No, well…

Liz Bridgen (42:25.549)
love to think I did. I do have a slide that I use every now and then and I have a picture of people I would say this is a very English word cavorting basically wearing very few clothes and lying around in the mud at the Woodstock Festival the famous rock festival which was when was it 67, 70 whenever it was and I say okay these people who are basically

Ana (42:45.226)
Yeah.

Liz Bridgen (42:55.693)
fornicating in the mud and like these people are now 70 they are now over 70 do you really think they would listen to old -time musicals and be sitting down with a blanket over their knees I think not somehow because before I asked them to you know think about what someone in their 70s would be doing and thinking and saying well actually no these

don’t just leave your life behind when you hit 25 or something, so hopefully that gets them to think about that people do might change in appearance they might become a little bit greyer and wrinklier but their mind doesn’t necessarily change and what they’re interested in and how they approach life and their sense of humour doesn’t necessarily change and

those people would not be interested in a recipe for apple pie and a of slippers, they might be you know they might have changed they might not be.

Ana (44:00.628)
If they’re really comfortable, maybe they might. Right, but let’s stop there, right? How important it is that in all these planning and tools, when we’re considering how to persuade, to convince masses of whatever there is out there, how we tend to turn these into abstract issues, all into the promise of manageable problem solving.

Liz Bridgen (44:03.072)
I’m ready.

Liz Bridgen (44:24.33)
Mmm.

Ana (44:29.257)
when the far more creative and humane approaches would be to think of people in their own quirkiness and beauty of diversity. that, of course, for big organisations and small, that posits a challenge because that brings so much more work than might be worth it.

Liz Bridgen (44:47.917)
Mm

Ana (44:53.683)
And it brings us back to the conundrum that we’ve been facing for many years now, that is, you know, of localizing and making customizing versus getting work done. Liz, I wish you the great and the best of luck with the second book. I’m looking forward to it. Well done on the first one. What an achievement. And by all means, more on industries that we

Liz Bridgen (45:06.839)
Hmm.

Liz Bridgen (45:12.631)
Thank you.

Ana (45:23.136)
would rather not talk about because we think we know it all about them. And it’s so much needed for us to look differently at things we know, then we take for granted. Thanks for joining the show.

Liz Bridgen (45:38.999)
Thank you very much.

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