You’re probably familiar with Marian Salzman, who has spent the last year-plus as CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America. Well, our mediabistro.com correspondent Amanda Ernst decided to pick the exec’s brain for a few as part of our “So What Do You Do?” series. Here’s a quick excerpt below, where Salzman discusses her transition from advertising to PR (you might remember she spent over years as EVP/CMO and EVP/chief strategy officer at both JWT and Euro, respectively, prior to heading into PR). Read the full Q+A here.
“How was making the transition from advertising to PR for you?
In advertising, you have very, very large budgets and you are very aesthetic. So, I was used to big budgets where there is a lot of room to experiment and things are very aesthetically pleasing and very visual. In PR, things are not as aesthetic; there’s not as much attention placed on how things look, and there was no margin for error because the numbers are so tight. Also, PR people tend to be afraid, and advertising people tend to be provocateurs. And so I had a very hard time… because I’ve grown up in a world of, ‘There’s no such thing as a mistake; there’s just a bigger challenge to repair.’ Because that’s the nature of the advertising industry: You’re only as big as your last failure.”