My daddy is bigger than yours…
I have held off writing this piece for quite some time, but now is as good a time as any. In a variety of online PR publications recently there have been a series of Big Agency versus Small Agency opinion pieces. These ‘articles’ aim to position smaller or larger (depending on the author) PR agencies as the best choice for companies for a range of spurious reasons.
The only clear take-away for me from these articles, is that any agency who participates will never get my business. Why? Well if a PR professional positions themselves so blatantly, supporting their argument with unsubstantiated generalizations they can’t be relied upon to promote my business intelligently. If this is their idea of thought-leadership be afriad…be very afraid.
So does size matter? Here’s my take. PR is at its core about people. Although agency elders often forget it, a PR firm lives and dies by its people. That’s it. When you extrapolate that out, whether you go with a large or small agency should at the end of the day come down to the people in the firm you’ll be working with. And that argument holds for international PR programs as well.
Over the past decade I have worked on the agency and in-house sides. In both capacities I have worked with single agency networks and a mix of different agencies. It’s clear that the most effective campaigns were not driven by the type of agency but by the people involved. Good people = Good campaigns….size doesn’t matter a jot, whether its big or small.
Murphy's Law 