Welcome to our review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch. Here we discuss the biggest pitch wins and mergers & acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in June 2024.

Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies.

Andrew launched Andrew Bloch & Associates in 2020.

Before we start,a reminder that the final entry deadline for the Creative Moment Awards is coming up on Friday, June 28th. So you need to get a wriggle on if you’ve got good creative work that you want to enter this year.

Also, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

Here’s a summary of what Andrew and PRmoment podcast founder Ben Smith discussed:

“It feels like confidence is building and returning, especially in the consumer sector.”

5 mins Andrew updates us on Jumnes biggest PR pitch wins:

The Academy wins Fullers London Pride

Alfred wins Perfect Draft

Here Be Dragons wins Koppaberg

Premier win Wireless Festival - (Live Nation)

Tin Man win Blue Light Card

Stakked and Munch win Netflix Buying London Cast and separarelty Kabuto

W win Extreme E

Hatch win British Cycling

Tin Man/Lucky Generals win EDF

“This was an integrated pitch where the client wanted the PR agency and the ad agency to come together at the outset to create a campaign that had earned at its heart.”

The Earnies win The Royal Academy of Engineering

Brand Nation win reebok

Wild Card win Ask Italian -

TrunkBBI win Moonpig

Unlimited Group win National Highways

Coolr win Britvic

Pitch win global brief for les Mills

Mischief MHP win Pringles

Shook win Soare

The Heard - Monster Energy

Golin win Unilever

36 mins This month’s M&A run down:

Pagefield sells to PPHC

Candid (a Netherlands-based marketing and comms group) acquires Houston PR

Lewis acquires Tayburn

Welcome to the PRmoment June 2024 iteration of the Global Creativity Review collection. In this series, founder of PRmoment Ben Smith joins a host of PR industry creatives to discuss, and sometimes dissect, the standout creative moments of the month.

This is the audio version of the Global Creativity Review: you can watch the video version, with all the campaign/work films on PRmoment's YouTube Channel.

The Global Creativity Review is produced In partnership with our sister title Creative Moment.

The only catch? Guests are not allowed to choose their own work.

Speaking on this review:

• Kat Thomas, founder and chief creative officer at One Green Bean
• Lora Martyr, executive creative director at Taylor Herring
• Olivia Mushigo, senior creative at Good Relations
  

Not got time for a whole podcast? Don’t worry, here is the TL/DR discussion points for time-pressed listeners:

1 mins: Sweethearts - Situationships by Tombras

5 mins: Heineken - Pub Museums (Ireland)

13 mins: NUFC x Sela - Unsilence The Crowd

21 mins: Red Bull - Flying Through London’s Tower Bridge

29 mins: Burger King - 70th Anniversary, Old Flames

32 mins: Heinz - Reviews For Naturalisation in Brazil

39 mins: Just Eat - More Beef Than Kendrick and Kanye

40 mins: Dove - Mom Experience Translator Tool

This is part of our regular series of creativity reviews, so if you like what you hear, look back at the PRmoment Podcast archive on iTunes or Spotify to listen to more creative ideas.

You can watch previous episode of The Global Creativity Review on PRmoment’s YouTube channel.

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.

I’ve been looking forward to this one. We’re chatting with James Wright, the global chairman of Havas PR.

James is one of a decent number of British PR folks who have moved to Australia.

Havas PR has had a good run globally and in the UK over the past few years. Global revenues are reported to be $236 m in 2023, up 5% on the previous year. Havas PR has 1600 employees globally.

Before we start, a plug for our new subscription training service for senior folks within agencies, PRmoment Leaders. The programme of activity, including the tutorials, is now underway. If you're interested in learning more about this bespoke training programme for agency leaders, we’ll include the link in the show notes.

Also, do take a look at our latest PR Masterclass: PR and AI, which will be held on July 2nd in London.

At this one event, 12 experts will give 10 Masterclasses on PR & AI. Face-to-face and virtual tickets are available.

Finally, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.
Here is a summary of what James and I discussed:

3 mins James talks us through the recent growth of Havas’s PR revenues.

“Some markets are going really, really well, some markets are sluggish this year.”

“2023 was a very good year for us.”

“Havas Red started at $19 m in 2019, now $57m. Part of that is through acquisition. A great deal of that is organic.”

4.30 mins James talks us through the shape of Havas PR. Where do Havas Red, H/Advisors and One Green Bean fit together?

“We’ve gone from having 28/29 PR brands to 5 or 6.”

“Our global PR group is now Havas Red. It now exists in 19 markets, soon to be 20 and 21 before the end of the year.”

8 mins How does PR fit into an integrated offer within Havas? What type of work and what channels is PR responsible for?

