A slightly different and shorter podcast today to briefly talk about Agency proof points, PR agency growth rates and The PRmoment Awards early entry deadline is this Friday 13 December
I've just finished some analysis of the top 100 agencies in the UK looking at the number of full-time employees they have.
The source was LinkedIn, so it's not a foolproof measure, but it gives a decent indication of the employee hiring growth and decline of UK agencies.
One caveat would be that I can see there's an argument that bearing in mind the increase in project income, relative to retained income, PR firms may have increased their use of freelancers compared to full-time employees.
A deeper dive analysis of these stats will be revealed over the coming weeks, but one top line stat is that of the 100 largest agencies in the UK, the average full-time employee growth over the last 12 months is 2.5%.
This, in a UK PR market that by and large seems to be picking up.
Whether FTE growth will follow the current gentle momentum to growth of the UK's PR sector, remains to be seen.
I've asked a handful of people in the last month or so, if during this golden quarter, on a score of 1-10, if 5 was normal, where are we at at the moment from a new business/pitch busyness perspective.
PR agency CEOs and the like seem to put PR on a score of 5/6 currently.
This time last year they'd put us PR's pitching busyness barometer at a score of 2/3. So relatively speaking, we're on the up.
From PRmoment's Linkedin analysis of the number of FTE of PR firms - there are some really interesting trends when it comes to the type of businesses that are growing or plateauing and I’ll be sharing that insight over the next few weeks.
Which leads me on to my point about the PRmoment Awards.
Some agencies have grown their number of FTE's at 15%+ percent over the past 12 months. But not many. When it comes to your PRmoment Award entries it's an opportunity for you to shout about your work.
The vast majority of entries for The PRmoment Awards are campaign lead.
If you've got a compelling agency of the year story, then go for it. And as per my FTE analysis, it's a different marketplace now. Across the board, relatively growth rates have been suppressed compared to the post Covid boom.
But much of the work I see coming out of UK PR firms is excellent.
Clients are getting integrated work across multiple channels. They are getting good value. And they are getting better strategy and creativity than at any time since I started working in the sector. (2004 if you're interested!)
A number of PR agencies have reduced revenue, retained profits but they're still doing outstanding work and the PRmoment Awards can be your proof point of the quality of that work.
A PRmoment Award is a proof point of that work to clients. And proof points are really important for PR agencies and indeed in-house PR teams.
If you're thinking of entering the PRmoment Awards, the early entry deadline is on the 13th of December, and the final entry deadline is on the 17th of January.
If you are a regular listener of this podcast, and don't enter already, go on, take the jump and enter the awards - join many of your peers.
It's also probably worth mentioning at this point that we offer an excellent feedback loop for anyone who doesn't make the shortlist. More details about how this works can be viewed on the PRmoment Awards microsite - but I'd argue this functionality alone makes entering the PRmoment Awards a uniquely useful benchmarking exercise for the quality of your work