David Brain has written a good PR trends piece over at his blog on Edelman’s recent results. In particular, David focuses on the PR industry’s reaction to those results (some find it amusing to see the class swot get a B-grade). There is a temporary amnesia of other agency groupproblems. Go and have a read of David’s piece here.
PR Week ran a piece asking if Edelman’s problems were down to the agency focus on creative talent? This quote from Fleishman Hillard’s Jim Donaldson digs into some of the perceived challenges:
“We have a slightly different approach based in part on the fact I’m not aware of a huge amount of success coming from bringing traditional ad creatives into PR agencies,” Donaldson (below, with deputy CEO Ali Gee) tells PRWeek. “That doesn’t mean this particular hire [Judy John] won’t work; maybe they’ll crack the formula. But it’s not necessarily the way we’re looking to pursue it.”
“Partly it’s a financial thing. They can be enormously expensive. But also we haven’t seen it work elsewhere, so we look for a different sort of person that approaches things from a slightly different way.”
Fleishman’s approach is to drive creativity throughout all parts of the agency from the bottom up, rather than bringing in crack teams of creatives.
Now you’re all caught up here’s my thoughts on David’s piece:
Richard’s approach isn’t right for every PR business; but that that doesn’t dispute the validity of his approach at Edelman. I still speak with corporate agencies who are still trying to ‘work out digital’. And these are successful businesses; who have had good growth and peer respect. We have PR agencies at all stages on the adoption curve . Secondly, if you are in a large marketing combine, there is a strong incentive to either integrate a la Ogilvy or hand it across the silos
There are reasons why Fleishman Hillard et al are more conservative in there approach. PR Week covered some of the reasons. Some of the industry commentary in PR Week I viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. Here are some others to consider:
Having brought both digital and ‘ad agency style’ strategy to PR agencies, I know that can be hard to implement and make it stick. It’s even harder to bring it to management teams who don’t really want it. The C-suite of a global agency say one thing, but getting to regional and country level is very different. It’s a miracle we have any pioneer thinking in the PR sector at all. As an owner-manager Richard has more power than most
The wrong lessons were learned from the digitisation of political campaigning during the Obama elections. Some agencies thought they could replicate it as they were political wonks and roll into consumer marketing. They messed up and are now gun shy in creative and digital. I was in meetings watching agency execs talk on the benefits of democracy and political campaigning. This was in China. It was after the 2008 crisis diminished the western system’s legitimacy in the eyes of Chinese people. There are some specialists like Blue State Digital who have been much smarter
Richard is probably having a diminished reward for his change at a time when marketing functions are changing dramatically:
Inhoused advertising and creative teams are now doing major strategy work. In addition to the original rapid response, tactical content. Organisations like Oliver are providing the flexibility of agenciey style staffing to inhousing operations. So brands get the best of both worlds. Its part of the uberisation of services. Oliver does run the risk of disruption by the likes of Adecco or Manpower
Vendors such as Adobe have stripped out some of the pockets of agency value pricing out of digital build and measurement work. Once configured automated marketer friendly reports are a lot easier and automatically distributed. You can put up local / brand specific websites much faster than legacy systems in use like Vignette / Open Text. (I don’t mean to pick on Open Text, but they are an iconic player). Having gone through the painful process being the client on the build of a global web template, I can appreciate the gains made. The template is then rolled out to local country websites via the company-wide CMS. You could have teams doing this process across tens of brands at a time around the world
There is a changing media agenda to a more media neutral media approach is healthier for brands than digital at all costs. Anything that promotes more critical thinking around paid and earned digital is good for the industry in the longer term. It is important to remember that thought leaders like disruption commentary has an implicit agenda. McKinsey and Deloitte look to have a series of ongoing projects in a client, rather than solving a problem. The digital disruption meme has meant that businesses have taken their eye off long term brand value. Until recently, the digital disruption meme prevented critical evalution of channels. This has changed. But with CMOs staying in their roles for short tenures, brand building may not be secure in its place on the agenda
I recommend that readers check out Richard’s PR is at a Crossroads post. Edelman cites changes at PR agencies owned by marketing conglomerates as indicators. He thinks this due to a lack of confidence in the PR industry. There may be some truth in it; 2016 had the lowest annual growth in seven years for Edelman. As PR is at a crossroads, on the cusp of transformation? No, it is already being transformed.
Public relations has already crossed the Rubicon. The Rubicon crossing happened years ago. Richard noticed the signs back in April 2011:
…as PR continues to expand, encompassing digital, research, media planning and content creation, should we consider rebranding ourselves as communications firms?
At the time the question was prompted from London colleagues. Richard disagreed with the premise.
By 2012 Edelman was in the AdAge Agency A-list in the US. In March 2015, Edelman’s boiler plate changed from:
Edelman is the world’s largest public relations firm…
to
Edelman is a leading global communications marketing firm
Edelman hasn’t been a PR agency for the past 2-5 years. The transformation in the industry has been going on for at least a decade.