“The strategy for Havas Red was to continue to own the earned but now to earn the owned…Over time, we have put social content and data solutions at the centre of our agency. In the US, when we started, only 3% of our revenues were social content. It’s now 40%. In the UK, it's a similar number.”

“For me, the concept of earned has changed from earned coverage to earned conversations.”

“Ad agencies just aren't set up to fast turnaround content.”

22 mins “The UK has been a massive success for us since we started in 2019 with just a few hundred thousand pounds to where it is now. The team there, led by Rachael Sansom, have done a phenomenal job.”

24 mins PR revenue-wise, Havas seems to have outgrown your holding group peers, albeit from a lower base.

24. 30 mins Does the Havas PR group follow the broad revenue model of most other international PR firms? Are the bulk of the revenues in North America?

25 mins What’s it like doing a global role from Sydney? Does James ever sleep?

“Sydney is the only place in the world where you can live a world-class lifestyle and do world-class work.”

28 mins James talks about the Australia PR scene in Australia.

“Consumer confidence is super low at the moment.”

“We hub some of our global accounts from here now. They just love the talent here.”

31 mins James talks about Havas’ approach to digital technology.

36 mins How big does James want Havas PR to get to?

“There is a very good opportunity in the next five years to break the $300 m mark.”

37 mins

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.

On the show today, I’m chatting with Jim Hawker. Jim has returned to PR. We lost him to performance marketing for ten years, but he’s now back amongst old friends. But it seems he’s still criticising us!

Over the past three months, Jim has been on a bit of a tour de force around the PR sector, assessing its digital credentials in the context of his ten years working mainly in performance marketing.

Today, he will give us a critical report on the state of digital in PR firms.

Jim is the co-founder of Threepipe Reply, which he started in 2004.

Threepipe was an interesting case study for PR because it transformed itself from a traditional PR agency to a fully integrated brand and performance agency with 90 experts in PR, data and analytics, paid media, SEO, creative, and social channels.

This was achieved by merging the original Threepipe, a PR and organic social agency, with a paid media agency before acquiring a creative agency and then an SEO agency. Specialist teams were built across data science, marketplaces and retail media channels.

In 2019, Threepipe was acquired by Reply, a global technology consulting firm. Jim left the business in April 2024.

Before we start, a plug for our new subscription training service for senior folks within agencies: PRmoment Leaders. The line-up of speakers for the first semester is now complete and even if I say it myself - it’s almost perfect!

Also, do take a look at our latest PR Masterclass: PR and AI. We've filtered out the snake oil salesman, the bluffers and the AI dead ends to create PR Masterclass: PR & AI.

At this one event, 12 experts will give 10 Masterclasses on PR & AI.

Finally, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

Here is a summary of what Jim and I discussed:

5 mins Does PR still have a digital problem?

9 mins What does the digital offer for most PR firms look like now?

“PR agency’s digital offer is still quite shallow”

“One of the things I always found odd was that people gauged your success by the number of people you employ, which I always thought was crazy. The aim wasn't to have a bigger Christmas party every year. The aim was to build profit and margin protection.”

12 mins Should PR firms be building their own tech?

17 mins How digitally curious are most PR people?

“The only way we were able to do it (bring in a greater range of digital skills into the agency) was through an acquisition strategy… it was a safer strategy.”

20 mins “One of the benefits of having a lot of paid media running through our agency was that we ended up having really close partnerships thiet eh technology platforms…the only way to get that is to spend money through them… Which meant we had a lot more access to insight.

“The net result of that is that your platform understanding becomes much deeper.”

23 mins Jim talks about how PR firms need to link attribution modelling and consumer behaviour to PR activity.

“I think the budget is going to end up going up the funnel, rather than further down it.”

On the PRmoment Podcast, we catch up with UK public relations leaders and today we’re chatting with Current Global CEO George Coleman. It’s a timely discussion as we seem to be celebrating a few PR firm birthdays recently, so this is the latest in our unofficial “Birthday” Series as Current Global celebrates five years of existence!

Current Global was born out of Weber Shandwick. It now has a reported fee income of over £35 m and about 300 employees globally, with about 30 in the UK.

It describes itself as a multidisciplinary PR firm that works in corporate, healthcare, technology, and consumer sectors. It’s an interesting example of a pretty young PR firm coming out of a holding group (in this case, Interpublic) and doing quite well. Over the past five years, most of the holding groups have mainly concentrated on merging their PR firms, not launching new ones!

Clients include Microsoft, Novartis and FedEx.

If you're listening to this podcast, it probably means you are interested in updating yourself on the challenges and opportunities that the future of public relations will offer. With that in mind, do take a look at our latest PR Masterclass: AI in PR. It’s a cracker!

