Has the PR industry reinvented itself post recession?
March 12th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe
In September 2008, on the day that the European Commission officially announced that the UK would fall into recession, I wrote a blog post entitled “The role of PR within a recession” offering some predictions on what I thought this would mean for the PR industry. The post sparked a fair amount of debate, and so I thought it would be interesting to follow-up this post now that we’ve come out the other side, to see how close or far off the mark I was.
1. The PR industry will reinvent itself
I made the prediction that “a recession will force PR consultancies to get their houses in order, and evolve or die”. Reading it back that sounds a bit harsh, and thankfully I don’t think too many ended up biting the dust…but a fair few have certainly been born.
I imagined PR agencies would “evolve” by quickly bringing their teams up to speed on social media, to ensure they were reaching both online and offline audiences in their consultancy. However, within the UK market there has been a growing trend for PR agencies to set up separate social media or digital PR consultancies - a few examples would be Hotwire launching 33 Digital, Next Fifteen setting up Project Metal and Fishburn Hedges opening up Brew. The list of internal social media teams at established PR agencies is also continually growing.
Moving forward, I think we will see more consolidation happening within this space as large PR agencies look to snap up smaller, specialist social media agencies, in order to accelerate their social media growth.
2. The profiles of individual PRs will become more important
The trend towards ‘Personalised Relations’ that we were seeing at the end of 2008 has undoubtedly continued. However Twitter has exploded exponentially within the social media PR sector enabling more PR folks to “become their own hubs” in the words of Jeremiah Owyang. Competition for share of voice has become fiercer, making it harder to spot the experienced social media consultants from those who are doing a good job of talking about it.
3. PR will no longer be a beauty parade
I would argue that the definition of ‘beauty’ has evolved within the UK PR industry. Today it is not so much about the company name, but much more about the agency’s online reputation and profile. We are increasingly seeing evidence of brands shortlisting and selecting agencies based on their social media assets, rather than the kudos of going with a big global agency. This is a positive trend that I hope will continue.
4. New business will be won/put to tender in less orthodox ways
From what we are seeing at Liberate Media, and hearing about among our peers, this is definitely becoming the case. There is still some nervousness around selecting a social media PR agency, and brands seem more comfortable meeting with agencies that have been recommended within their network of contacts, than taking the impersonal approach of putting a pitch out to tender. We are encountering the fierce pitch process less and less, and instead being given the change to demonstrate our knowledge and creativity within a less confined manner.
5. CEOs will need to prioritise PR more highly
This final prediction is difficult to assess, as I can only offer personal experience. It would be interesting to hear whether other agencies have found this to be the case.
At Liberate Media we did see CEOs and senior management dedicating more time to PR, and taking greater interest in social media. Our training services in particular were called on increasingly as CEOs wanted to upskill and take a more active role in their social media PR efforts.
** These are just my humble opinions. It would be great to hear back from people who commented on my original post, and others, on their experience of the above predictions.
Tags: digital pr, PR, recession, Social media