Why this has happened is down to six factors:
Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing
Technology-driven marketing strategy
CMO perspectives shaped by marketing thinking
Talent
Advertising changes
Media landscape changes
Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing
Lets break things down a bit, some bits of PR are about the corporate parts of a company.
Corporate PR covers a large area including:
Public affairs
Educating investors
Shoring up shareholder confidence
Internal communications
Community affairs
Some corporate and social responsibility actitivities could fall under PR. When we’re talking about who is responsible for organisation moral purpose /meaning. This should come from the CEO down.
Thinking about marketing communications the situation changes a lot. It depends on the sector and the audience that you are communicating to. For consumer marketing; the role that PR plays as part is a subordinated part with the marketing mix. Byron Sharp’s works How Brands Grow (parts 1&2) outline PR’s small, but intricate role with clarity.
For mature consumer brands, engagement (and by extension PR) is less important. Instead the focus would be on efficient reach and frequency of repetition. Being top of mind is more important. The only way for marketing communications-orientated PR teams to grow their billings is service expansion.
Technology-driven marketing strategy
Many business-to-business marketers are using content marketing as a key channel. The content shaped by analysis from marketing automation software.
In marketing automation, strategy is outsourced. Rules embedded in the software platform dictate approach. PR becomes a source of content to feed the machine. The idea is to determine an effective approach. Then optimise to reduce the price of engagement over time. I could write a blog post or two about the problems with this approach, but it is tangental to PR. Content creation is an opportunity for PRs, all be it one with perpetually squeezed margins.
Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing
In B2C marketing there are large research projects on what works. These include Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the IPA. In marketing mature consumer brands, we know that reach, frequency and recency matters. Engagement is less important. Public relations then becomes an afterthought at best. Taking an integrated media planning led approach makes sense.
There isn’t a comparable set of research for the PR industry like IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass. Outside the US public relations generally doesn’t have budgets for tools and data. Clients tend to be more action-orientated. Media agencies tend to have the best insights – which aids planning and creative.
The benefits of an integrated advertising-led approach goes back decades. Edelman cites Y&R’s ‘whole egg’ concept. Dentsu’s ‘Cross Switch Marketing’ is similar with roots going back to the 1960s. The PR industry mistook integrated thinking for a primitive view of PR practice. The reality lies somewhere between communications myopia and macro marketing thinking.
From a CMO perspective
PR spend is a small part of their budget. It may not even sit in their budget if there is a CCO (chief communications officer) role in the company
PR isn’t supported by good quality secondary insights like the IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass
Advertising works
Advertising agencies foster high trust through visualisation of ideas backed by insights
Media relations is low cost, low efficiency but can be high engagement
Integrated simplifies the client/ agency dynamic (one ass to kick)
Successful integrated agency engagements. Examples include Red Fuse (Colgate), GTB (Ford, Purina) and TBWA Media Arts Lab (Apple)
The memory of Enfatico has disappeared
Talent
Edelman has done a better job than most agencies in getting digital and paid media talent. I’ve worked as an in-house marketer. I have worked as a PR person. I’ve also worked in PR agencies doing digital and paid media. I now work as a strategy director in a creative ad agency and the difference is huge.
For most specialists working in a PR agency can be thankless task:
PR agency leaders don’t get other disciplines. This is particularly true outside North America
I’ve worked with too many agency leaders who think digital is an infographic or a video
The briefing process in PR agencies is awful. ‘We’ve got a video, make it viral’ was the worst brief I had
Outside North America budgets are very tight
You can get better working conditions elsewhere. Tools, people you can learn from, research and ambience. Real conversation at a PR agency: “can you wear a shirt and suit?” “Why?” “We’d just like it” “Can I quadruple my day rate?” “No, why?” “That’s my inconvenience of wearing a suit fee”
PR agencies don’t win the awards that matter to us. PR publications wring their hands about the lack of PR wins at the Cannes Lions. This matters for your career
If you have capability built up in the ad agency, creative shop or media agency; use it. Publicis, WPP and Interpublic have deep expertise they can draw on. Publicis talks about this as ‘The Power of One’. It is much easier than recruiting more technical, creative and planning talent into a PR shop.
Advertising changes
As PR has changes so has advertising. There is a far greater understanding of what efficient and effective looks like. While I lament the the decline of advertising’s golden age; multichannel storytelling has improved. Advertising agencies have learned how to combine earned and paid media. Earned media is an incremental revenue increase advertising agencies. Advertising agencies have done earned media and not even thought about it being PR.
By comparison creative represents a big budget bump for your PR agency. That causes the client to pause and think. The expansion of advertising has wiped out the crossroads; so PR isn’t at a crossroads anymore.
