Last year, Robert Gray has reported in a PR Week feature how the staff at 50 UK PR agencies spend their time, based on 12 months worth of research. The results are not surprising, and confirm why the business model built on the billable hour - which, in my opinion, has never been the right one for an industry whose main objective should be to create added value on behalf of clients - is totally obsolete. Here are the numbers:

1. Media relations: 15%
2. Tracking features: 0,9%
3. Client communication strategies: 0,6%
4. Business development: 1,5%
5. Reporting: 17,8%
6. Administration: 6,3%
7. Account management: 44,9%
8. Other tasks: 13%

Just to summarize: 16,5% of the time is spent to provide added value and 19,3% to provide some added value to the client, but a whopping 51,2% of the time is actually wasted in activities that do not bring any value to the client but are only intended to “please” the financial controllers. Robert Gray comments: “The findings suggest that agencies are - for want of a better word - ‘wasting’ much of their time”. I do not feel confortable when I see these figures because I know that they are real, as I have been on the client side before switching to the agency business and I always had the perception that PR agencies were not organized to provide the added value that I wanted (and needed). At the time, I have probably been one of the nastiest clients in the business, but I always managed to get the right level of service. For instance, I refused to accept more than one report per month (no meeting and no phone call reports) and I wanted to attend the agency meetings (usually internal) where the account team was supposed to discuss PR strategies and tactics for my company. PR agencies should be as “flat” as possible in term of structure, and as “networked” as possible in term of organization. In my ideal business model, which I can describe as a “matrix” where each individual is part of several account teams (each one built in order to provide the highest added value to the specific client) and at the same time has a strong vertical specialization (for instance, product reviews, technical media, or industry analysts), the continuous “contamination” between teams and specializations brings an additional value to the client. I will return on this subject in the next few days. P.S. - I have not accessed the original PR Week research. The data have been mentioned by Andy Smith at Object Towers in this post on October 31, 2006.