Jeremy Pepper and Colin McKay have some very interesting posts about the growing diversity in the PR business and how many smaller and mid-size agencies are undertaking very successful and public PR campaigns.
I think this is a good example of the fragmentation taking place in the PR market. As PR professionals, we are faced with an environment where people have become far more sophisticated in how they make decisions. A single reference is no longer enough to drive the agenda or the sales process, instead PR folks are faced with the challenge of reaching out to a multitude of media (and non-media) sources.
This is accentuated by the fact that while on one hand media such as the Internet are making the world a smaller place. It seems to me that the smaller the world gets, the more people are looking for relevant local information and content. It’s a message the local US TV and newspapers learned a long time ago and explains their success covering local issues. I think this trend will continue.
Finally, the PR business has never been as fragmented. There are thousands of individual consultants, a growing number of smaller specialists agencies and then the usual mix of mid- and large-size agencies.
There’s nothing to stop larger firms successfully undertaking these campaigns – they already are. But the fragmentation in the agency business provides clients with a much richer choice of services… and that’s a good thing.
The one downside to all this change is that it requires a number of things from PR practitioners. Firstly it’s essential that PR people understand their client’s audience intimately. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing and where are they going?
Secondly this change means that we need to understand practice areas that we might have previously considered outside our remit. These include Search Engine Optimization, Online Promotion (Overture), Direct Marketing etc.
On the one hand all this change presents great opportunities for everyone in the profession and on the other hand we have to make sure we’re in a position to take advantage of it.
Never a dull moment..
Murphy's Law 