Choosing a PR agency – does size matter?

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog” said Keith Weed, new CMO of Unilever at Cannes last week, answering the question “do big agencies do the best work…or small agencies”.

Interesting too that he was saying it to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP – one of the world’s largest comms groups (138,000 employees in over 2,400 offices in 107 countries) for whom Unilever is a major client.

Weed goes on to say that when working with a big agency, his aim is to make sure he has that agency’s best people on his account, implying that in a big agency, employees are a mixed bag.

While it’s feasible to demand the best staff if you’re Unilever with a budget of £5bn a year, if you’re looking for a PR agency and have say £60K a year to spend, the size and quality of the agency you’re dealing with become more mission critical factors.

There’s a lingering perception that smaller PR agencies may lack resources but when it comes to online pr in particular, the number of people an agency can throw at a campaign isn’t as important as the quality of thinking behind it.

This is what the Head of R&D at Proctor & Gamble meant when he said “my biggest competitor today is a person with an idea” – a quote from the website of Anomaly, a  small agency that won the £50m Sony business last year.

In online pr, everything is measurable and testable so it becomes easier to drill down and understand whether the agency sitting in front of you can really deliver online and if you are in that position, we’ve devised seven questions you should ask.

In the video of the interview below, watch out for Sorrell dodging Weed’s question about if he has the best staff working on Unilever accounts – quite funny.