New Business Opinion 3
PR SEARCH AND SELECTION LANDSCAPE
Search & selection in the PR industry
Analysis of The Survey Shop’s “PR Report” - From the PR Week article by Richard Cann: “PR Middlemen Face Changing Role”.
This piece looks at the usefulness of search and selection agencies in the PR sector. Market research company The Survey Shop reports in PR Week that only 15% of PR pitches reported the use of search and selection intermediaries, a smaller number than in the advertising discipline.
What conclusions does The Survey Shop make?
The piece explains the low usage of intermediaries in the PR sector is due to the fact that PR has a different model - where clients follow the key people around rather than the agencies - and points out that the opposite is true in advertising. Additionally, PR budgets tend to be smaller than advertising, so the intermediaries are too expensive to use.
Biss Lancaster Euro RSCG brand managing director Jonathan Sanchez says his agency tends “to work as multi-specialist, hiring people with real sector experience and then encouraging those individuals to market their skills and our business" - rather than make use of intermediaries.
Weber Shandwick deputy chief executive Sally Ward admits intermediaries have a place and can act as facilitators rather than barriers. As a large agency with a recognised brand, she says WS does not need matchmakers to get onto pitch longlists, but the presence of intermediaries helps to create an even-handed process. Ward says that once the shortlist for a pitch is drawn up, intermediaries seem to step back. So whether intermediaries are involved or not, sooner or later agencies have to do the wooing themselves.
Matchmakers mentioned in the piece include: -
- The AAR
- Agency Insight
- Haystack
- Agency Assessments
- Creative Brief
- PRCA PReview (for PRCA-audited members)
Rainmakerlive’s Analysis: What are our thoughts on the survey’s findings?
We're not learning much that's new here. With more and more entrants into the intermediary sector, and with every advertising pitch being hard fought over, there's a real pressure on search and selectors to open up PR as a significant marketplace. However, The Survey Shop suggests that clients obviously don't want to play ball. The differences in models between advertising and PR must surely apply, but we also understand that PR budget holders and agencies tend to be a conservative, independent-minded breed that rely, or need to be seen to be relying, on working their personal connections, their people skills and their ahead-of-the-game, insider knowledge. We think that for many PR agencies, it goes against the grain to invite an outsider to participate in such an internal affair.
The “profile of even the largest PR agencies is not nearly as pronounced as that of ad agencies.” Publicis Consultants MD Richard Moss.
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