Also, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

Here is a summary of what George and PRmoment founder Ben Smith discussed:

2 mins Is Current Global one of those large, mid-sized global PR firms that many of our listeners might not have heard of?

3 mins George gives a brief history lesson on how and why Current Global came about.

“For us, it (the merger) was a positive, forward-looking move.”

“If your reason to merge is to save money, that is a more difficult brief.”

10 mins George talks about what it’s like being a global CEO of a PR firm based out of London, when the US is the largest market for Current Global.

“40-50% of my time is billable…I love the job… It’s less about operations and the admin and more about doing great client work.”

18 mins George reflects on the challenge of running a PR firm across global markets.

“Culture is an expression of connection.”

21 mins How have the complicated geo-political environment and the complicated societies that we seem to now live in impacted the type of work that PR firms do?

“There seems to be an ongoing process of polarisation in public discourse fuelled by social media. Traditional media plays less of an influential role in creating that common ground, that understanding. A lot of our discussions are becoming more polarised, more tribal…We (society) can’t even agree on facts."

“Communications sits in the middle of that.”

25 mins Brands face a challenge in leading conversations at the moment in this era of increased polarisation.

27 mins “The importance of what we do has never been greater.”

28 mins George reflects on how he thinks AI will impact the PR agency model over the next 18 months.

“There are two ways AI is going to transform public relations…”

“We’ve had ten years where search has been king. With AI, that dynamic changes.”

35 mins What do global PR clients want currently?

38 mins Why George believes that we’re seeing a fundamental change in the PR agency: employee relationships.

42 mins George talks about the need for the PR sector as a whole to make its communications more accessible, reminding us that much of the tech you already have access to can transform the accessibility of their communications to a broader r

For this PRmoment Podcast, something completely different. It’s one of those shows I thought I might have to do one day but I hoped that day would never come.

On today’s show, Daney Parker reflects on 15 years as PRmoment’s editor. If you haven’t heard already, Daney is leaving her role as PRmoment editor.

So today - it’s her running for the hills goodbye show!

Daney and I started PRmoment back in 2009 when we were both, shall we say, between jobs. We didn't know each other, and I think it's fair to say we both took a punt on each other, and it’s worked out.

Today, Daney, who has written well over 1,000 articles about public relations, will look back on her time as a journalist covering public relations to reflect on where PR has come from and where it might be headed!

Before we start, take a look at our latest PR Masterclass: PR and AI. It’s a cracker! Tickets are on sale now from the PRmoment homepage.

Also, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

Here’s a summary of what Daney and I discussed:

2.30 mins Daney talks about why she is leaving PRmoment and what she is up to next.

“When people die, you have to look after yourself and your family. Because it is upsetting.”

“You have to accept that life isn't always happy and joyful but you have to strengthen yourself and nurture yourself. It’s important to do that during difficult times.”

“I love writing, words have always been my thing…it’s very important to give yourself a creative output.”

6 mins Daney talks about how she felt as the editor of a start-up PR mag that no one had heard of when PRmoment started back in 2009.

“Marketing Week made the whole editorial department redundant.“

“It’s been nice to focus on PR. It’s one of the most interesting sectors. It’s also a sector that is thriving. Compared to above the line advertising, which is a completely different beast to when I started my career.”

“It’s a fascinating industry and it evolves all the time.”

12.30 mins “Looking back, I’m a bit surprised we managed to pull it off!”

17.30 mins What makes a good features journo different from a news journalist?

“It's not such a craft news journalism, it’s a skill… you have to be ruthless as a (good) news journalist. If you get a good piece of information from a friend, you’re going to use it. And you might lose a friend.”

21 mins Daney reveals her favourite ever PRmoment columnist in the last 15 years.

“I have to say, Francis. He was scurrilous. Which is always interesting…He was prepared to upset people.”

23 mins Was the demise of the PRmoment column Hacked Off Flack the beginning of Cancel Culture?

27 mins Daney reflects howPR is different now, compared to 15 years ago.

“Do people work harder now in PR? They certainly drink less.”

31.30 mins As a journalist, how was it writing about public relations?

“PR generally does a very good job. Of course, there will always be some teething problems. But every journalist is different.”

“Journalism is quite stressful and PR people are a good scapegoat.”

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.

This week, we’re talking to Louise Jenkins, co-head of Edelman Data and Intelligence, EMEA, about the UK results of The Edelman Trust Barometer 2224.

If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a senior member of a PR agency team, our subscription training service, PRmoment Leaders, was built for you. It features a new educational syllabus that will help develop and retain your senior team members while preparing them to lead your business and drive future growth.

Containing 11 learning and networking elements, the PRmoment Leaders subscription package has been designed to flex around busy teams and individual learning styles.

