Observer’s PR Power 50 Firms for 2016 and Insights for the Future

Below is the list of 2016's Top U.S. PR firms according to The Observer's PR Power 50, with the basic statistics of each agency. Some of the thoughts and observations from the article for you to ponder.

In 2015 there was an obvious overlap happening between PR, social media, advertising, and the like. That increased in 2016 and will probably fully merge over the next couple of years, allowing traditional PR and advertising firms to offer both to their client base and do so efficiently. Now it's less about companies and more about the people overseeing the work for clients. It may also be about who understands niche markets better, so that agencies representing one or two sectors primarily will start getting more of their work — whether advertising, digital, or public relations — for those markets.

Because of that, many agencies have stopped calling themselves PR firms or advertising firms. They talk more about communications, content, and media providers and distributors instead. Florence Quinn, founder of the travel and lifestyle powerhouse Quinn, said: "We create strong ideas that resonate with people and the media. This is incredibly exciting because there are a gajillion ways to produce content and even more ways to distribute it. The line between earned and paid media has been crossed forever; there is no going back."

Shawn Sachs, CEO of Sunshine Sachs, who represents A-list celebs, blue-chip nonprofits, and global corporations, described the radical transformation: "We've got 35 people who don't do traditional communications. That's pretty significant for a firm with about 160 people. We hired our second art director this year. If you'd said that 10 years ago, people would have thought you were crazy. In the broadest sense, we're a communications company. But we're also an advertising company, a marketing company, a digital company, an events company, an idea company. We're a lot of things." That's not to say traditional PR doesn't still have a place — earned media is still a much better way of attracting customers than advertising. According to Andy Polansky, Weber Shandwick's CEO, it's "absolutely critical."

The Observer said that in choosing the list and assigning placement, it did not make choices according to size of the agency or their revenues. Instead, it looked at more subjective factors such as momentum, new Superstar hires, how they handled crisis situations for clients, and the firms' responses to questions from the Observer.