Let me ask you a question… when is a PR agency, not a PR agency? Well for the past 12 years, I’ve been in denial that Media Stable, the communications agency I founded in 2010 is in fact, a public relations agency.

But why? What else could Media Stable be if it isn’t a PR business? And what finally changed my mind?

To be honest in the early days of Media Stable I didn’t want to be a PR agency.

At the time, the industry was struggling with services, deliverables, exorbitant charges, accountability, and professionalism. While I recognise this is a broad criticism, there were exceptions, with many small and mid-sized agencies doing great work. The culprit was monolith agencies that charged the earth and only vaguely represented their clients’ interests or goals.

From the beginning, Media Stable was designed to be a service provider to PR companies, to work alongside them. And that’s why I originally didn’t want to offend or compete with them. I wanted to support them by supplying them with an expert-based service that delivered great content.

The unique Media Stable offering gives smart communications and PR people a platform that offers their clients’ unique results. Unfortunately, most PR agencies couldn’t grasp the concept that Media Stable was after content rather than their clients… that was always going to be a hard sell.

On the other hand, marketing agencies embraced the concept that Media Stable’s services were an excellent add-on to offer their clients.

So, if Media Stable wasn’t PR from the start, then what was it?

Partly inspired by Ten’s The Project with its byline ‘News delivered differently’, The Media Stable byline was always ‘Communications delivered differently’, focusing more on what the industry leader, owner, expert, CEO, or MD had to say rather than the PR teams behind them.

Audiences were, and still are demanding leaders of industry get out from behind their big corporate desks and provide them with true, honest, authentic, raw commentary on important issues that educate, inform, and even entertain.

But there was another concept that challenged both the agency and client world: who did Media Stable serve?

I still say to this day: “Media Stable’s biggest client is the media.” It’s an unusual philosophy but it works for all parties, because when we’re serving the media it’s our experts that benefit. The media gets the very best experts and relevant content, so the media cycle circle is complete.

The last three years have been a period of change and growth. Partly driven by Covid and because the business was still maturing, big business and government agencies were attracted to the relationship and content-based model that Media Stable offers.

In 2021 we launched the Media Personal Assistant (MPA) program for clients that need more public relations support. This essentially locked in our PR credentials, and with an already effective creative and content distribution platform, we were able to offer more hours of media engagement management to clients that needed it.

We had become a PR firm with a difference. Media Stable procures and pitches content the media wants – it’s not just content being thrown at them with a scatter gun approach.

In the past 18 months the clientele of Media Stable has changed. We are working with more multinational’s and large to mid-size businesses, as well as solo-preneurs and speakers. This is due to business owners of larger companies realising that to stay relevant, they need to be in front of their audiences more than ever before.

Media Stable also had to tell its own story better. The irony isn’t lost on me that we relay the stories of our members as clear, directional, and without distortion but we often flew under the radar about who we were and our credentials.

An interesting story that hardly anyone knows is the origin of Media Stable’s name and how that came to be. There was one significant influence in the business name and that was Judy Hayes, my mum. My mother’s love of horses rubbed off on me and hence the connection to the stable, I had a vision of thoroughbred experts easily accessible and gathered in one location for media to access.

We are a platform that brands, organisations, leaders of industry, experts, businessowners and authorities use to effectively tell their stories. A cost-effective way to raise your media profile, while also establishing authority and expertise in the media.

We leverage our relationships, knowledge, expertise, and reputation to share the stories of small, medium, and large business enterprises with the media, who might previously have used a national or international PR agency.

In short, Media Stable is PR done differently, we focus on content, leadership, relationship building, and goals… we love what we do, and we love to see our experts shine in the media.