By Jenny Wagler
Despite last year’s loss of PR heavyweight Wilcox Group, Vancouver’s public relations industry is continuing to ride a growth trend that, for some companies, didn’t just survive the recession but gained momentum through it.
Sara Pereira, founder of Pereira PR, said her company with its four full-time staff is poised to increase its business 60% this year, following up on two previous years of 60% year-over-year growth.
“We never really felt the effects of the recession,” she said. “In fact, we felt quite the opposite.”
Beth Boyle, co-founder and CEO Spark PR and Publicity, said her company’s business has also increased through the recession. It grew 33% between 2008 and 2009 and now has a full-time staff of five employees, which is up from the three it had in 2008.
Boyle said the increased business during the recession was surprising.
“We were anticipating that people were going to cut their budgets and PR was going to be the first to go,” she said. “So when we saw quite a bit of an increase it was a bit of a shock for us, too.”
While local PR industry statistics are few and far between, Business in Vancouver’s list data shows that staffing levels at B.C.’s 22 biggest PR firms have risen 46%, or 82 people, since 2006.
Those staffing levels grew by 10% between 2008 and 2009 and another 5% between 2009 and 2010. This year, that number dipped by 3%, or seven people, reflecting the loss of the Wilcox Group’s 15-person staff when the company closed last August.
In contrast, BIV’s staffing statistics for the biggest 27 Metro Vancouver advertising agencies show that advertising jobs have dropped by 5%, or 33 people, since 2006.
The industry grew until 2008 and then dropped 4% over the next two years. This past year, the numbers dropped by 10%, largely reflecting the restructuring of Cossette West, which cut its staff to 37 people from 145.
On the PR side, those numbers indicate strong growth in the local industry.
“I think it’s a growth industry,” Peak Communicators Ltd. partner Alyn Edwards said.
Edwards added that his PR company suffered a 20% downturn in business during the recession. He attributed that drop largely to the fact that 40% of the company’s work is in the real estate sector. But Edwards said Peak has otherwise seen “a steady climb” in eight years of business, with staffing levels up to 17 now from 12 in 2008, revenue now back to pre-recession levels and the company poised for its best year yet in 2011.
The PR industry contends that some of its growth has come at the expense of the advertising industry – particularly during the bleakest part of the recession.
“We definitely noticed the trend that advertising budgets were coming down and PR budgets were either staying very healthy or even increasing,” said Adam Grossman, Vancouver branch vice-president of the Canadian Public Relations Society.
He added that PR services can be more cost-effective than advertising campaigns.
But local advertisers contest the idea that PR’s growth is coming at advertisers’ expense.
“We totally respect what PR can do but haven’t seen a mass exodus of people saying, ‘That’s where we’re going,’” said Rick Hart, MacLaren McCann Vancouver’s senior vice-president and director of client strategy. “The stampede, I think for everyone, has been trying to understand social media better and trying to work with that.”
However, despite any rivalry between advertisers and PR companies, players on both sides are quick to point out that the two industries complement each other – and, in some ways, lean on each other.
Communications specialist Anabel Hawksworth of PR company Hawksworth Communications, for example, said she spent the recession urging clients not to cut back their advertising dollars.
“Without the advertising, the editorial [content] gets cut back and obviously it’s much harder for us to place stories.”