Public Relations in Thailand

Your PR partner does not (first and foremost) design or buy advertising for you, and nor do they manage every aspect of your big events. The sole purpose of your public relations consultant is to support your own messaging, so regardless of whether you are seeking to use an agency or you want to go “guerrilla” and do the whole public relations thing yourself on no budget, getting your key messages right at the very beginning is super important.

The PR firm employs a team of consultants, media liaison and support staff, and yet their primary goal is the same as your own would be were you to go it alone – amplifying your messages.

Where your PR partner ultimately proves to be valuable is in media relations. The good ones will maintain strong (and personally friendly) relationships with many of the media organisations you are looking to use to promote yourself; crucially, this typically includes all of the daily newspapers in your city, perhaps some lower level connections at national TV companies, and a whole truckload of lifestyle and business magazine editors.

The relationship between a PR firm and its media partners is symbiotic; the magazines help to publicise stories and features on the PR company’s clients, and in return, the publication gets free and unlimited access to written and photographic content for use in the magazine (and sometimes advertising revenue). If you were to use a good PR firm and you wanted to be featured in a certain magazine, not only would they stand a good chance of getting you in there, but you would probably be having dinner with the editor the following week at a private function, organised by the PR team, at which you could present yourself and your product, and of course begin to build a personal relationship with the editor. This is the fast-track advantage of outsourcing your public relations.

However, times are changing, as is the media landscape and the digital permeation of life in general. As traditional media organisations find their markets and margins shrinking, so too is their influence. Meanwhile, the rise of the influencers, the reliance of almost everyone on social media of some kind, coupled with the transition from in-person events to online-only launches has clipped the wings of old-school PR firms who have traditionally marketed themselves as being experts in a media industry that it collapsing in on itself.

PR is now more important than ever. As last-gen PR firms become obsolete and their services less in demand, clients are rapidly switching to next-gen operators like Gemini to service their needs with agility, value, and by working in-house with the client’s own marketing team. Together, we are best able to respond and adapt to the ever-changing communications landscape.

As the professional field of business marketing is vast and encompasses many disciplines, specialisations and overlap, there is often some confusion as to the exact role of public relations in a marketing mix. Typically, a PR agency does not decide how a product is designed, brought to market, how it is priced, where it is sold or through which channels it is sold, as this is the remit of marketing management, which always occurs earlier in the product life cycle or promotional cycle.

The role of public relations is very specific, and it is to amplify messages. Those may be messages about the brand and its mission and promise, its products (often new products specifically), or its services. In each case, PR builds upon earlier marketing efforts which have already taken place, and which have brought the originator (in the case of PR agencies, the client) to a point where they need more people to know about it (benefits communication), know about the brand more generally (brand awareness), or to deepen the connection other businesses or consumers feel about the offering (relationship enhancement).

Under our philosophy of “A constellation of possibilities”, we provide essential public relations services either standalone or as part of an integrated offering delivered by way of a contract retainer. Our core services are made up of the following six rudimentary elements, which are our Gemini “products”:

Press Release by Gemini^™
The writing of press releases, calendar news, photo releases and story scoops, and their distribution to target media organisations.

Live Online Events by Gemini^™
The preparation, RSVPing and management of e-events conducted completely or primarily online, which are typically either a press conference, virtual fam trip, webinar, panel discussion or virtual launch event (retainer arrangements often contain several types), with a strong focus on key messages.

Media Interviews by Gemini^™
For clients wishing to speak directly to specific media organisations, we will handle all aspects of the arrangement and help you prepare for your session, with a strong focus on key messages.

Influencer Management by Gemini^™
As influencers are essentially the new media, we partner closely with some of the industry’s standout (and coolest) leaders in APAC, and maintain great relationships with those KOLS we love to work with, ready to tell your story to their engaged fanbases.

SoMe by Gemini^™
Affordable content calendar creation, with each post assembled with great care and a structured approach to delivering strategic messaging over time, whilst removing a lot of hassle from writing them internally.

Crisis Response by Gemini^™
Our crisis response and management services are always-on and free for retainer clients. This item can also be purchased as a very affordable standalone, giving you accessible access to a PR agency, perhaps for the first time, with the great support of Gemini PR.

In most last-gen PR firms, client accounts are taken care of day to day by a PR manager (sometimes called a consultant or account manager). The nomenclature, in Thailand certainly, is deceptive as the person fulfilling this role is often very junior (in experience and salary) and is tasked with managing several client accounts at the same time. This often leads to a poor level of consulting quality, as well as a lack of strategic capability and creativity which are common complaints clients have of old-school Bangkok agencies. They also typically do not speak much English, which can be a considerable impediment to the agency’s account management success.

We take a different approach at Gemini as we have no juniors and therefore no “account managers”. All of the industry experts who make up our consulting force are all senior stakeholders and relative heavyweights in the industry, and so our clients benefit from having only C-suite level consulting around the clock. Our entire client service philosophy is based not just on providing amazing public relations consulting services, but also to kick the last generation of lacklustre PR firms into touch.

Historically, PR firms have reported on several metrics as per their Service Level Agreement. They are: Number of clippings (i.e. the number of times an article is published in print media); Number of website coverage(s), which is literally just the number of times a press release appears in a search, never mind the quality of each website; Number of releases in a month (a given, as this is stipulated in the contract as an SLA, and is easy to understand); and finally Media Value. The last one is controversial as it’s based (ostensibly) on taking the cost of an advert in a given magazine, dividing the page up into eights and then quoting that dollar value based on how much of the page the content occupied and what that would cost if it was bought advertising (“above the line”).

Media value reporting in traditional PR agencies is almost entirely made up, and is prone to being inflated to make agencies look like they are not underperforming their contracts.

At Gemini, whilst we do provide these metrics to give you a ballpark understanding of month-to-month activities and reach, we prefer to focus on the hard data which backs up our digital engagement endeavours, plus two other KPIs which are close to our heart – do you enjoy working with us, and is your business selling more stuff?

This is so much easier to understand, and everyone seems to like this approach we take.

Answering this would require several volumes of business books, but it’s helpful for clients in the first instance to differentiate between strategic activities and tactical implementations. Tactics are the nuts and bolts of activations – the events, promotions, media gift packs, pop-up booths, poster campaigns or prepaid ads. The strategic part is understanding where the client’s business is going, where it wants to be, and how we can support that during the course of a year or more.

The strategic effort which backs up the PR retainer is essentially a kind of “communications plan” and “calendar of activations” over a 6 or 12-month period which contains all the small steps (tactics) that move things along incrementally towards the end goal (strategic objective).

The strategy, then, is the overall vision for that plan moving forward, and a great deal of consultation between the PR firm and the client takes place at this “top-down” altitude. That is the collaborative strategizing; the hard work is the small tactical steps along the way which the PR firm carries out for you.

It depends on whether the definition of “tools” refers to tacticals/components or actual tools such as media monitoring software, Hootsuite for social influence management, the actual app called Instagram, etc.

For easy clarification, we refer to the campaign steps of a PR plan as “components” because tools has too broad a meaning.

We have a lot of tools, though …