The gist of the story was that Don Draper, the lead character, messed up a newspaper interview that led to his firm getting bad publicity, which is bad for business. Meanwhile, Peggy Olson, one of Don’s young creative leads, comes up with a PR stunt to regain their account with Sugarberry Ham. She hires actresses to fight over a ham in a supermarket. The stunt goes sideways, when the fight turns real and the actresses get arrested. Don gets angry at her, but Peggy wins back Sugarberry. Good for business.

In the Mad Man era, PR equaled publicity, either managing it when a reporter called, or creating it with cool stunts. Don was an amateur; Peggy was a natural. I’d hire her in a minute.

Before I did, though, I’d warn her that, even though the public relations industry in our post-Mad Men era has changed a lot, it still has a long way to go before it’s the dog. I’d tell her PR has an opportunity to become as powerful and compelling as the ad business in the last decades of the 20th Century, if only a couple of things would change.

1: Create PR Holding Companies

The ownership structure of most of the world’s large, global PR firms is an insurmountable wall in the way of greatness. Tucked near the backside of global ad conglomerate org charts, the world’s major public relations firms, with the exception of independent Edelman (disclosure, my employer), are encumbered by second-class status. They are grouped into kludged organizations with names like “constituency management,” “diversified agency services,” and “specialized agencies and management services.” The organizational categories are basically “other.”

Despite the talent and excellence of some of the holding-company PR firms, they will never assume marketing leadership locked in a last-generation concept that puts ad networks at the front of everything. When these holding companies were formed, the ad agencies ruled the day and owned the client, and their DNA is born of a time that will never again exist. And regardless of all the talk by holding company heads about the importance of digital, the ad guys still run the show.

Because so much of the world’s PR talent is locked into this declining model, the entire industry is being held back. PR needs a little bit of Darwin to create the model of the future holding company: One made up of great PR firms, with perhaps a small creative ad agency and a digital direct-marketing firm in the “other” part of the organization.

2: Own - Really Own - Social Media in the New Engagement Economy

It was social media that poisoned the holding company, ad-agency-led marketing model, and it can be social media that empower the PR industry. If, and it’s a big if, the industry embraces the implications of social media and restructures itself to take advantage of the new engagement economy, it will move to the center of the client relationship.

Some PR firms have genuinely embarked on a journey to alter their business models and are quite skilled at engaging on behalf of their clients within social media. Most, however, have a social media expert or two, but still spend the majority of their time and their clients’ money sending out core messages and strategic responses to the media, then counting media hits and ad-equivalent column inches to justify that effort.

Of course, PR will always communicate with media in whatever form media take. But the industry will be great when public relations agencies have scores of people adept at the way information is shared across digital platforms, when their employees are respected members of online social networks, good listeners who are also expert at cultivating relationships through increasing customer and stakeholder interaction.

My pitch to get Peggy Olson to join the PR ranks would also include a confession. I am an accidental PR guy. I didn’t choose this business; it chose me. I didn’t know it existed when I was in college; I scorned it during my years as a newspaper journalist; I found myself in it one day, and have now embraced it.

I would tell Peggy Olson I’m glad I did, because PR, before long, might just be the dog.

This post also appeared in Marketing Asia magazine.