Public Relations Shops See Uptick
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Orange County’s biggest public relations shops are cautiously optimistic that the worst days are behind them.
“The storm is just about weathered,” said Laer Pearce, president of No. 25 Laguna Hills-based Laer Pearce & Associates.
The numbers back up the observation.
The 30 companies on this year’s Business Journal list, ranked by OC employment, posted a 4% increase in public relations workers to 311 in the past 12 months.
And fee income generated by OC operations rose 1% to $31.8 million in the period, according to the 23 companies that disclosed billing numbers.
This is the first time the Business Journal ranked public relations shops by employment. In the past, they were ranked by OC fee income. But a number of shops, citing restrictions by their public parent companies, declined to disclose billing figures.
Nine shops saw a rise in OC public relations workers, six reported a decline and 12 said they had no change. Three shops declined to disclose employment numbers and are Business Journal estimates.
“No big surprises here,” said Jennifer McLean, vice president, director of public relations of No. 17 Irvine-based O’Leary and Partners, which kept its PR staff flat at seven workers.
But the tight economy has meant continued pressure on shops to produce.
“Clients have not loosened their wallets for the most part,” said Hilary Kaye, president of No. 20 Tustin-based Hilary Kaye Associates Inc., which kept employment steady at six workers. “Money is still tight and most of the emerging growth companies we typically work with have had trouble acquiring any new funding.”
The result: Clients are focused on “maximizing each dollar spent,” and many are impatient and want “immediate results,” Kaye said.
The tight market, though, has made it a “buyers’ market,” Pearce said. “We’ve been able to find extremely talented people.”
Plus, Pearce and a number of shops said business is picking up.
“No doubt, we are seeing budgets come back as companies recognize that they have cut costs as much as possible,” said Erika Price Schulte, public relations director at No. 20 Irvine-based RiechesBaird Inc.
Pearce said his “phones have been ringing.” He said the shop has more proposals out this month than the last four months combined.
Public relations shops, though an influential group, aren’t large employers in OC relative to other industries, including their advertising counterparts. The Y & R; Cos., for instance, alone has about 375 workers in Irvine.
No. 1 Hill and Knowlton’s Irvine office, which employs an estimated 36 workers, and No. 2 Benjamin/A Weber Shandwick Company, which has an estimated 26 public relations employees in Irvine, are the biggest.
Hill is owned by the United Kingdom’s WPP Group PLC and Benjamin is a unit of N.Y.-based Interpublic Group of Cos.
