Michael Willard has been in the public relations and advertising business for decades, yet he says he has never met a PR expert, much less a PR guru.  He says that since anyone can print business cards, rent an office and say they’re in the PR business, “the profession has become a refuge for those who have failed at most everything else.”

At the same time, Willard says there’s no magic to doing the job well.  All it takes, he says, is “having a measure of creativity and common sense born of experience.”

“Public relations is about experience applied judiciously and strategically to a client’s often serious problem or issue. It is about the magic of out-of-bounds creativity to publicize an event or person,” Willard says in his weekly webcast, The Ukraine Observer (www.ukraine-observer.com).  “It is about telling a client what he already knows, but doesn’t want to hear - and doing it so clearly and forcefully that the right action is taken.”

His weekly webcasts touch on issues of marketing, advertising, public relations and management.  A new webcast is released each Monday.