Public eye

13 October 2011

The public relations industry is surprisingly compact, writes Stephen Gardner. Britain's top 150 PR consultancies had a total fee income of £839 million in 2010, according to the trade press. This, relatively speaking, is a tiny slice of economic activity in the business services sector. It is dwarfed, for example, by the turnover of just one of the big four accounting and professional services firms, PwC, which generated £6.8 billion in western Europe in 2010. Britain's biggest PR firm is Bell Pottinger Group, which earned fees of £68 million from 907 clients, according to PR Week magazine. Second and third in the rankings are Brunswick, which deals mainly with financial PR, and Weber Shandwick. The UK industry is heavily concentrated in London. The leading agency outside the capital is Glasgow's The Big Partnership, which comes in in 34th position overall, according to the PR Week league table. The business is growing, posting an impressive increase in fee income of about 9 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. It even emerged relatively unscathed from the financial and economic crisis, continuing to grow in 2009 compared to 2008, though by a slim 0.75 percent. Despite its relatively small scale, the PR industry is credited with significant influence, and this is where the problems start. The so-called "father of public relations", Edward Bernays, regarded it as the "engineering of consent", using psychology and the social sciences as the key to the "group mind", which could then be influenced by clever campaigns of subtle messages. The concept of PR provokes a number of ethical questions. Lord Tim Bell, the British godfather of PR and chairman of Chime Communications plc, which owns Bell Pottinger, has said that the popular perception of his industry is that it tries to "make a rat look like a squirrel". In fact, PR aims to emphasise "the good bits of a rat, if there are any, and try and talk about those". Nevertheless, there are many ways in which the waters get muddied. PR consultancies are frequently reticent about disclosing their clients, so it can be unclear which rat is served by the messages being pumped out. Bell Pottinger is happy to declare on its website clients such as Airbus, Cadbury, Emirates Airlines, Visa and Vodafone. However, the firm is less keen to advertise its work for the governments of Bahrain and Sri Lanka, and for Imperial Tobacco. Lord Bell also advised commodity traders Trafigura, after they dumped deadly toxic waste in Ivory Coast in 2006. PR is also problematic when it focuses its power on politicians through quiet lobbying. However, shadowy deals are increasingly a thing of the past, according to one PR insider, who says registers of lobbyists in Brussels and London mean "it is much harder now to be opaque in your advocacy". Opacity may become even more difficult. The UK Public Affairs Council maintains a voluntary register of PR firms, which reveals interesting facts such as that Hill & Knowlton lobbies on behalf of the Republica Srpska, and Portland Communications represents the Russian government. The UK government has said it will consider making the register mandatory, though it has done little to fulfil the promise. Industry body the Public Relations Consultants Association has said it will fight mandatory registration. A version of this article was published in Ethical Corporation magazine.

 

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