(MENAFN- PRovoke) A few months back, in June, the most important PR-related story of the year barely made it out of the trade press. The accountancy trade.

The news that PWC was dropping its fees because AI was helping its people deliver work to clients more efficiently seems innocuous enough – albeit out of character for a numbers-obsessed Big Four firm.

The bean counters are clearly worried. But it should have our own industry in a sweat colder than the leads we have when we're told to sell-in yet another pop-up. It really is time to have a proper conversation about the financial future of the PR industry.

And by financial future, I don't mean the minutiae of how we can use AI to drive efficiencies, create new products or save money on images of mocked-up brand and talent collabs, I mean the bigger financial picture. Because we are at an inflection point.

What has happened at PWC and is happening across the service sector threatens our payment model of choice – payment for time spent – and our industry as we know it. We desperately need to talk value, something we've been notoriously poor at demonstrating. God knows, I've written enough articles about it.

Clients have always asked for better value measures. But I have had more clients in the past six months asking for measurement that links to financial value than at any time in my long 30 years in the business. All from in-house practitioners who are feeling the internal pressure.

At a time when media budgets are being eroded and advertising is becoming less effective, we should be cleaning up financially. But we're really not.

We persist in quantifying our value in terms of boots on the ground, not the impact we deliver. For certain projects like events and sell-ins, this makes sense. But our value goes way beyond the time we spend grafting at the coal face.

Agencies need to make a collective stand to transform – or at the very least diversify – our pricing model and show our in-house contemporaries the real impact of our work.

Part of the problem we all face is confidence and legacy.

Our fees have historically been dwarfed by the big ad agencies and their seven-figure budgets. When you've been selling your services at between £100,000 and £200,000 a year, it's going to be hard to contemplate selling a single idea for £1m plus. But that's what ad agencies do, for ideas that frequently don't have any earned potential.

It's obviously also impossible to expect a PR client (who's used to PR fees) to contemplate paying so much more. Even if we were good at asking for pay rises from our clients (we're not), the idea of expecting them to pay advertising levels of fee is absurd.

So what's the solution?

At a recent AI masterclass, Nathan McDonald (the Founder of We Are Social) outlined three payment models: Subscription (for a level of basic PR support for inhouse teams), Performance (tied to results) and IP/Licensing (of creative ideas). All are valid.

Subscription entities like Olivia Brown (sexily dubbed an 'AI PR Superagent') offer to“amplify your PR team to superhuman levels. Add 1,000 hours of expert PR work to your agency's capacity every month”. Terrifying, but we need to expect much more of this.

The idea of payment being attached to performance has been around for a while, but has not been widely adopted, mainly because PR success is hard to predict and quantify (especially in the short term). Wider accessibility of data and econometric modelling (thanks to AI) is changing this and we must lean in.

And finally, 'licensing' absolutely offers the opportunity to access and sell elevated creative resource but is tortuous to implement and feels more of a longer-term play.

Given the speed of change, we need to collectively look beyond these models and (in the short term) do three things in particular.

First, agencies need to be more confident in their pricing and more ambitious in their client targeting. Warren Buffett once said:“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get”. We need to be more Buffett. And if our PR contacts don't have the budget, we need to nurture better relationships with the CMOs who do (and help our clients do the same).

Secondly, at its best, our work works harder, across more channels, engaging more people than advertising work sold at a premium. Agencies and in-house teams alike need to openly share more examples of our financial impact.

There is evidence of this in the public domain. The well-thumbed 'Tooth Fairy' case study from GSK (via Aquafresh) used attribution modelling to show that PR spend delivered an ROI of 5:1. A New Jersey food brand proved a“40% sales boost”, following a modest media relations campaign with no supporting advertising or promotions. Analysis of what's out there suggests that PR, when integrated into Marketing Mix Modelling, often yields ROI figures ranging from 300% to 800%.

But we need more evidence, and we need to shout about it.

Finally, we all need to demonstrate the positive impact of PR on longer term reputation and share price. PR – consumer PR included – is a strategic resource designed to cultivate long-term brand equity, foster trust, and enhance corporate reputation, all of which is foundational for sustained sales and profitability. What CMO in their right mind wouldn't pay a premium for that?

So now is the time for us all, urgently and collectively, to Be More Buffett, to double down on value and to find our inner bean counter, however alien that feels. Because AI, as we are already seeing, sleeps for no one, and our industry simply can't afford to wait.

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