In an age of time-compressed newsrooms and the ten-minute news cycle, opportunities for the old school long lunch are pretty much all encased in the British Museum, alongside a sorry-looking stuffed Dodo. This is a shame, as there were valuable lessons to be learned at the long lunch coalface back in the day.

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from these Bacchanalian skirmishes was the precious skill of face reading. But now we live in a world where nearly all communication is done by email or text and a network of contacts can be built up with a few clicks on a keyboard.

It is a little worrying at times that this is so – not because I have a problem with social networking and the onrush of technology, but more because there is a generation of people who are not gaining the emotional intelligence necessary to function fully as a good PR. Social media is a wonderful and useful tool, but if you don’t have the opportunity to meet people face to face as well how are you to develop meaningful relationships with them?

Things have changed in 20 years – not only on a grander scale, but in the minutiae too. My journalist friend stared sadly at the expensive bottle of water I’d ordered and said “Can you imagine ordering that in 1985? You’d have been locked up!”

We’ve lost as well as gained a lot since the 1980s but after this meeting I am looking with concern at the future, wondering what will happen to the art of communication and PR if the art of the long lunch and all the necessary emotional intelligence and understanding of people and their body language, which one needs if one is to communicate with them fully, is consigned to the museums.

The latest casualty in the ongoing debate about the oil spill fiasco is the global PR financial shop Brunswick. Alan Parker’s stately independent whale has made a habit of maintaining the lowest of profiles. Accomplished, circumspect and effective, Brunswick are respected in the financial orbit for their tactful and discreet diplomacy. The company have successfully produced a number of Richelieu figures, many of whom have gone on to the most powerful corporate multinationals.

The diabolical fix their client is in has started to spatter even their enviable brand reputation with the sticky, oily residue of failure. Brunswick now face a very public, very uncomfortable test. There was a time when the solemn and sober Alan Parker would, like Zelig, be visible at every corporate disaster; an undertaker with a reassuring demeanour. But no more. Crisis comms have not been one of Brunswick’s most effective tools of late.

The diminishment of their success has been partly due to the company’s global expansion. The realisation of this ambition has resulted in lesser mortals stumbling into key roles. Can the corporate comms world really produce enough senior suits? It’s not simply a case if poaching more senior journalists to the fountainhead. The blinding, gut-wrenching speed of the new 24/7 news-driven and web-obsessed commentariat produces menacing ultimatums at terrifying speed and, unfortunately, there isn’t a PR production line to craft wily responders – they require time to be perfected.

The onslaught of the digital age has created sustenance for forensic media on and off line, unimpeded and free, driven even, to explore and dissect all aspects of the crisis. And now, for the first time, Brunswick are becoming the story. It’s an uncomfortable dilemma at the best of times and anathema to the likes of Brunswick, as it interferes with their usually mythic calm. And it really doesn’t help that a small fortune was paid to Google to bump BP to the top of the list in searches, or that they sent ‘journalists’ in to get positive stories from people likely to be affected by the spill that they could then put on the BP website.

Greater scrutiny of nasty PR tactics is an absolute imperative, now. Perhaps the attention being lavished on Brunswick might signal a change. Certainly, it’s a move in the right direction to open up a critique on some of the better known ambiguous tactics PR firms employ. Expedient shops have, thus far, been able to escape scrutiny. But less ethical work must be analysed – why should there be anywhere to hide?

Brunswick’s efforts to spin BP were doomed weeks ago, I think. A fatal combination of images of oil-stained pelicans struggling to flap their wings and a thoroughly ineffectual chief executive made it a job too big for even the very best. PR alone cannot salvage a crisis of this size, I’d say, and they were foolish to try. Seasoned campaigners know that deft semantics in a crisis can undo even the most brilliant strategic objective.

The critical clamour surrounding Brunswick will probably not cause them serious long-term damage, but it does send a signal to the larger PR firms that, despite unwillingness to comment or disclose their client list, we are entering an age were translucency will be a necessity – and that it is better PR to accept this than to be dragged kicking and screaming to it at the expense of all dignity and clients.

PR is living in interesting times at the moment. As traditional marketing and advertising suffers a confidence slump, the best people in PR are carefully repositioning themselves and the PR industry into a lead practice that can take on all aspects of the modern, digitally savvy rapid-change media. But for every good and forward-thinking PR firm, there’s always one who wallows in the clichés of the industry, as CAN’s attempts to out-Kingsley Pat Kingsley have proved.

If they’d done it with a client imbued with a bit more effulgence and star-power than Andre, perhaps (and it’s a slim perhaps) it might have been justified. But this is a back to square one manoeuvre in the current climate, where the main struggle is to work out who occupies the high ground – journalists, bloggers or PR.

It is time for PR to focus on best practices and to put ego to one side. When I started out, I saw PR as a vocation and enjoyed it as such – but PR is a job like any other (albeit a sometimes rather exciting and interesting job).

A good example of best practice is Asda’s Dominic Burch, who has introduced a new culture of engagement and responsiveness to the company. Instead of simply burying bad news or hiding Asda’s corporate head in the sand, Burch has actively engaged with problems and used social media to resolve them. For example, when an ex-employee posted videos of himself licking a chicken and chucking food around the store, Burch went straight to the store and filmed a number of voxpop videos for YouTube with outraged staff, instantly diffusing a potential PR disaster.

If only everyone could be this engaged. No one is sure where the industry is going next, but it would be better if all the companies could see PR as a lead practice rather than a quick buck and help, through careful use – and deeper understanding – of the rapidly changing media landscape, to drive it forward into the future as the ethical, exciting and useful industry I know it can be if we all work at it.

As PR mechanisms for reaching journalists get smarter, so many PRs themselves risk becoming that much more dim. In the new techological landscape, journalists are no less prone to the pressures of the speed of technological change. As they succumb to these pressures, as time is stripped away, they put up the barricades and deny that they have any need of or use for PR.

There seems to be, all too often, little understanding on either side. The uneasy pact slips into ruin. No one is going forward with the craft of PR and anyone guilty of sending out easy spam information at the expense of building a relationship with journalists is simply assisting them in their unhealthy bid for isolation.

As Madeleine Bunting said in the Guardian a couple of days ago: “We should be watching carefully for how a new generation of media technology might erode… the nursery of our skills to speak, listen and build relationships.”. She was talking about families, but the same could easily apply to the previously intimate relationship between hack and flak.

The more information is disseminated at the expense of building a useful relationship face to face, the more sterile the relationship becomes. PR spam isn’t the new chlamydia – intimacy unprotected by a layer of technology can only lead to new growth. Some of the loudest complaints are from scribblers with a weather eye on their own notoriety; a remarkable number of them are in the technology sector, so are perhaps more prone to PRs using kits to spew and spray.

As ever, it’s about how one uses the tech – with a bit of intelligence and a willigness to listen on both sides, technology can make the world of media and communication a much more fertile place.

Amen.

Adam Horovitz

Written after hearing that a chain of hotels frequented by celebrities, which are to be featured in a reality show, have asked to use The Fame Formula as a replacement for the Gideon’s Bible – something for the down-at-heel Z Lister to turn to for inspiration.