AMRUTHA RAMAN, PR CONSULTANT

Play each point like your life depends on it!

– by Amrutha Raman

“Kiddo, you’ve got a gift”, said Baskar Ethiraj, Co-founder, Indianstage.com (a ticketing and performing arts production company). This was 7 years ago, in 2010, when I cracked my first pitch for a feature in Deccan Chronicle. Back then it wasn’t passion but just a drive to communicate about a theatre group convincingly to a reporter. While I was hired to manage Indianstage’s social media accounts, Baskar and his co-founder, Sajesh Nair, one day handed me with a media list with contacts of Bangalore journalists. Before I knew it, I was running PR campaigns for plays directed by Naseerudin Shah, Paresh Rawal, Nandita Das and others. It startles me even now to think about what made Baskar and Sajesh have faith in a 22 year old to manage their company’s external communication!

Indianstage gave me the first exposure to PR but my stint at the firm was a short one. Like any typical youth in her early 20s, I too was unsure of my career path and decided to try my hand at fields like digital media and start-up mentoring. But the PR bug never left me, I moonlit as a publicist for performing artists – musicians, dancers, theatre artists and the likes. In 2012, I finally took the plunge to join formal PR and entered the agency world. It’s been 5 years at Aim High Consulting now and the journey has been incredible.

I made a giant leap from live entertainment PR to Business PR at Aim High. But here’s the interesting thing and I did mention it at the beginning of this article, it’s not always about passion or having the dream job, it’s really about trying to be the best at what you do; seeing every project / campaign as something fun to accomplish and thrive on the rush that you get when you complete it. That’s exactly how I see my job, even today. So the transition to business PR wasn’t so hard and neither was all the learning about venture capital, securitization or impact investing that came along with the domain. Everything boiled down to the thrill of building a brand in the media. I can never forget the feeling when I saw one of my clients on the Forbes cover page. It was the best feeling ever and worth all the hard work that went behind building the company’s brand image!

See, this is what I like about public relations: it has the ability to create powerful and impactful brands. Whatever may be your specialisation- business, lifestyle, entertainment, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is building responsible communication for clients and driving those messages to the external world.

Challenges are aplenty, life as a publicist is hard. You need to earn RESPECT from both clients and the media and that is not easy to come by. You need to earn respect by knowing your clients’ business, studying their industry in-depth and more importantly through your everyday engagement with your client. Demonstrate that you are a reliable communication partner to them. On the other side: show empathy to journalists, understand their job and enable them with information that is most needed for their story.

As Vincent Van Gogh says, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not accidental, but must certainly be willed”.

Click here to read more about Amrutha

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Wonder Women World.