That, old friends, is the “best advice” from Peter Barron, Google’s top UK PR man, in the PR Weak Power Book. Thanks Peter. My best advice would be, “pull out before it’s too late.”

Is the Power Book meant to be a joke? I can’t work it out. It doesn’t seem to be tongue in cheek, and it’s not the Weak’s usual form to indulge in subtle irony, so I can only assume it’s a serious publication. But what purpose does it serve?

Imagine if you were a nurse, say, or a teacher, and you picked up a copy while having dinner with your best mate from university who’d fallen into PR in the absence of any clear idea about how she wanted to spend her working years. What would the Power Book tell you about this industry that we all take so very bloody seriously..and in which your mate’s earning twice as much as you are?

Well, it would tell you that the ’elite’ 500 in PR thought that the third most impressive thing the industry had done was mount a campaign which saw an old chocolate bar stuck back on the shelves. And that the second best thing was Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. No problem there in principle. Except that it wasn’t a campaign created by the PR industry. It was created by a couple of advertising execs. Most of all, of course, the Power Book tells you that the PR industry is choc-full of navel-gazing egotists.

The only decent thing about the Power Book is the fact that some people - like Freud, Campbell, Coulson and Clifford - are so properly influential (or at least high profile) that though they clearly can’t be arsed to spend a second of their time responding to the ridiculous questionnaire, PR Weak has to write a profile itself to avoid the publication being completely worthless.

Still plenty of pomposity to prick round here then?