Media landscape changes
As advertising has changed so has the media landscape. The online environment is shaping out with two winners around the world. The pattern of online advertsing spend is clear. Everywhere outside China online advertising is static; only Facebook and Google see increases. In China, is is Tencent due to WeChat that wins. Sina benefits from Weibo. Baidu would have been an obvious winner due to it being a Google analogue. Instead Baidu’s earnings have been static.
This decline in media fortunes adversely affects editorial space. This impacts the efficiency of media relations. By some accounts in the UK there are now 3 PR people for every journalist. PR agencies have needed to expand beyond media relations. This means trying to get more involved in owned and paid media. The challenge is that advertising agencies are also in that space – extending their storytelling. In the case of the media landscape, PR isn’t at a crossroads because the crossroads no longer exists it has become a singularity at the centre of the media sector
Writing about consumer grievance came from a couple of things. I was watching a lecture by professor Robert Reich at Stanford and it reminded me of Edelman‘s 2025 Trust Barometer report ‘Trust and the Crisis of Grievance‘.
Edelman’s annual report is a barometer, a global snapshot of who and what consumers trust. As long as I can remember Edelman’s report into trust of institutions has been in decline, but the 2025 report highlighting consumer grievance marked a perceived acceleration.
TL;DR
Why it matters: Most brands treat consumer complaints as a customer service headache to be managed by a chatbot. That is a massive commercial misstep. Grievance is not an admin burden; it is a raw, unvarnished map of what your audience actually cares about.
What is changing: We are seeing the rise of a distinct global grievance culture. When trust in traditional institutions wobbles, consumers direct their frustration at the brands they buy from. If you look closely at these grievances, you see the exact gaps where your business is failing to deliver on its promise.
The big picture: Two distinct trust economies now exist. There is the formal, corporate version presented in annual reports, and the real-world version lived by your customers. When the gap between the two grows too wide, the goodwill sitting on your balance sheet evaporates.
Global grievance
In the report Edelman posited that trust in institutions was no longer a universally shared civic resource. Around the world, it had become a luxury commodity that is heavily segmented by income and social class.
Putting my cards on the table
You the reader should question my interpretation as an enquiring mind. With that in mind, it makes sense to understand my starting viewpoint as I started to go through the subject matter. I agreed with the essence that Edelman’s research has captured. And the bifurcation of the economy is being baked into marketing plans that I have worked on over the past few years.
I have my doubts about their methods. I believe that their motives are good admittedly moderated by commercial considerations, but I did find myself questioning the techniques used and data transparency.
I set out to find high quality research that validated, or challenged the concept of consumer grievance.
Edelman’s original approach was triggered by the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’. The survey’s structural model was built upon the mid-1990s theories of Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that institutional trust was primarily driven by upward mobility, structured legal systems, and guaranteed economic prosperity.
The Trust Barometer’s original respondents was restricted to “opinion leaders” or “opinion elites”. That mean’t highly affluent college-educated people aged 35 to 64 with high media consumption and active engagement in public policy. The demographic that prospective Edelman clients would sit neatly within.
Technological and economic change saw Edelman move to a general population sample. They also moved from telephone interviews to online surveys. The number of respondents increased from 1,300 in five countries to 36,000 respondents.
2020 saw a change in survey design that broke the idea of ‘to do what is right’ into two attributes:
Competence
Ethical behaviour
Business did well on competency but less well in ethical considerations. Government, media and NGOs were viewed as lacking in both . Edelman compensated for this by studying proximal trust and employee trust.
Edelman introduced the concept of ‘trust brokering’ – an organisations capacity to support dialogue and bridge social divides.
The Genesis of Global Grievance
With a flair for drama and storytelling Edelman’s Trust Barometer links the decline of trust and the genesis of consumer grievance back to the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference held in the city. While a wide coalition of both left and right political figures, NGOs, organised labour were there to protest against unfettered globalisation the wheels were already in motion.
…globalization is not new, but that the present era of globalization, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets and the repercussions on people. Characterized by “shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders”, globalization has swung open the door to opportunities.
Breakthroughs in communications technologies and biotechnology, if directed for the needs of people, can bring advances for all of humankind. But markets can go too far and squeeze the non-market activities so vital for human development. Fiscal squeezes are constraining the provision of social services. A time squeeze is reducing the supply and quality of caring labour. And an incentive squeeze is harming the environment. Globalization is also increasing human insecurity as the spread of global crime, disease and financial volatility outpaces actions to tackle them.
The above quote came from the introduction to the 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).
As the 1999 HDR introduction alludes, by 1999 globalisation was not new and was already happening from Japanese consumer electronics to Korean shipbuilding. Instead globalisation was moving at a pace that institutions were no longer able to keep up with it or control it.
This viewpoint is supported by Professor Reich’s lecture on the factors driving the rise voter interest in populist leaders like President Trump. Reich outlines a four decades-long trajectory marked by:
The decoupling of productivity from wages. The US Board of Labour & Statistics paper Understanding of the labor productivity and compensation gap, considers the gap to have opened up in the 1970s. The fissure since the 1970s was also documented by the Economic Policy Institute’s work The Productivity-Pay Gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published research showed how corporate profits decoupled from employee compensation from the early 2000s on.
