014 - Secrets to Win Tech PR - Curtis Sparrer of Bospar PR Shares Secrets of His Award-Winning Boutique Tech Public Relations Agency

The most important thing with PR is asking your clients what business results they want to achieve. And then reverse engineering a PR program around that.

Welcome to another episode of Better PR Now.

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Today, we're fortunate to be joined by Curtis Sparrer, principal at Bospar in San Fransisco. Bospar recently won the PR Week Boutique Agency of the Year award. Congratulations and welcome, Curtis.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

So, as we jump in, I'd like to find out about how people got into public relations, how they started their career in communication. You graduated from UT Austin with a degree in Radio, Television, and Film. What's happened between graduation and ending up in San Fransisco as a principal at one of the nation's leading agencies?

Well, I think what happened in the short term is I got smart. But the long-term is a much more complicated story. I went to LA, worked for Roger Corman. He's a famous B-movie producer and discovered that I just did not have the patience to pay my dues in Hollywood. When I was going to school at UT Austin, I worked as a video film editor for the local TV stations, and I used that skill to go back into news. And my first job as a producer was in Toledo, Ohio. I cut my teeth as a producer there for about three years rising up the ranks and even moonlighting as a restaurant critic and advice columnist. I then moved to Huston where I worked the overnight show there. And then I got an amazing offer to produce the 9 PM news at [inaudible] in San Fransisco. I worked there. I won a regional Emmy. And I was promoted to the executive producer. And then as I kind of ended my career at [inaudible], I was faced with the choice that I could either move to a different city, or I could change my career trajectory so I could stay with my friends. And I gave it a long thought and determined that it would be best if I took all my skills and applied them somewhere else. I applied at a lot of different PR firms thinking that would be the best use of my skillset. And I was really surprised by the obnoxious response of a lot of people.

How so [laughter]?

I got some responses like, "Oh, I couldn't possibly qualify to do PR. It was far too complex." "Oh, PR is just so difficult and you would not just understand it." A lot of self-satisfied responses about how complex PR was. And I didn't get a lot of encouragement. I answered a Craigslist ad for a PR position, an internship really, and I met this woman named Kris [Balkie?]. And after Chris and I had a very long conversation, she called me back and said, "I don't want to do an internship. I want to get married. I want to hire you as our senior associate and I want to get things started." And so I started as a senior associate and started learning, very quickly. And I learned that a lot of people in PR were really good at telling clients no. And I decided that my fastest route for survival would be learning how to tell clients yes. And I I treated clients like anyone would treat a television anchor, with the utmost respect, and I learned that really paid off well. I also learned that a lot of times the press release material that clients were trying to get in the media was not useful for any journalist having both been a TV producer and also having been a writer.

So before we go any further. Why was it not useful? Was there a pattern there?

Yeah. It was. A lot of the content was jargon-heavy. A lot of the content was something that would not fit in any kind of current narrative or current story that journalists were already talking about. It was very tone deaf. A lot of the content was just tone deaf and it was as if a bunc