Choosing a public relations firm is pretty straightforward if you need help with one particular PR discipline in one geographical area. If you need health care PR services in Chicago, your obvious choices are agencies with health care experience based in Chicago. A company that needs tech PR services in Denmark can interview agencies with that expertise in Copenhagen. Boutique PR firms in the desired locations may be excellent choices to fill such needs. But what if you need services in multiple U.S. cities, and/or in multiple international urban areas?
At first glance, the obvious choice for meeting needs in multiple geographic locations is a large agency with offices in all the places you need them, whether that includes all the financial capitals of the world, Europe’s biggest startup hubs or the top ten American consumer spending market areas (DMAs). There are many big global communications holding companies who have multiple agencies providing PR services in offices around the world.
However, there are some disadvantages in using big multinational agencies globally. While that choice may be right for some companies and situations, it’s definitely not right for everyone, and isn’t the only option.
In big multinational agencies, each office manager competes internally against other office managers for revenues and has quarterly and annual financial goals to meet. Decisions about which office gets an assignment are often influenced by corporate financials and aren’t necessarily made altruistically with the client’s best interests at heart.
In addition, the quality of any one agency’s offices across the globe can vary a lot. The local office near your headquarters may have a great staff, but there may be some offices in an agency’s roster that simply don’t have the capabilities you need. Yet, it would be extremely unusual for a big agency to admit that. Standard practice for the manager of an office without the expertise you need is to hire freelancers or subcontract the work to a small local agency, often without telling you those team members are not agency employees.
In addition, networks of large multinational agencies tend to be considerably more expensive than independently-owned agencies. The big holding companies may skim around 25-percent of their local agencies’ revenues to support central administration and marketing expenses. Those fees are, naturally, passed on to clients.
An alternative to sticking with a big multinational agency brand globally is to hire a member agency of a global network of independently-owned PR firms. There are several such networks, including Public Relations Boutiques International (PRBI), founded in 2008, which has some 45 boutique PR firm members around the world.
Generally, a boutique PR firm’s work is confined within national borders. But PRBI provides a network of boutique PR firms around the globe that can work together to meet each others’ clients’ needs when those opportunities arise. The member firms are carefully vetted to meet high quality standards and assure a good fit with the group’s values before being accepted. PRBI agencies’ principals and senior staff meet in person on a regular basis, have frequent network-wide phone calls and share daily communications via private group emails. Many have worked together on client teams.
Above all, there’s one big advantage of using a boutique PR agency network: the hands-on participation of agency principals and senior practitioners on client service teams. PRBI member agency owners are professionals who left senior positions at big agencies and/or corporations to start their own firms because they wanted to get back to working with clients again.
How is working with PRBI members typically structured? A company that needs multi-city and/or multi-country services first chooses a “lead firm” that will pull together an appropriate team, oversee the work of all firms on the team, serve as the main client contact and handle client billing. The lead firm has no obligation to use only PRBI member agencies on a client team. If the PRBI member in a particular location isn’t a good fit for a particular client, the lead firm is free to go outside the PRBI network. The client’s needs come first.
PRBI members have worked together internationally on many different types of assignments, ranging from global crises to multinational product launches to international corporate PR. Many client organizations have found through experience that a network of independently-owned boutique agencies is a viable alternative to a large multinational holding company agency for meeting international PR needs. Furthermore, going the boutique network route can provide higher quality service at a more affordable price.
For more information on PRBI multi-agency teams, see “How We Work Together as Members” on the PRBI home page.