The Reagan era erosion of labour bargaining power. Similar erosion also took place in the UK under the Thatcher government.
The concentration of corporate market power. Deregulation from the 1980s on, allowed the financial and corporate sectors to become politically and economically dominant. Reich argued that this created a system average citizens perceived as rigged to favour corporations and big banks over ordinary workers. The 2008 bank bailout while ordinary citizens faced foreclosures cemented this perception. This isn’t only a western issue. 44% of China’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
The resulting financial exhaustion of the working and middle classes. American families employed three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living. First, they simply worked longer hours. Second, women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, creating the dual-income household out of necessity. Third, the other measures reached their limit, they tapped into the equity in their homes, until 2008
The US Bureau of of Labour had three hypotheses for factors driving the labour compensation – productivity gap:
Globalisation: Increased offshoring shifted production and service activities to other countries. Consequently, income that might have previously gone to domestic workers was reallocated to intermediate purchases and foreign labour.
Increased Automation: As technological automation increases, the overall need for human labor input drops. When machines replace workers, the share of income dedicated to capital naturally increases relative to the share dedicated to labor.
Faster Capital Depreciation: Modern business capital, such as computer hardware and software, degrades or becomes obsolete much faster than the heavy machinery used in previous decades. Because these assets must be upgraded or replaced more frequently, a higher share of industry income must be diverted away from wages to cover these ongoing capital replacement costs
When the report explored specific industry sectors such as electrical power generation and supply, the divergence correlated with a fourth factor, deregulation. This happened to the US energy market in 1992.
The Energy Policy Act, 1992 created domestic competition. Incumbent local monopolies became more efficient or went under. Productivity was achieved through new technology and aggressive cost-cutting including layoffs. Workers produced far more value per hour, but because the company is fighting to keep prices low to compete, wages didn’t rise at that same rate.
Two trust economies exist
But all of these factors didn’t impact across society equally. What Edelman’s Trust Barometer acknowledged, but didn’t highlight at the time was the existence of two trust economies existing in the same space, but for different people.
The top quartile of income earners trusted the system. The bottom quartile didn’t. This was mirrored in findings by other organisations, notably the OECD’s Government at a Glance 2025 report and UNU WIDER Trust in a changing World 2025 paper.
There is a decline in governmental trust documented by the Pew Research Center Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – a consistent downward trend much longer than 1999, back as far as the mid-1960s for the American public, much earlier than Edelman’s work seems to suggest.
Business and consumer grievance
Edelman posits that businesses have become more trusted than governments. It’s a comforting anchor for a business that sells corporate reputation work. The reality may be different. The decline in government trust has merely set a very low bar according to research by Bentley University and Gallup. The rise of zero-sum thinking exemplified by Zero-sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), will sweep business attitudes along as part of systemic distrust. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posits that this zero-trust thinking has brought conflict within the US itself and driven protests around the world – globalised consumer grievance.
The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University documented an increase in political violence risk factors across the US mirroring the 1960s and early 1970s . German insurance company Allianz warned that this behaviour represented a risk to large businesses across their operations and supply chains. This is outside and separate to government military actions like the US – Iran conflict or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are problems inside organisations as well. Employer trust has been in decline according to Edelman. The causes are diverse and amplify consumer grievance:
Managers are supervising but failing to manage. They struggle to coach or develop their staff sufficiently.
Media sector consumer grievance
The media business is seeing the impact first hand. Fear of deliberate deception is at the cente of the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025. That fear is driving growing divisions in society and between societies, further feeling consumer grievance. According to The Reuters Institute Digital News Report of the same year these concerns about deception are driving audiences away from ‘legacy’ media companies to platforms of editorialists and opinion formers across podcasts, YouTube and other social platforms.
Edelman claims that this audience migration is down to beliefs about the motivations of media organisations. 75 percent of high-grievance respondents believe news organisations would rather attract a big audience than report what people actually need to know. 67 percent believe the media prefers to support an ideology over informing the public.
On slight glimmer from Edelman’s data was that trust in traditional media dropped by four points, versus trust in search engines dropping by five. But that delta will be cold comfort to media executives watching their business being eaten alive by technology platforms.
Goodwill on the balance sheet
Goodwill on the balance sheet of a company tries to capture brand value, the value of customer relationships and wider stakeholder trust within a business. PwC research provided some empirical evidence to support RoI on the stakeholder trust component of goodwill. But Edelman overreaches in its 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World report to try and do the same with brand value. In this case, Edelman tries to use survey responses, rather than observed behaviour data and the scientific method to try and overturn several decades of validated marketing science research.
Consumer grievance: so what?
It’s very easy to ignore consumer grievance as ethereal fiction or background noise. Being part of the solution can end up being part of the problem.
