Creating a ‘Pulp Fiction’ PR team

Hiring an agency, of course, is a lot like picking a husband or wife…minus the four years of college sweetheart dating. So given the limited time to play the field, you’ll need a more standard benchmark for whom to look for in an ideal account team.

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s timeless masterpiece, “Pulp Fiction,” we have one.

Within the film’s motley crew of formally dressed hit men, misguided athletes and haphazard criminals, you’ll find the core traits that any winning PR team should have:

• Bruce Willis, a.k.a. “The multitasker”: Willis’ Butch Coolidge is more than just an amateur boxer. Between disobeying mob bosses, appeasing a naïve girlfriend, and keeping a close eye on a very important family heirloom, he knows no downtime, but manages to stay alive. If the members on your account team don’t have at least a little bit of Butch in them, you’ve been warned. Pitching a white paper and a data study in conjunction with press release drafts and a bylined article—all in 48 hours—wouldn’t intimidate Butch, and it shouldn’t scare off your PR team.