Many larger agencies are populated by a legacy workforce that has obsolete skills from a bygone era of marketing history. Therefore, agency customers are now building internal social media organizations.

However, they too are challenged by the apparent digital savvy talent shortfall in the marketplace.

In fact it is only because of this that I was able to do my analysis at all. So whether your headline growth is right, or my suggestion, or some other interpretation, we all wouldn’t have been able to have this important discussion about the performance of the industry without the data to base it on. And that in my book represents success.

Good luck putting together the sector specific ones and FWIW if I can be of any help just let me know.

Best
Adam

The transparency we encourage with the Top 150 is really valued by the industry I think. Not many other industries have this kind of resource to gauge performance by. It’s just unfortunate that some agencies choose to absorb details about their competitors but won’t give details about themselves.

@Crispin I omitted the No.1 position as Bell Pottinger have held this for the last three years and so effectively that is only a comment on their specific performance which at 9% like for like growth has already been highlighted as significantly outperforming the market http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/search/990828/Industry-good-shape-recovery-Chime-Communications-reports-growth/ I also started at 10 because 6 of the eight companies between 2nd and 9th are either estimated figures or no comparative is stated (Freud).

@Cathy I realise that the figure was calculated for PR Week by Kingston Smith and I am in no way questioning the execution of the calculation itself. I was able to replicate the result pretty accurately myself by looking at the change in income of the agencies for which submitted figures existed for both years. I am just questioning whether this figure is consistent with other evidence in the wider market and whether, in such a turbulent year, the absence of a sizeable number of agencies makes the sample used significantly less representative to draw the conclusion that “an average growth for PR agencies in 2009 of approximately 0.75 per cent. A small increase, but growth nonetheless, of which the industry can be justifiably proud.”

The bottom line is accountants can tell different stories with the same set of numbers, just like PR people can do the same with words so I wanted to highlight to the community that there are alternative conclusions to be drawn on the basis of the same data. Which is right definitively would require more information about the agencies that aren’t in the table.

Thanks again.

I should point out our estimate of a 0.75 per cent growth was calculated not by PRWeek but on our behalf by accountants Kingston Smith W1, which we make clear within the copy.

It is my personal policy not to question accountants on matters of calculations.