Brand purpose real talk
For some brands it make sense to pick a side, but if you do commit to the brand purpose. It may cost you, but if you really have a brand purpose, or ‘higher purpose’ as David Aaker called it, then the 30% opportunity cost in marketing effectiveness is worth it in your calculus.
Effectiveness expert Les Binet’s two question test on brand purpose makes a lot of sense:
Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.
Brand purpose can be a struggle to retrofit. After the success of Dove being re-positioned from a functional product to the ‘real beauty’ positioning; Unilever looked to replicate the effect with varying degrees of success.
You also need to be aware of brand purpose not being global. Apple, Meta and Nike have made decisions in Asia that are vastly different to what they do in western markets. There is no coherence or congruency in their world view. Neoliberal universal values died in corporations long before they were devalued in mainstream western political discourse. Both the online world and social media will shine a spotlight on this difference. This perceived corporate hypocrisy will increase consumer grievance and reduce consumer trust in the brand to do ‘the right thing’.
You could make the argument that Apple, Meta and Nike all fail Binet’s brand purpose test.
Outside of geopolitical differences, even the most basic demographic differences can be landmines for brand purpose. It’s an accelerant for consumer grievance and one that marketers at the likes of Unilever and P&G have either ducked, or got tonally wrong.
Patagonia is arguably the most prominent brand purpose led brand, yet it faces a slew of dilemmas. You could argue that Patagonia’s self description as being ‘a work in progress‘ is at best a temporary fix with an uncertain sell-by date during a time of consumer grievance.
Brand promise
The brand promise is the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service that they are purchasing. There is a temptation to reduce costs. You see this with automated services and reduced sized packaging.
If you are transparent about the trade-off consumers will self-select and be fine with it. Telecoms companies have been doing this for years.
Plusnet – BT’s no-frills ISP
Voxi – Vodafone’s self service brand that comes at a discounted price
Does your consumer journey penalise behaviour instead of rewarding loyalty. if it does, that will fuel consumer grievance. Audit these friction points and act on them. Fix underlying operations-related grievances and the customer lifetime revenue will take care of itself.
Disclosure: a long time ago I worked for a forerunner of Burson and WPP’s dedicated agency for Colgate; Red Fuse. During that time I was based out of Hong Kong.
Later on, I won the Huawei consumer devices AOR business from my old colleagues in Hong Kong.
I know Burson’s current CEO Corey duBrowa from even further back in my agency life, we share a love of the Wu Tang clan.
What’s news?
Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into what you’re really here to read. The Times ‘news‘ that Burson is a possible candidate for sale isn’t really news. It had been eluded to previously in coverage. Coming in as a new CEO to WPP, it was inevitable would take an all-up strategic review.
Executives in the group have also discussed potential disposals as part of the new strategy, with some suggesting that Burson, its PR agency, would be the easiest to consider for sale given it sits separately from the three other divisions. – WPP to overhaul creative agency structure in strategic rethink | Financial Times (February 9, 2026)
The real news was that WPP appointed Goldman Sachs to do the work and that Burson reported a 6% decline in revenue in 2025.
The shape of the new WPP has been becoming clear for a number of months.
WPP Production was basically the same direction of travel as Hogarth with a new brand. Hogarth was a new brand in itself, and didn’t have the depth of brand equity that Young & Rubican (Y&R Brands) or J Walter Thompson (JWT) had.
WPP Open – AI stuff. Some of which is ‘self-service’ to tap into smaller clients and some of which seems to sit in WPP Production.
WPP Media – which seems to be a rebrand of GroupM, like WPP Production it makes complete sense.
WPP Creative – puts the creative brands under one line item where it used to be under Y&R Brands, JWT, Ogilvy etc. The past structure was as much down to WPP’s history of acquisition as it was to strategy. Much of this work had been done under Mark Read, this seemed to be as much about cleaning up the accounting processes as anything else. PR agencies would nominally fit underneath.
Why would WPP sell Burson?
A successful sale of Burson would provide WPP with funds to use elsewhere. This could fulfil two purposes; reducing debt or reinvesting in WPP’s business and technology transformation. Burson is a business that could be packaged up, sold to the right buyer or floated in a public offering.
The downsides would be a loss of integrated pitch power, and a smaller global footprint for back-office resources.
Obviously a few questions come up about who would be a buyer and would WPP want to spend the time listing Burson as a separate business?
It also makes strategic sense
When I worked at WPP, the PR agencies outside of Ogilvy weren’t integrated very tightly to their creative agency counterparts. You had a similar distance between the likes of Golin and McCann Erickson at IPG too. So the loss of integrated pitch power less than it would at first appear.
PR is an umbrella term for two broad functions, marketing communications and management functions. Management functions would include:
Internal communications including around change management.
Legal and compliance, for instance around financial communications for a public company.
Stakeholder engagement including the investor community, local communities and government.
