- Is this post my Jerry Maguire moment? Cover of Jerry Maguire
When asked why I was leaving a successful role in our Brussels office to come to D.C. my answer generally went along the lines of “I want to learn new things about public affairs after 8 years here in Brussels. Where else would one go other than Washington? Public affairs is just bigger and better the other side of the pond.”
I was of course proved right. It certainly is bigger. There are far more people here doing it. Those people do it more publicly. There’s a far larger media coverage of it. This coverage drives the day’s agenda. Something which can only be dreamed of by the European Voice staff. There’s a public that takes an interest in the issues, which in turn impacts elections and the elected. Something which most of us from Brussels can only dream of.
This all leads to the public firmly being put in public affairs. Sure, government relations – see this post if you’re from Brussels – is vitally important but no amount of time on Capitol Hill is going to get cap and trade passed if Americans think it’s gonna cost jobs and increase fuel bills in a time of recession and elections. The canvas on which you will need to work is a lot bigger and your team will have to be bigger because of it.
However, it occurred to me on the Metro home the other evening that bigger may not necessarily mean better. This rather heretic thought (for someone who works at an agency) popped into my head as I looked at a full page ad by a defense contractor. It was followed several pages later by another full page ad by another defense contractor. Above my head was a message from one of the same advertisers. They were competing for the same defense contract and wanted to tell all those on the Red Line how great their plane was and how rubbish the other guy’s plane is. Now clearly the rewards of winning the contract are high, but my mind wandered to the thought that they would both be better off agreeing not to engage in such tactics. The two competing contractors could simply both agree just to present to the people making the decision and leave it at that. May the best man/woman/supplier of hunter-killer-missile-laden-flying-things win.
This reminded me of a scene from Mad Men‘s 1st series (what else?), when Stirling & Cooper’s client campaign falls apart on the back of a regulatory decision to ban the use of health claims in advertising for cigarettes. Don and the team wander around in a daze until the fateful meeting with the client, when he realizes in a spark of nicotine induced genius that actually this is liberating for him and his client. Now they can make any claim they want. They are freed from having to compete with others on this factor alone.
My point is this: size is relative.
Firstly, throwing resources at something is only likely to result in a draw if the other guy is doing likewise. It seems to me that the nature of public affairs in Washington has simply raised the barrier to entry in comparison with Brussels. It may not have made it better.
Secondly, throwing resources at an issue is not necessarily enough to move the policy agenda in your favor, even in the absence of others doing the same. A certain level of resources are necessary in every market, but they are not sufficient. Amongst other things the facts of the case, your message and how you communicate it, your reputation and that of your industry, who’s for you and against you and of course the interests of those you’re trying to persuade are all going to dictate whether you will have an impact on policy.
All this to say that it’s probably not the size of your pencil that matters in public affairs but more how you write your name. More on that point later.
James
I always thought that the barrier to entry for government relations is much higher in the US because the stakes are much higher. Companies in the US can throw millions of dollars a month into government relations because the pay-off is in the trillions. In the EU, a company can, at best, hope for a couple hundred thousand euros from the EU. There isn’t a single EU-run project that compares in size to the budgets of most US agencies, not even talking about the Defense Department, where one battleship will cost as much as the single largest EU project (at least, in 2007 when the EU took control of Galileo).
Michael,
Thanks for your comment. I think you’re right. Clearly government contracts at a U.S. federal level dwarf anything that the E.U. can offer. Thus the resources thrown at them by organizations is likely to reflect them. This may not go against my general point about resources.
Upon reflection perhaps I muddied the water a little by my Metro advertising example. There’s clearly two different types of outcome here that we’re talking about; advocating for government contracts on one hand and advocating for a policy outcome on another.
The latter is, as you know, more my field of interest. One could argue that the stakes at play in the EU is likely to be higher rather than lower than those in the US in the case of policy outcomes. Firstly, I’d argue we may well pass more ambitious and thus legislation with more costs/opportunities attached to it. Secondly, as we pride ourselves in leading the world in legislation, we fully expect the world to adopt our standards with additional impacts on global businesses in terms of costs and potentially opportunities. As examples, think of California looking to prohibit certain chemicals on the basis of EU bans, or sending delegations to Brussels to examine and be inspired by ETS. On the opportunities side, I was at a conference the other week where a Canadian civil servant was talking about how EU regulation on energy efficiency in buildings was inspiring them to be more ambitious in Ottawa. The EU’s creating opportunities for growth in global markets for some.