2021 Agency Rankings: Resilient Global PR Industry Declines 4% Amid Covid-19 Pandemic
PRovoke unveils its ranking of the world’s top 250 PR firms, revealing encouraging resilience from the global PR industry, most notably at the bigger end of the scale.
The global PR industry declined by 4% in 2020, based on PRovoke Media’s definitive annual ranking of the world’s top 250 PR firms, which is now live.
The Global Top 250, which provides the clearest picture available of global PR industry size and growth, is based on submissions from more than 400 PR firms across the world, along with revenue estimates for the many firms that chose not to submit during a difficult year that was dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The research reveals that the Top 250 PR firms reported fee income of around $13.2bn in 2020, effectively flat in USD terms compared to last year’s Top 250 ranking. A weaker US dollar helps to explain USD parity, but our constant currency analysis reveals a Top 250 decline of just under 4%.
While that means the first annual global PR industry decline since the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, it is still likely to beat expectations given the grim industry outlook 12 months ago.
The industry’s 2020 performance, paving the way for this year’s anticipated recovery, was underpinned by resilience from the Top 10 group — which appeared able to mitigate the worst of the economic downturn, particularly in terms of consumer marketing budgets, thanks to practice area and sector diversification. For the first time in several years, bigger PR firms outgrew their midsize peers, while publicly-held agencies also narrowed the gap on their independent rivals.
In particular, PRovoke Media’s ongoing industry research has revealed that corporate communications, including such areas as crisis counsel, public affairs and employee engagement, have seen robust demand during the pandemic, coupled with sector-specific growth favouring healthcare and B2B technology, for example. Many of the firms specialising in these practice areas and sectors grew in 2020, while bigger networks benefited from specialist (if not geographic) breadth, ensuring they were not disproportionately impacted by the drop in consumer spend.
Accounting for the numerous firms that reported outside of the Top 250, along with the vast number of smaller firms that do not provide revenue figures, PRovoke estimates the size of the global PR agency industry at $15.8bn, down from $16.5bn in 2019.
Meanwhile, the ‘floor’ for the Top 250 remains roughly the same, at $5.7m. Many firms, disappointingly, chose not to submit numbers this year — even if PRovoke used its own market research to estimate earnings in several important cases.
“After a decade of steady growth, the global pandemic not surprisingly resulted in a decline in PR revenues last year,” said Paul Holmes, PRovoke Media founder. “But the decline was much smaller than many observers predicted at the start of the crisis, and significantly smaller than the decline in adjacent industries, such as advertising. Much of what PR agencies do is mission critical, corporate crisis and employee engagement work. And much of what they do is work that cannot easily be replicated by other agencies from other disciplines.”
Source: https://www.provokemedia.com/long-reads/article/2021-agency-rankings-resilient-global-pr-industry-declines-4-amid-covid-19-pandemic