That isn’t an exhaustive list but it covers the major areas. There is more synergy between these areas and management consultancies than there are with WPP’s offerings. WPP has already sold FGS last year. FGS is a financial communications specialist.
The ‘management functions’ is more of a boutique offering and can come with risks as Bell Pottinger found out to their cost.
It’s arguably even more risky in a volatile political environment that yo-yos between different forms of political populism.
The other side of PR: marketing communications is earned media. That side of PR has been shaken up by several factors:
Decline in the mainstream media.
Search, generative AI and social algorithms as tastemakers.
The creator economy.
Brand media: led by the technology industry who published their news directly via blog posts.
In the past creative agencies thought about talkability, which was earned impact from advertising creative. Now creative agencies think about campaigns even more in terms of earned impact, including earned first approaches and WPP agency Ogilvy has managed to integrate its PR function into this process.
Specialist agencies tap into the creator economy and it’s been well documented by senior leaders in PR like Stephen Waddington how the PR industry missed the SEO opportunity.
PR agencies have looked to redefine themselves. The world’s largest PR firm, Edelman calls themselves a ‘global communications firm’ to help it position itself against management consultancies and advertising agencies.
The question WPP would have been asking themselves would have been: do they really need Burson when a lot of its function is now being done by media and creative agencies?
What does Burson gain or lose from leaving WPP, one way or the other?
Burson and its previous constituent agencies have been part of a conglomerate for the past quarter of a century that wasn’t focused on their business. WPP’s former CEO Sir Martin Sorrell used to talk about WPP primarily being a ‘media investment’ business for its clients. Helping them make the most effective, efficient investments in advertising for its clients.
Burson could be allowed to chart its own course, with less constraints put upon the business.
Burson would lose access to shared services over time, having to reorganise:
IT support
Offices
Time-tracking
Finance
Employee and at least some client contracts
New business prospecting
Client contracts where the work is shared with WPP agencies
Over time Burson could rebuild partnerships and capabilities that it would have previously had through WPP.
There is a bigger question about whether the natural consequence of the structural bifurcation of modern PR into ‘management’ and ‘marketing communications’ specialists leaves room for a large full service generalist agency like Burson.
The industry itself is splitting rapidly between highly specialised management consultancy style operations handling the C-suite, and earned-first creative shops driving marketing communications. The traditional, full-service generalist model that Burson and its ancestors helped invent is finding it harder to operate in the middle ground. For example, Edelman, the PR industry’s bellwether fell below the $1 billion fee income mark in 2024, a 5% global decline.
If the world’s largest PR firm is struggling to make the integrated generalist model work, it may be that the model itself might be broken?
Who may want to buy Burson?
Private equity (including supporting a management team buyout)
I think that Burson would be a tough sell for an informed private equity (PE) firm. PE firms tend to look for business with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 10%.
Here are some estimates that are why I came to this conclusion and I may be wrong.
Global Industry CAGR (2024–2030) is projected at 6.1% to 6.4%, although some aggressively optimistic estimates suggest up to 10.5%. That is based around assumptions on digital transformation and AI-driven services being fully integrated.
Looking at historic data from PRovoke Media’s global top 250 PR firms (2015 – 2023), CAGR was typically between 3.5% and 5%. These numbers maybe a bit optimistic due to currency fluctuations. (During CoVID, 2020 was flat and there was a sharp rebound in 2021.)
Burson’s constituent agencies BCW and H+K were running somewhere around 3.5 – 4% CAGR.
The outliers are AxiCom and ASDA’A who are Burson’s tech specialist brand and its Middle East agency presence – both operating in high growth sectors. They had CAGR somewhere between 12 – 14%.
This is the reason why PE has focused on specialists in the healthcare area or financial communications like FGS Global where the growth rate and margins are higher than normal.
Given the length of time that Burson has been within WPP, the consolidation that the business has been through merging:
Burson-Marsteller
Cohn & Wolfe
Hill and Knowlton (H+K)
JeffreyGroup
WPP likely trimmed out any organisational ‘fat’ which leaves little if any efficiency gains to be made by an acquiring PE firm.
When these firms were all separate it’s not like WPP were generous at the best of times. I heard allegations of bonuses either cancelled , or like pay rises constantly pushed out as aggressive cash management and cost reduction with junior and mid-level staff taking the brunt of this process.
Another PR agency network
Another PR agency network purchasing Burson may gain some operational efficiencies by de-duplicating the back office business processes from finance to HR departments.
But given that Burson is the world’s number two agency by fee income according to Provoke Media and PR Week; it is unlikely to be acquired by another PR network.
If the current number one Edelman bought them, they would run into antitrust issues and this would put them on the radar of the Trump administration in the US. Given the progressive leaning content of their Trust Barometer research, Edelman may end up creating its own business crisis.
Omnicom are likely too wrapped up in consolidating their purchase of Interpublic to attempt it. Even if they did make an offer, WPP may not be inclined to sell to a direct rival.
