The PR/Marketing Consolidation

Since the second quarter of 2010, there has been a noticeable increase in the demand for marketing skills in the PR industry, specifically digital marketing. Rather than only looking for PR people who have had strong experience in social media, blogger relations and SEO of press releases, agencies are now looking for people who have experience of managing the creative process – helping to devise new websites, come up with ideas for mobile applications and creative online video campaigns. These people generally come from an advertising or branding background and know how to project manage third parties, bringing a creative idea to fruition.

Some agencies have gone the extra step of creating an in-house centre of excellence, or even an internal supplier, who also have their own P&Ls and clients on a purely digital basis, but can supply these skills as needed to the parent agency’s PR campaigns. These internal shops have the skills, and the developers, to create the websites and applications themselves.

In their recent new book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (who coined the term ‘wikinomics’ with their first book in 2006) produce some highly astonishing figures:

• YouTube releases up to 2 billion videos per day
• Twitter hosts 750 tweets per second
• 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month
• Internet traffic is growing 40% per year
• Increasingly, appliances are logging on to the internet
• Since 2000, 72 US newspapers have folded
• Newspaper circulation in the US has fallen by 25%

It seems that, in this brave new world into which we are all plugged, it’s not enough for many PR companies to simply deliver the message. They also need to create the method of delivery, as these budgets are simply too good to miss. But, as Tapscott and Williams point out, the internet offers all kinds of businesses the opportunity, not only to reinvent themselves from a brand perspective, but also to reinvent the way they do business and collaborate.


What we are seeing in the marketing sector are different disciplines collaborating better than ever before, and inevitably leading to consolidation.

Self styled social media anthropologist, communications strategist and lead blogger for NewCommBiz.com, Tac Anderson, accurately predicted this trend last year and in June was quick to point out some of the brands (like NBC News) following suit, merging their PR, Promotions and Marketing departments.

The quote from Lauren Kapp, most recently VP NBC News Communications, now heading up the unit, is one of the most apt I’ve heard recently

“We work so closely together, but as the industry changes and the media landscape evolves, we just found ourselves working more closely, and it make sense to have us more cohesive…We’re always looking for ways to do things better.”