Following on from my post on Monday about the PR Week Top 150 I thought it might also be interesting to analyse the rankings from an ownership rather than a brand perspective. As I previously stated the largest player in the Top 150, if ownership is taken account of, is WPP with £81m combined fee income across its brands. Based on a little bit of analysis I think the Top 15 allowing for ownership and partial ownership would look something like this. (Hope I have these right anyone who wants to point out an error please do so).

1. WPP – £81m (Hill and Knowlton, Finsbury, Burston Marsteller, Cohn and Wolfe, Buchanan, Ogilvy, GCI, Clarion)
2. Omnicom – £62m (Ketchum, Fleishman Hillard, Porter Novelli, Gavin Anderson, Pleon, Fishburn Hedges*)
3. Huntsworth – £57m (Citigate, Trimedia, The Red Consultancy, Grayling, Huntsworth Health, Haslimann Taylor)
4. Bell Potinger – £53m (part of Chime Communications**)
5. Brunswick – £44m
6. Financial Dynamics – £42m (part of FTI Consulting)
7. Interpublic – £36m (Weber Shandwick, Golin Harris)
8. Publicis Groupe – £28m (Freud Communications, MS&L)
9. Edelman – £21m
10. Havas – £21m (Maitland, Euro RSCG, Cake)
11. Next Fifteen – £19m (Lexis, Bite, Text 100, Inferno)
12. College Hill – £13m
13. M Communications – £10m
14. The Photon Group - £10m (Hotwire, Frank PR)
15. Lansons Communications – £9m

* Fishburn Hedges is owned via BBDO Worldwide
** WPP holds a 21.8% stake in Chime Communications
Analysis based on company websites and/or publicly available annual reports.

Between them these 15 account for £505m or approximately 65% of the total fee income of the Top 150 of £781m. As you can see of the Top 10 only Brunswick and Edelman are not part of a wider group.

So why the title of the post? I suspect you have already worked this out, but if you haven’t it is because if each parent above were treated as an individual entry then the number of entries on the rankings would fall by 25. This revised listing would then fit the Pareto principle a lot more closely.