‘Boards are needier than ever’: London’s PR firms adapt to growing corporate angst

Not that long ago, City professionals would happily tell dinner party acquaintances that they “worked in PR”. But not any more: now they are busy with “strategic consultancy” and “boardroom relations” with some “crisis comms” on the side.

The public relations industry has been busy rebranding itself to reflect what its corporate clients and boardrooms demand. The goal often is to become a one-stop shop for everything from crisis and financial communications to advising on sustainable business, corporate culture and geopolitical risk.

The larger firms, which have focused on broadening their business, have been able to protect their bottom lines despite lower levels of corporate dealmaking that traditionally would have been their bread-and-butter.

In the first half of this year, just £8.8bn was raised through IPOs and follow-on issuance — the lowest volume for 30 years, when adjusted for inflation. There have been 10 listings on Aim and the main market so far in 2025, and there were 17 in 2024 — a fraction of the 125 listings in 2021.

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This is the third in a series of articles examining how firms are having to adapt to this listings dearth in order to survive.

The ongoing drought of stock exchange listings in London has meant most PR partners have been wooing private equity clients in the hope of being instructed on takeover action.

“IPOs never really made that much money for firms, but they were important for profile and to get the retainer for future relationships”, one adviser said.

Neil Bennett, global co-CEO of H/Advisors — owned by French media giant Havas and which absorbed the City PR firm Maitland — said: “Financial PR is just a small part of what we do now. We spend a lot of time advising firms on public policy, on crisis, their digital footprint and their internal comms when undergoing transformation.”

Unsurprisingly, global and macroeconomic issues top boards’ concerns after five years of almost nonstop challenges — from the pandemic, inflation, wars and most recently global trade chaos caused by Trump’s tariffs.

“Boards are needier than ever for advice because the world has rapidly got a lot more complex, a lot more demanding, and they need to know how to manage stakeholders,” said one adviser.

London’s IPO drought: An FT series

This is the third in a four-part series examining how different sectors across the City of London are responding to a lack of public listings and other challenges

Part one: How London’s IPO drought forced City bankers to pivot

Part two: Advisers bank on a London IPO bounceback

Part three: How PRs went from “leaks over lunch” to boardroom hand-holding

Part four Fund managers call for policy change to fuel UK’s next IPO wave.

“Ten years ago, a chief executive would say to you: ‘This is what we’re doing — now go out and sell it,’” said one boss of a major agency. “Now they are coming to you to help articulate their strategy and figure out what it is [ . . . ] They want to sense how their different stakeholders from investors, government, NGOs, and customers will react”.

Trusted spin-doctors therefore still have their place — from Brunswick’s Sir Alan Parker to Roland Rudd at FGS Global to Joele Frank at her eponymous firm — and are leaned on for their powerful contacts books and shrewd advice.

Meanwhile. crises topple chief executives and wrongfoot companies quicker and more severely than ever before. To wit: the abrupt departures of Bernard Looney at BP and Debra Crew at Diageo — for very different reasons. Brunswick advised the companies in both instances.

“Increasing stakeholder activism has made it more difficult for leaders to lead,” said Alex Geiser, chief executive of FGS Global. “Being able to deliver compelling multi-stakeholder strategies to build momentum for a company’s strategy has become a key success factor for successful companies and leaders.”

Veteran PRs, who still fondly call themselves flacks, remember the days of “leaks over lunch” before takeover rules were tightened up, and when there were plenty more hostile deals. “It’s all changed because there are also far fewer retail and active investors — so ‘selling the deal’s story’ to the papers has become a lot less of the job,” said one senior adviser.

Senior PRs suggested that dealing with journalists was now less than 10 per cent of their work.

More financial pressure has meant many PR firms are up for sale or in constant search for new revenue streams. “The long boozy lunches and freebie trips to glamorous places are long gone,” said one veteran.

Firms are also having to get used to being the targets of private equity buyouts, rather than just advising on them.

KKR increased its position to a majority stake last year in FGS Global, which partly started life as Finsbury. Teneo, backed by CVC Capital Partners, used its leverage to buy Tulchan in 2023. That same year, SEC Newgate sold a £100mn majority stake to Investcorp, while Powerscourt was sold in a £50mn deal to US advisory firm Morrow Sodali, backed by US private equity TPG.

That may mean demanding paymasters. But it also translates to extra firepower in an ongoing war for talent that has moved far beyond hoovering up Oxbridge graduates. Instead, City PR firms are poaching from investment firms, cyber specialists, antitrust practices, US government agencies and AI experts.

Meanwhile, law firm Schillings — founded by Keith Schilling, a libel lawyer with a formidable reputation as “silencer to the stars” — set up its own PR and communications agency to create a one-stop shop.

George Pascoe-Watson, founding partner of the communications arm, said that Schillings realised the benefit of offering PR advice alongside a combination of media lawyers, intelligence analysts and cyber experts to clients who wanted to protect their reputation.

A recent report by the PRCA, the industry’s professional body, found that there are 108,7000 PR and communication professionals in the UK, with 12 per cent of those in corporate public relations, 4 per cent in public affairs and 3 per cent in reputation management. The overall number of PRs has increased by 30 per cent since 2016, when 83,000 professionals were registered by PRCA.

Alongside navigating the dearth in IPOs, PR firms have also experienced corporate enthusiasm for environmental, social and governance policies wax and wane.

One adviser recalls: “A couple of years ago ‘sustainability’ was shoehorned into every annual report. That’s gone. But there are firms that are now having to balance the ‘vibe shift’ and Trump laws in America with investors that still have ESG fund managers and will hold them very much accountable.”

Another said: “It’s not that firms are no longer doing ESG, it’s just they are no longer talking about it. It has become a real tightrope walk to balance between the US government and the NGOs which are also noisy stakeholders.”

Like every other industry, PR firms are also having to adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI and its effects top the list of challenges for the communications industry, according to the PRCA.

“Everyone went from being climate experts to diversity experts to AI experts,” said one corporate adviser.

Some firms, including FGS, have already developed their own in-house AI tool. Others say that they are already extensively using AI to compile daily media reports that mention their clients, scour research and compile reports ahead of pitches and presentations.

Many companies’ in-house PR teams now prefer to use AI tools over expensive external advisers, leading to a healthy debate around whether AI will replace mundane tasks within PR firms themselves — as well as at their corporate clients.

Yet many in the in the trade argue that it is only making human advice more valuable.

“What is weird is that while you might think we could rip out all the cost and fire juniors, that’s not happening,” said one adviser at a PR firm.

“I can say to a CEO: ‘Yes, sure, you can get your AI avatar to write your post on LinkedIn, but I’m the only one who can say if you write that you’ll look like a tit.’”