Niira Radia's PR exit: Business that's attracting plenty of foreign capital but needs smart ideas
Niira Radia
Niira Radia
In the end, Niira Radia's exit from the public relations (PR) business came in a flurry of press releases. It was just the way she would have liked it - no ungainly media scoop to quell, no unruly mob of television crews to wriggle her way of out of (and she has faced a lot of these in the last year or so), and finally, no probing questions to handle.
Her laconic public statement was followed by far more effusive press releases from the Tata Group and Reliance - the country's largest corporate houses and the anchor clients of the agency Radia founded exactly 10 years ago, Vaishnavi.
Radia often subordinated "her personal and family interests in favour of her clients' priorities", said Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata in a release. RIL has agreed to place some 30 Vaishnavi executives in its internal communications team. And soon, in what a senior executive of a Mumbai-based company describes as a "somewhat late face-saving bid", Tatas announced Vaishnavi's PR replacement: Rediffusion and Edelman.
Radia's decision to shut down Vaishnavi and its other subsidiaries like Neucom brings to close a chapter which marked Radia's rise from your average behind-the-scenes publicist to national recognition and most would agree, infamy.
But it is also a chapter that the fast-growing Indian PR industry would like to forget in a hurry. After all, it is not often that a publicist gets so much publicity and that too for the wrong reasons.
Earning a Bad Name
So was Radiagate, as it became known, a loss of face for corporates or for the PR industry? Opinions vary but many PR executives, perhaps not surprisingly, claim that the scandal was a worse reflection on PR. The scandal unfortunately made Radia the de facto public face of PR, at least for a while. A senior executive at a Mumbai-based conglomerate rues that in the case of Radia, corporates let PR folks "dominate" them.
Industry insiders claim Radia distorted the way PR is practiced. "Unethical lobbying got disguised as PR. And the industry as a whole suffered. There is suddenly an overhanging cloud of suspicion," says one.
Earning a Bad Name
So was Radiagate, as it became known, a loss of face for corporates or for the PR industry? Opinions vary but many PR executives, perhaps not surprisingly, claim that the scandal was a worse reflection on PR. The scandal unfortunately made Radia the de facto public face of PR, at least for a while. A senior executive at a Mumbai-based conglomerate rues that in the case of Radia, corporates let PR folks "dominate" them.
Industry insiders claim Radia distorted the way PR is practiced. "Unethical lobbying got disguised as PR. And the industry as a whole suffered. There is suddenly an overhanging cloud of suspicion," says one.
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