An industry veteran for about 9 years, Tarun Deo, Managing Director of Text100 India and a Founding Member of Public Relations Consultants Association of India (PRCAI) feels that the profile of PR manager is going to change for better. Text100 India is a part of the global PR group OneMonday, which was recently named Next Fifteen Communications.

MD, Text 100 India

One of the frontrunners in the industry, Deo started his career with Perfect Relations as a trainee, rose through ranks to become Associate Director. He handled a client portfolio, which included firms like Morgan Stanley, Electrolux, Hyundai, TVS Suzuki, Kotak Mahindra and Escorts Group. Extensive planning, in-depth understanding of the clients business, clarity in communicating objectives, he feels are the hallmarks of a good PR.

Deo joined Text100 in 1998, became Managing Director in April 2000. With client portfolio including Microsoft, Cisco and the Gartner Group, Deo has been working to increase his portfolio, albeit with the right strategy and long term focus. In the last two years, Text100 claims to have grown both in revenues and profits by 50% in the Indian market. In an interview with Nikhil Gupta of exchange4media, Deo talks about Bill Gates visit, second day syndrome, Text100's USP and the future of PR in India.

Our unique selling proposition is that we are specialists, we work for companies in the technology space. We are update with the key developments in the tech world. We have the ability to understand and articulate technology, and communicate it to a wider audience. And that's our USP. We do that globally, in all our other 24 offices worldwide.

Well, we are about 60 people in India, we have three offices, Delhi Mumbai and Bangalore. We have about 20 clients, which include Microsoft, Cisco, Cannon and Motorola. And we are about 7 years old in India.

It has more to do with the industry per se, and the IT industry is one, which is evolving fast. You have new products hitting the market every quarter, the basic pace of the industry is so fast that you need a PR firm which can match this pace. It should be able to filter through these massive developments and communicate to the audience that here is a definitive technology. I think the difference is in how we are able to cut through the clutter of technology jargons and communicate its real benefits to the people at large.

Today there are various technologies in the market, people are talking about wireless local loops (WLL), and at the same time somebody is peddling you a normal GSM cellphone. Now, if I were a business customer or a normal retail customer, I would like to understand what is the difference between the two products. Both will be looking at the benefit of price and how good the service is? Will it have a 24-hour service back up? Is this technology distributed in any other part of the world? So, any corporate or retail customer would ask these questions and our job will be to furnish the answers. Though these are the similarities but and in a way these are the differences also. Like in the Indian context you might be able to roam freely with a GSM connection, whereas there is a government regulation, which says that WLL will only work in a single city.

One special effort has been in terms of planning. You have someone like Gates coming to India for about 3 days, the challenge in such cases is not to just get him here but the challenge is how to use his visit to fulfill a number of key objectives. In this case, first element was that Microsoft wanted to work closely with the government, so you have seen initiative been announced with Ministry of IT for Media Labs Asia.

Second element was education, which was also very close to Microsoft's initiatives in India, so there was 'Project Shiksha'. So, there was a lot of groundwork, which was done and I am sure over the next two or three months we will see a lot of follow-ups announcements. This whole process started in June 2002, what you see in newspapers is a culmination of months of extremely hard work.

One of key differentiator is that we don't go for every pitch we are invited to. There is a due diligence process in place where we qualify and quantify the prospective client, we try to get an indication as to what kind of budgets are available. We don't want to win every piece of business available out there. We want to work with the right kind of people and with the companies, which are looking for a long-term relationship. This strategy prevented us from overstretching ourselves in the dot-com boom.

Most of our clients have a long-term relationship with us. For instance, we have been working with Microsoft in India for last 6 years, Cisco for 3 years, Motorola for 2 years, and Nasscom for 3 years. And this really helps us to grow our business in a right way.

In India, the biggest challenge today is firstly to find the right kind of people. Second challenge is to find the right kind of infrastructure to train them, to instill PR skills in them. The Indian PR industry would be worth about a 100 crore and its growing at a rate of 20% per year. So, it is very important to have the right kind of staff on board.

If we look at the way PR profession is growing in UK and US, I think the percentage of media relations as a skill to support any public relations program is going down. So, probably in India, today if the percentage of media relations in the total PR exercise is 80%, I see that coming down to 50% or even less than that in the next 10 years. People are going to be more interested in messaging. For example if a CEO gets up at a business conference and delivers a speech to a focused audience. What he says, how he conducts himself, how he portrays his company is going to be much more important than how is his product doing in the market. Also, say in the area of finance, what does a fund manager sitting at Morgan Stanley think about a particular company.

So, specifics of PR are going to become more important than the mass media relation PR that you currently see in India.

I think the moment you start looking things in grey, that's when you get into this argument of definition of ethics changing. I think everyone knows that there is a fine line between what is right and what is wrong. And the moment you try and fudge the line or try to say that the line doesn't exist, you harm the integrity of your company. So, I think ethics are very important; there again we keep a safeguard through picking and choosing the right kind of companies we want to work with.

We believe, that if a media person has asked a question, then that question should be answered in the right way. What we have to understand is that we need to give the right answers, the role of a PR professional is not to falsify, fudge or create any block between what the media is asking and what the client wants to divulge. That is why you will see Text100 trying to put some kind of public stance on any issue forward, whenever media asks one of our clients to do it. Sometimes, it is important for the client not to comment on a particular issue and media has to understand that.