Hill & Knowlton Paul Taaffe

Paul Taaffe immigrated in the 1980s to London from Australia as a young advertising executive and eventually fell in love with the city.

When asked in 2002 to move to New York to run the worldwide operations of public relations giant Hill & Knowlton, he balked.

“I suggested I could run Hill & Knowlton from London, but my chairman, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP Group, said `there are only six multinationals in the UK and we’re one of them’,” recalled Mr. Taaffe in his New York office.

“He was right. There are 500 global titans here, located in New York or a two to three-hour plane ride from New York. London is 13 hours away. So if you are serious about communications or changing the business model you have to be in America,” he said.

Hill & Knowlton is one of the world’s biggest public relations firms, with more than $300 million in billings. Mr. Taaffe is its Chairman and CEO worldwide which involves managing 73 offices in 36 countries. Hill & Knowlton became part of the WPP fold years ago, along with a number of advertising agencies and public relations giant Burson-Marsteller.

Roughly 75% of Hill & Knowlton’s work involves routine public relations, but 25% involves high-profile government lobbying and policy advice drawn from Hill’s worldwide a-list of high-profile former generals, civil servants, politicians and their advisors.

“We give more policy advice than political advice and we hire all parties. In the U.S., for a few years, Democrats have been cheaper than Republicans, but there’s a resurgence and Democrats are now asking for more money,” he said.

Washington’s lobbying rules are the strictest in the world. There is a lifetime ban for former government officials involving any projects they were directly involved in while in office and a two-year ban on anything involving their former department.

Conflict rules are less rigorous elsewhere, but lobbying and policy advice is restricted to English speaking countries, he said.

“It’s uncommon throughout Europe but in Brussels, where it occurs, it is called the American system. It is seen as an anglo-saxon disease,” he said.

“My personal theory is policy advice and lobbying thrives where you have free media, which governments listen to, capitalism, democracy and where there is an educated citizenry and lots of controversy,” he said. “English-speaking countries have the longest history of those four elements in place and also have little concensus. So government-oriented public relations becomes one of the agents in the court of public opinion.”

Broadly speaking, Mr.Taaffe defines public relations as any effort that helps a company, person, government, or organization get its message across to the audience it chooses.

In China, for instance, that involves helping corporations deal with the “dual system” there which involves dealing with Communist party officials and then with government officials.

Hill & Knowlton also have governments as clients such as Pakistan, the Maldives and the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan where a campaign to encourage poppy growers to switch crops met with some success, he said. So did its California government initiative to reduce teen pregnancies.

“Public relations has more credibility than advertising and we help get messages across through the media, blogs, influencers, commentators or by creating coalitions of like-minded persons or groups,” he said. “The public relations space has grown in five years, by $1 billion to $4 billion.”

Like others, Hill & Knowlton also deploys proprietary research tools to enable clients to find, monitor and keep audiences.
“We can do a brand map which shows whether your brand [or message] is strong or weak, ascending or descending, where investment is needed and where it isn’t,” he said. “For instance, Coca-Cola would not need to invest in awareness but it may have weaker areas such as health issues, the fact it’s too American or its credibility.”

The company also tracks journalists and media outlets to monitor the “conversation”.

“There is a marketplace theory that markets [for products, people or policies] are a series of conversations and our core competency is who’s in that conversation, who’s online, who are the influencers. I can map the conversation and show a client how to get a part of the conversation,” he said. “It’s also about limiting your rivals’ conversations and accelerating yours’. And whoever gets the most attention, wins the commercial battle.”

Hill & Knowlton also answers corporate “911” calls.

“Take what was left of WorldCom. We worked for the bankruptcy administrator and there were problems. AT&T and Verizon took a run to destroy it. We had public opinion, justice department, bankruptcy and European and Asian issues. We put together a global crisis team because that’s what was needed.