1. PR can no longer fly under the nonsense (or BS) radar. Today’s smart consumers see through PR messages in the media.
2. PR agencies can no longer hide the truth. With 100 million bloggers, media is no longer “the third party”, but rather, just one of many voices.
3. The PR industry is doing very little for their clients’ brand strategy and clients are starting to catch on.
4. A parrot can learn to say branding and advertising, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he understands what they mean. (Feel free to substitute executive for parrot…)
5. Greed and competition have driven PR agencies to sell press clippings by the kilo. The result: PR has become easier to spot as artificially generated and not an especially good bargain.
6. PR agencies love crisis management – not for the challenge, but for the money. Crisis management is a cash cow and is often sold by the same agency doing the rest of the PR.
7. With limited online savvy, PR agencies’ attempts to fake their way into reputable forums often backfire. (Several agencies have already been ousted for fake postings.)
8. PR agencies are nowhere near delivering what their customers are asking for. Nine out of ten of their customers surveyed aren’t sure what they’re paying for.✴
9. A lack of rules and ethics often drives PR agencies to go too far. (Or maybe selling seriously ill celebrities as spokespersons for pharmaceutical company products is OK? It seems that reality is more Sicko than Michael Moore’s film…)
10. Due to time restraints and competition from the Web, much of what passes for news has no credible source. Try it yourself: check the sources in the newspapers you read this week. If you can find one article with a real source, one without a profit motive, frame that article. It may be the last one of its kind.

✴Just like PR agencies’ years of “bought” studies, we have used the same unscientific methods to arrive at these figures: we interviewed a large number of PR customers over a period of two years. We’ve talked to a number of leading multinational companies that admit they’re not quite sure what they’re getting from their investment in PR.

Above from Stefan Engeseth new book: The Fall of PR & the Rise of Advertising. When quoting the book cite the source: www.DetectiveMarketing.com