Richard Parker, our esteemed MD, co-founded EML back in the days when mobile phones needed a trolley to make them ‘mobile’ and I was at home playing Manic Minor on my ZX Spectrum. We get the impression he is still enjoying being at the helm of the good-ship EML:

“I love the challenge of running a PR company; to keep it successful, to sustain growth and attract new clients and keep existing staff and clients happy, is a constantly evolving puzzle. I think EML’s success is largely down to our flexibility and the way we adapt to the shifts in our target markets.

We’ve been a part of the boom and crash cycle of the telecoms industry and have ridden the wave of progress in the technology sector. It is a volatile area to specialise in, but I honestly can’t understand why anyone would want to do any other kind of PR – technology is the most exciting market in the world. We see the future – and the technology that will be driving tomorrow’s market or that might be in next year’s top five Christmas presents.

There has also been a change in the PR industry as a whole since EML was founded. When we started up, we invested the mighty sum of £3000 in two, top of the range Apple Classics with a combined memory space of 40MB – in external drives.

We were laboriously printing, photocopying and posting each press release to each editor because email hadn’t yet become the ubiquitous business tool that it is today. Thankfully some bright spark invented the Internet and took all of the tedium out of PR.

Everything is much more immediate now and there are so many more possibilities; ‘you want a press tour in Taiwan next week? No problem’, ‘Your release went out 5 minutes ago, here are the first 20 online cuttings’, ‘You want to be more interactive with your target audiences? Fine, we can help you start a blog’. It’s definitely keeping us all busy”

For the next installment of “who’s who at EML” I’ll be talking to another of EML’s recent additions, Darren, about his experiences on the “dark side” as a journalist before he joined EML.

What do you think have been the biggest changes in technology or PR in the last two decades? What will the next 21 years will look like? And did you, like me, take your GCSE IT classes on ‘good old’ ClarisWorks only to be totally confused by Microsoft Office when you hit the real world?