Publicis and Havas both have their focus on larger growth opportunities elsewhere and PR are much smaller parts of their business.
Most of the rest of the largest global agencies in the PR industry are either industry specialists like Real Chemistry and Invizio Evoke (health), FGS Global, APCO and Brunswick (financial communications) or national champions like Germany’s mc Group.
Conducting a leveraged buyout (LBO)of Burson would be unattractive due to the cost of debt servicing versus Burson’s CAGR. So this would make financing for a management buyout (MBO) challenging too.
Spin out or spin-in
From a PR agency perspective Burson has a good quality management team at the top. Someone like Corey duBrowa, who has previously worked at major corporates like Google and Starbucks. If the business was spun off or floated like Next15 Group, it could make sense on the London Stock Exchange.
Retail investors would be likely to give the best return for WPP. However, an IPO would take a major effort and a good deal of time to make happen that doesn’t feel like the kind of cadence that the WPP Elevate28 plan / platform wants to move at.
A spin-in might make some sense. Merge Burson with a publicly listed company (for instance Next15 or Stagwell) and then WPP sell down their shares over time. WPP maybe able to securitise its shares in such a way that it gets its (diminished) return upfront and a financial partner gradually sells down the shares with a view to making a profit on the money it paid WPP versus the price it gets on the stock market.
Clients get a vote too
Clients get a vote too. If the future of Burson affects client team morale, capacity or make-up they are likely to head for the door. The agency intellectual capital is their practitioners.
We saw a client exodus happen during the protracted acquisition of IPG by Omnicom with 3.5 percent drops in year-on-year revenue and peaked as high as 10% on a quarterly basis in markets like Australia.
Maintaining the client base will require a swift disposal process that doesn’t have Burson people keeping one eye on LinkedIn and the jobs section of PR Week or Ragan PR Daily.
Omnicom is desperate to rejuvenate its business and stealing unhappy Burson clients would be an easy win. Publicis is a high-performing group of agencies already and boutique shops live for ‘giant-killing’ new business pitches. Havas had a healthy PR business that would provide an alternative for any unhappy Burson clients.
The Human Cost of Structural Change
The current speculation surrounding Burson reflects a broader structural shift across the industry. For the professionals within the agency, many of whom have spent years managing complex briefs for major clients, this period of uncertainty will be unsettling.
Burson’s current position is not a reflection on the capability of its staff. It is the logical outcome of the continuing bifurcation of modern PR.
The sector is dividing between specialist management consultancies advising the C-suite and agile creative shops leading marketing communications.
The traditional generalist model, is finding the middle ground smaller and tougher than it used to be.
WPP’s wider strategy is now firmly anchored in technology and integrated creative solutions.
Operating independently or with private equity backing, Burson would have the operational freedom to determine its exact shape in this new market. Stepping away from a holding company structure is sometimes the clearest route to finding the necessary focus. The talent remain in place; the immediate requirement is a business model aligned with current market realities.
February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition
I am now at issue 31, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘get up & run’. In Cantonese 31 isn’t a famous lucky number, it could considered to mean ‘life first’ implying an importance of vitality. On the plus side, it doesn’t have negative connotations of say 14 – which sounds similar to definitely die.
I was sent a mix by an old friend of mine done by Frankie Bones at Amnesia House in August 1990 – as aural history its a fascinating treasure trove and occurred a pivotal time with several genres about to fragment from the original UK scene. Now we have our soundtrack let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
I appeared in the What’s In My Now newsletter talking small wallets, cheaper alternatives to Apple Studio monitors and making better use of LLMs. More here.
I gave a presentation for Outside Perspective on my Dot LLM era paper. Here is my speaking notes that I prepared as I got the presentation ready, complete with the slides at the relevant points.
I spoke to the WSJ about my dot LLM era thinking and was name-checked on their Take On The Week podcast. And I compared my research with Marc Andreessen’s of A16z 2026 AI outlook here.
I wrote a letter to the FT about Sony surrendering its home entertainment business (TVs, home audio) to Chinese TV maker TCL. While Sony’s current involvement in sectors such as elder care and insurance are worthy endeavours – what does it mean when they are more core to Sony’s identity than the home entertainment equipment that the brand built its empire on?
As well as being a concerned Sony customer, I was also thinking about what it means to a brand when it gets rid of its core raison d’être? You can read my letter here.
I was talking to a friend about classic films and suddenly Matthew Frank’s newsletter dropped in my inbox and started me down a rabbit hole exploring the idea of forgettable cinema as part of the modern public zeitgeist.
I pulled together a collection of adverts and campaigns celebrating lunar new year from across Asia and a couple aimed at the wider diaspora. As brands look to benefit from the year of the fire horse.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Publicis widening the business gap versus its rivals. A decade spent preparing their data and foundational technology for machine learning.
