PR firms join the big league

A slap around the chops for Teneo, which gets the full Oliver Shah treatment in last week’s Sunday Times.

“PR monster Teneo”, has a “silly corporate name” and internal infighting is rife, is the gist.

We’ll leave Teneo and the Sunday Times to battle over whether all this was deserved.

The point is that the paper wrote about the business like it were any other.

This is a sign of the industry’s success, and perhaps a weakness. You can’t be huge AND fly under the radar at the same time.

In the old days scuffles inside PR companies might be fun industry gossip, of amusement to hacks, perhaps.

Teneo, and rivals such as FGS, are now so large they are going to attract as much attention as many of their clients. Some of whom may not care for that fact too much.

How come you are in the papers and we’re not, it is possible to imagine a CEO saying to his PR firm.

I guess the point is that Teneo and others are so much more than the PR firms of old.

Teneo itself has five different arms – strategy and comms (that’s PR), financial restructuring, management consultancy, headhunting and a growing geo-political risk business.

No one can say it isn’t doing well – revenues last year topped $600 million. And the UK PR arm has just had a record first quarter.

Most of its clients are increasingly global too. So Sainsbury’s, a UK business, perhaps has no need of Teneo’s global network, but it might want the rest of the expertise anyway.

But multi-nationals certainly do want the whole show, which is partly why Tulchan sold itself to Teneo last year for £65 million.

It recognised it needed a global offering.

Some of that offering is going to be on the quiet – hush, hush work that is never supposed to see the light of day.

With 1700 employees worldwide there must be some chance of leaks, but that’s for Teneo to manage by keeping staff content.

The trend for bigger and wider firms that offer PR alongside other services isn’t going to be reversed.

For smaller players, the hope must be that the big boys leave plenty of scraps on the table – sometimes quite tasty morsels – on which they can feast and grow.