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The USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations today released an executive summary of its Global Communications Report, a comprehensive survey of senior public relations executives, which predicts the worldwide PR agency business will grow from its current estimated size of $14 billion to $19.3 billion over the next five years. To accommodate this growth, agency leaders anticipate their headcount will increase over the same period by about 26%. Industry leaders, both in agencies and in-house, believe future growth will be driven by content creation and social media, as well as more traditional activities such as brand reputation, followed by measurement and evaluation. Earned media still ranks relatively high for both corporate and agency leaders. Paid media ranked last of 18 possible growth drivers. “Overall, we are sensing a continued optimism about the direction the industry is headed, which is good news for people entering the field,” said Fred Cook, Director of the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations. “But questions remain about the industry’s ability to attract the right talent, adapt to new technologies and increase the level of investment required to capitalize on these opportunities.”...
Global expansion. Blurred lines between PR and marketing. An explosion of creative services.
Chief executives from 12 of the largest agencies in the world discuss their firm’s performance over the past year and share their pitch for the future of the business....
With the recent revelations about Sony ‘s movie studio executives behaving badly and its discriminatory treatment of female stars, I decided to look closer to home—to my own industry of public relations—to see how women fare. If anyone should treat women well, shouldn't it be a field like PR, which is predominated by women?
It turns out that while the PR profession skews heavily female, men make significantly more money and hold the majority of the seats of power in the largest agencies.
Consider who's running the world’s top 10 PR agencies as ranked in the Holmes Report. The vast majority has white men at the helm, though two have women running their North American units. It would almost be amusing if it weren't so sad to see some of these agencies’s leadership pages,with men holding all the top spots and women peering out beneath them.
Even as economic power has become increasingly concentrated in large corporations, communication power has become more diffuse. Most of us now carry global publishing power in our pockets, and we are connected to one another like never before. This combination of access and interconnection gives us the ability to make or break reputations and brands.
For the last two years, I’ve had a unique vantage point on this tumultuous change, as chair of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, the confederation of the world’s PR and communications professional associations.Professional business communicators are on the front lines of the communications revolution. The Global Alliance represents 160,000 practitioners and academics around the globe and I’ve been able to meet thousands of communicators on every continent, from at least 30 different countries and many different cultures. Based on that experience, I can share a few insights about how communication is changing the world of business — and how business communication itself must change as a consequence....
The competition between public relations agencies and inbound marketing agencies is heavily one-sided. What can PR professionals do to step up their game?
Most agencies (advertising, social, search, design, digital) realize that inbound marketing isn’t just some concept waiting to get trumped by the next fad. It’s actually a comprehensive, forward-thinking type of marketing that puts the power in the consumers’ hands. I know this can be scary for some, and that may explain why not everyone is as excited about inbound marketing as they should be.PR agencies have all the makings of successful inbound marketers (in fact, some could argue that public relations professionals were the original inbound marketers), but for some reason they just don’t seem to get it.
Rather than integrating their practices to keep up with the competition, they are choosing to stay in the background and focus on less competitive areas like crisis communications, social monitoring and CSR.For the past few years people have actually been saying that PR as we know it is dead. Rather than adjusting to the new world of journalism, many PR agencies are content to sit on the sidelines and wither away while other firms take their business. Which makes no sense, because public relations is the industry most similar to inbound marketing....
Two huge public-relations firms are going into the advertising business -- focusing on areas that are natural extensions of PR.... In general, public-relations firms have been quicker to adapt to the changing social-media landscape. It's not just the big players like Edelman and Weber Shandwick. Independent firms such as Shift Communications and Digital Influence Group saw social media, and in turn content marketing, as a natural extension of their mission. It's important to note that public-relations firms aren't banging down doors to break into the traditional advertising world of print and television, at least not yet. Rather, they're smartly taking advantage of opportunities that have come their way. For example, the concept of native advertising -- embedding paid content in an editorial environment so that it is barely distinguishable from the journalistic information around it -- is conceptually the same as placing press releases that look like independent journalism. It's a natural fit for public-relations firms. These firms come to this new world with advantages. They understand the publishing business and have a long tradition of collaborating with publishers to create content. And they get that content marketing is not only about creating interesting material; it is equally about managing the distribution of content through all of the social channels. With the major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter introducing paid-media opportunities, the public-relations firms simply are climbing on board.