WPP’s big pivot to adapt to market conditions for the large holding companies.
Dentsu’s change of leadership to better control strategy and manage global capabilities.
Michael Farmer on why reorganisation isn’t strategy, instead strategy should drive any reorganisation to meet the strategic objectives. This one proved a bit controversial, I’m not sure why.
Books that I have read.
While I have been looking forward for David McCloskey’s latest book The Persian to come out, I managed to finish The Seventh Floor. On one level The Seventh Floor is about espionage and feels very now given the new cold war. But it’s also about friendship, loyalty and personal betrayal. McCloskey doesn’t only bring expertise from a past career at the CIA, but also a deep love of the espionage novel as an art form and this novel gives a nod and a wink to the works of John Le Carré.
While the agency world is focused on the rise of AI, I decided to revisit Michael Farmer’s Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Ten years after it has been published, the diagnosis and the lessons from Farmer’s research seem to have been ignored by clients and the c-suites of holding groups. One thing I picked up on my revisiting the book was the challenge in defining strategic contribution and effort to campaigns. With creative output, Farmer managed to break down creative tasks into fixed ScopeMetric® Units (SMUs). But Farmer admitted that he couldn’t define strategy outputs in the same way because the context changed account-by-account. This makes sense given the difficulties I have had in the past when strategists were way oversold by the project management function within agencies.
Things I have been inspired by.
Insularity was the watch word of this year’s Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It was a pretty dark vision of the future. There is a huge delta between top income quartile of the population and their trust of authority and the bottom income quartile. In the lower quartile group there is little to no trust in authority figures (business, journalists, government). They only trust people like them.
Andrew Tindall published a new book for System1 based on their research and Effie data which reinforces previous publications by Orlando Wood, Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It also reinforces the importance of context as part of creativity when media and creative functions are co-joined at the hip. It’s very readable and available for free here.
Chart of the month.
The surge of US measles infections turned into a politicised debate about vaccinations, competence, why Canada’s rates were even higher and whether things were as bad as experts would have you believe?
The chart only tells part of the story.
The US CDC cites a general hospitalisation rate of about 20% (1 in 5 cases), recent years have seen significant fluctuations depending on the specific age groups and regions affected by measles outbreaks.
The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.
2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.
Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.
2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.
Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.
Canada’s rates are high because the population has a significant amount of unvaccinated immigrants and refugees from conflict zones and the developing world.
Things I have watched.
Thomas Harris’ Silence of The Lambs still has legs in culture. Which is why Amazon Prime Video has gone back to the universe with Clarice. The story takes place in the aftermath of the buffalo Bill killings which drove the plot of Silence of the Lambs. The storytelling is top notch with a fantastic plot twist in episode 1. It is well worth your time to at least give the first few episodes a chance.
It started off in an unpromising way, several years ago a friend left a DVD with me. They said something along the lines of they liked a number of Werner Herzog films, but that this was too weird for them. I finally got to sit down and watch Fata Morgana.
It doesn’t have a story, but is beautifully shot footage of the Sahara and Sahel in 1969 with a focus on near horizon mirages (from which the film gets its name) and features the human effect on it from vistas of oil processing equipment to barbed wire and crashed planes.
There is a poetic narration in German over the top with a range of music to flt the landscapes. It feels like a forerunner of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsimade a decade later. It’s easy to watch.
I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.
Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.
This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.
I was inspired by watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond last month to watch Danger: Diabolik. The psychadelic motifs of and dream sequences of Reflection in a Dead Diamond seemed to draw from European cinema’s brief flirtation with super spy and super villain films during the 1960s. Danger: Diabolik was Mario Bava’s and Dino DeLaurentis’ take on the French Fantômas film series.
Bava’s expertise in genre films and special effects gives Danger: Diabolik a more sophisticated look than you would give it credit. Add in the film’s 1960s modernist aesthetic, James Bond type action sequences and you have a winning film. The humour-heist plot is very of its time but still entertaining and cried out for a remake. Terry-Thomas’ character performance as a government minister in the film is one of brilliance.
Useful tools.
I was saddened to read of the demise of The World Fact Book published by the CIA. I found it invaluable as a starting point when getting up to speed on international campaigns on parts of the world that I hadn’t visited. It even helped me win some work with Telenor Myanmar back before the current military regime got back into power. According to this post on the CIA website the World Fact Book is going away.
This personal productivity playbook by CJ Casseili was interesting to read and some of you may find tips and tricks that you can apply in your own work and personal life.
Ilina Scott’s quick guide to AI tools for strategists is worth a read if you are just dipping your toe in the field.
Occasionally software comes along what doesn’t become a mainstream success, but is well loved and much missed when it disappeared. Apple’s HyperCard was one, another was Yahoo! Pipes. The idea behind Pipes has been resurrected and in its latest iteration is very useful, even in a time of AI-with-everything.
The sales pitch.
i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of my February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
– a great book, right up there with 