Also, thanks to our PRmoment Podcast sponsors, The PRCA.

Here is a summary of what Louise and PRmoment founder Ben Smith discussed:

1.30 mins Louise talks us through the headline results of the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2024.

“The UK results are a heightened version of the global results this year.”

“We’ve seen big drops in the scores for the (UK) Government and media, which has plummeted the UK to the very bottom of the trust index.”

3 mins The trust scores of the UK institutions.

4 mins Why is trust in the UK’s institutions the lowest since 2018?

6 mins Louise discusses how low trust scores impact behaviour.

“NGOs are in the distrust scale.”

“The erosion of trust in NGOs has been a long-term trend.”

11 mins Louise discusses why trust in the media has dropped by 6 points.

“People are telling us that the UK Government is an ineffective agent of positive change, (suffers from) corruption, bias, does not have a vision of the future that they believe in and serves the interests of some, not everybody.

“The extent of how those attitudes have increased year on year is huge.”

“Is there are hypotheses that trust in democratic governments is always likely to decline over time.”

16 mins Louise discusses the trust scores of different types of media.

“For PR planners out there, it's kind of as you were.”

21 mins How does the UK’s trust score fair internationally? A selection of global country trust scores across the four institutions.

“It’s shocking to me that the UK is at the absolute bottom of the 38 markets that we surveyed.”

25 mins What’s a good trust score for a country?

“For a country (like the UK), you’d want to be at the top end of a neutral trust score (so upper 50s)”

26 mins How do we explain an authoritarian state like China having such a high trust score?

27 mins Should we be worried that the world's largest democracy, India, has a trust score within 3 points of China?

28 mins Louise discusses the high trust scores that the UK public has in their employers.

31 mins Most consumer media face the tough economic reality that they are still chasing page impressions to satisfy an advertising-driven model. This means they often create populist stories, which is not a good model if you want to retain the trust of your readers/viewers.

Louise and Ben discuss the worrying results of this strategy from a trust perspective.

33 mins Have we seen AI impact the trust scores of the institutions of trust yet?

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.

This is our quarterly bonus podcast, where we chat about Rajar’s latest results. For those of you who aren’t aware of Rajar - it was established in 1992 and operates the single audience measurement system for the radio industry in the United Kingdom.

It publishes the listenership figures for UK radio each quarter. This offers PR people really interesting insight into how the UK public engages with this important channel.

On the show today, we have Alex Blakemore, daily newsroom editor at Markettiers, who will discuss the latest Rajar results for Q1 2024.

If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a senior member of a PR agency team, our subscription training service, PRmoment Leaders, was built for you. It features a new educational syllabus that will help develop and retain your senior team members while preparing them to lead your business and drive future growth.

Containing 11 learning and networking elements, the PRmoment Leaders subscription package has been designed to flex around busy teams and individual learning styles

Also, thanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

Here is a summary of what Alex and PRmoment founder Ben Smith discuss:

1.30 mins Alex summarises the key insights for this latest quarter of Rajar's results

“It’s really exciting and shows just how much opportunity there is within radio for people within PR.”

“50 million people listen to radio each week, or 89% of the population. This beats all previous records.”

4.30 mins Alex reflects on what is likely to be behind the increase in radio listening numbers.

“We’ve got a summer of sport coming up, so this could be just the start of an upturn for radio.”

9 mins Alex discusses the ongoing radio battle between commercial radio and the BBC.

“Commercial radio has its highest-ever audience reach at 39.6 million listeners.”

12 mins Alex gives some advice for PRs who are planning their summer campaigns on how to engage with radio.

Key radio stats:

Radio Reach – Weekly: 50m (49,947,000)

Radio Hours – Weekly 20.5 (no change)

TV Hours – Weekly (Barb April 2024) 18.6

BBC Share of Radio Listening: 43%

BBC vs Commercial Reach – Weekly

BBC – 31.3m

Commercial – 39.6m

Commercial Stations on the Rise

talkSPORT UP from 3,081,000 to 3,390,000

talkRADIO UP from 725,000 to 757,000

LBC News UP from 810,000 to 990,000

LBC UP from 2,467,000 to 2,547,000

Times Radio UP from 492,000 to 503,000

GB News Radio UP from 430,000 to 455,000

Greatest Hits Radio UP from 6,753,000 to 7,687,000

Heart UP from 8,838,000 to 9,442,000

Capital UP from 5,871,000 to 6,243,000

BBC Stations on the Rise

BBC Asian Network UP from 448,000 to 542,000

BBC Radio 4 UP from 9,116,000 to 9,204,000

BBC World Service (UK Reach) UP from 1,072,000 to 1,225,000