RainToday.com Note: This is the first half of Marcus' article on the PR Agency Game. Here, Marcus gives some background on the history of the PR industry and discusses how to identify the right objectives for your service firm's PR. Next week, Marcus will offer key questions to ask yourself about the effectiveness of your PR firm's strategies.

There was a time when all you needed was a roll of nickels and a phone booth, and you were in the PR game. Of course, all your clients expected of you then was that you get their names in the paper. For most of the publicity clients in those days, that was sufficient.

Those days were the late 1930s and 1940s, before publicity became public relations, and we were beset with such glorious concepts as image, and positioning, and niche marketing, and issues management. Today, public relations is infinitely more sophisticated than that, as is the public relations client. The public relations program for any modern corporation is to its publicity ancestor as desktop publishing is to hieroglyphics.

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