The Holmes ReportWPP 1H 2011 Results: PR Again Outpaced By Other DisciplinesThe Holmes ReportLONDON--WPP, the owner of numerous PR agencies including Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy PR, has reported that PR earnings grew by five...
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The global PR industry grew by 7% in 2014, with currency volatility helping to soften another positive year for PR firms around the world, according to the 2015 World PR Report.
The 2015 World PR Report, produced by the Holmes Report and ICCO, again provides the clearest picture available of the global PR industry, based on submissions from more than 400 PR firms across the world.
The research reveals that, for the first time, the Top 250 PR firms in the world cracked the $10m barrier in terms of fee income last year, reporting $10.4bn compared to $9.7bn in 2013....
PR has probably changed more in the last ten years than it has in the last three decades. For communicators, new challenges and opportunities have come along with the changes we have experienced as a society, most of which have roots in the influence of the Internet and social media. We are living through a creative and transformative period. With each passing year comes a time to reflect on how far we've come and, perhaps more important, how much we still have left to figure out.
What will PR look like in 2015? What will the challenges be? As communicators pause to celebrate the holidays, let's take a look at where the profession is headed next year:
Much has been shared about the way the PR gig has changed over the past few years. While all of what’s being said is accurate and important, noteworthy is the fact that seeking new business has also changed. Listed here are a few of the ways new business generation has changed since I first jumped into the business:
In 2013, prospects find you. This is the first and by far the most significant item on this list. Prospects find agencies or individual PR professionals in a home office somewhere by way of their online presence. That’s an online presence far beyond just a website – although that remains hugely valuable. Prospects are looking for professionals who practice what they preach, and who are active and engaged....
New webmaster rules from Google just killed PR agencies according to Tom Foremski's post "Did Google just kill PR agencies?" last month.He highlights a Google webmaster update warning about black hat, linkbait press releases and other similar improper SEO content practices trying to manipulate search engine results.Look out PR agencies Foremski warns....
It’s just over a hundred years since the first press release was issued by a company in an effort to tell their story in the media. In 1906, after a railroad accident, the company hired a journalist to help them deal with the disaster and the media coverage. Soon press releases and media relations became a core part of public relations.In the 1930s radio was a part of most American households.
Companies and PR agencies soon realized that just sending a text press release to a radio station was not enough. Sending a photograph was a complete waste of time. This was a new medium with new technology and it needed new content. And so the sound bite was born. Smart PR agencies and company PR pros quickly learned how to make 15-second audio clips to send with their releases.
And then came TV. By 1955 half of all American homes had a TV and this became the medium of choice for news. Smart PR folk had to adapt once again....
Once again, a public relations firm is in the news for the unethical professional conduct of one of its own. And once again, it’s over the issue of disclosure. Reports surfaced in Gawker and elsewhere yesterday that a young professional employed by Mercury Public Affairs had posed as a university student and registered under a false name to gain access to a “closed press conference” held by Warehouse Workers United (WWU). Mercury’s client, Walmart, is trying to open a store in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles, and local labor groups, among others, are challenging the store’s permitting. Allegedly, the Mercury employee infiltrated the meeting to interview union members, one would assume to gain inside information that would benefit her client. This woman’s actions—and the subsequent reactions—have rippled through the profession, leaving her unemployed and the public relations profession with yet another black eye that erodes the public’s trust in our craft....
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Optimism ahead for the PR industry – $20 billion value by 2020. The Global Communications Report is a must-read for PR pros, students and PR agencies. 9.5/10