2024 Review: The Year's Top Longreads

(MENAFN- PRovoke) PRovoke Media's most popular longreads of 2024 captured many of the biggest themes and issues for global communications leaders. Our coverage from Cannes and Davos features strongly, as do analyses of PRovoke media research studies and interviews with PR agency leaders.

From the future direction of earned creativity, to AI, to the increasing pressures on corporate affairs chiefs, the impact of geopolitics and the DEI/ESG backlash, our most well-read and best analyses and features combine to form an invaluable overview of the issues that dominated public relations thinking in 2024.

It is worth noting that our longreads get traction ahead of most of our top news articles, which we ranked here as part of our 2024 review, alongside the best thought leadership of the year, top 10 podcasts , and our M&A review .

1.
Creativity in PR study: welcome to the earned era
The ninth edition of our popular annual Creativity in PR study, published right back at the start of 2024, reported that 57%
of PR firms say earned media has become more important in the current economic climate, but more than half (53%) think that their agencies are not viewed as the best option by clients to lead earned-first creative ideas. The 2023 study analysed here was co-authored by PRovoke Media and Now Go Create, in partnership with
FleishmanHillard, based on a survey of more than 200 agency and in-house executives from across the world, and explores the sector's creative evolution at a time of immense competitive pressure from other disciplines.

2.
PR finally cracks the Cannes Lions
The theme of creativity continued. It was a landmark year at the Cannes Lions, with Golin becoming the first PR agency to win the PR Lions Grand Prix. Paul Holmes authored two pieces on Cannes that made the best longreads list, the first being an account of our annual CEO roundtable on the Croisette , looking at whether PR has finally cracked the code in Cannes. In a discussion that ranged from creativity to impact, from AI to EQ, PR agency leaders Gail Heimann (Weber Shandwick), Matt Neale (Golin), Diana Littman (MSL), Corey duBrowa (Burson), Mike Doyle (Ketchum), Richard Edelman and Jillian Janaczek (Porter Novelli) celebrated success in this year's competition and looked to the future.

The second popular Cannes-focused longread was this analysis of the“Michael CeraVe” campaign, developed by Ogilvy PR for L'Oréal's CeraVe brand, which
won the Grand Prix
in Social & Influencer In recent years, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity has been celebrating purpose-driven campaigns almost to the exclusion of all other work. But the 2024 edition of Cannes was dominated by a different kind of creative output, with a good number of Grand Prix winners instead tapping into“cultural moments”, with an emphasis on fun rather than social significance. Paul Holmes argues that the CeraVe campaign provided a blueprint for a new approach to PR-led marketing in an earned-first world, outlining six ways that it showed marketers a possible future, from brief to impact.

3.
Reflections from Davos
Another major event in the calendar, the World Economic Forum in Davos, also yielded two of our most popular longreads. The first was a piece on Davos lessons from global comms leaders , an account of a roundtable with communications chiefs from major companies around the world, hosted by IBM, which PRovoke Media partnered with Weber Shandwick and Page to convene. The discussion looked at how, despite a theme of "Rebuilding Trust", last year's World Economic Forum found many corporates on the back foot, wary of the many reputation risks that have multiplied during a volatile economic and political period. Davos has long touted its ability to bring business, government and civil society together, but that nexus becomes increasingly fraught as stakeholder capitalism finds itself imperilled by anti-woke forces and geographic turbulence. The leaders found there is no escaping the significant implications that these trends have for the communications function – not least a decline in corporate activism – colliding with a moment of transformation in terms of AI-fuelled disruption and disinformation.

In the second Davos longread, Arun Sudhaman covered four key takeaways for communicators from the event, sounding out industry figures to come up with the themes that resonated most among the many communications and marketing leaders who made the pilgrimage to the mountains, again focusing on AI, disinformation, culture wars and geopolitics.

4.
The Burson merger
Two of our most popular longreads – mirrored by our top news stories and podcasts of the year – focused on the Burson merger early in 2024. The first in-depth analysis, Burson's welcome return should not overshadow merger risks , came immediately after the news broke in January that WPP would be carrying out the largest agency merger in PR history by combining BCW and Hill & Knowlton. Arun Sudhaman delved into the strategic rationale and industry implications behind WPP's decision. Against a backdrop of ongoing consolidation in the PR industry, the analysis looked at how the merger fit into WPP CEO Mark Read's broader simplification strategy, aimed at reducing costs and complexity. It highlighted the challenges posed by blending two strong agency cultures and the potential impact on talent retention, innovation, and client relationships. The piece also contrasted the merger with past industry consolidations, discussing whether the scale and efficiencies gained from such moves can truly drive growth and adapt to the evolving demands of the PR landscape, particularly in the AI era.

One month later, Arun Sudhaman sat down with Burson CEO Corey duBrowa and chairman AnnaMaria DeSalva to talk through change management challenges, benefits of scale and "the opportunity of a lifetime". Their conversation also covered the impact on talent – and indeed there have since been redundancies due to overlapping roles across the two agency brands – as well as how the success of the merger would be evaluated.

5.
A D-AI-alogue: what the leading edge of AI in PR looks like
By August last year, there had been a good 18 months of discussion about how artificial intelligence was changing the way public relations professionals operate. Many believed AI was still not“ready for primetime,” while others were most concerned about the automation of traditionally labor-intensive tasks such as writing and reporting, and others focusing on AI's creative capabilities. But forward-thinking firms were already deploying AI in a strategic role that impacts planning and strategy, message development and more, all the way through to measurement and evaluation. And it uncovered some basic themes regarding AI as a tool for better, smarter PR rather than a labor-saving device, and especially the need to combine AI with good old-fashioned human intelligence. For this piece, Paul Holmes invited representatives of six firms on the leading edge of AI usage to talk about how AI is already impacting corporate communications.

6.
2024 agency rankings: global PR industry growth stalls amid challenging conditions
This longread from May covered the global PR industry's modest growth in 2023 of just 0.7%, based on PRovoke Media's annual Global Top 250 ranking , which showed the world's top PR firms had combined fee income in 2023 of $17.3 billion. Arun Sudhaman's analysis looked at the factors behind this sluggish performance, including downturns in the tech and healthcare sectors, client caution amid geopolitical volatility, and economic uncertainty. It also highlighted how the Top 10 PR firms, particularly those under holding groups, struggled with a 4% decline in revenue, reflecting broader industry challenges. The research also emphasized the contrasting success of midsize and independent firms, which outpaced their larger, publicly-held counterparts. Despite some firms expanding through mergers and acquisitions, the overall picture pointed to a rearrangement of market share rather than a genuine increase in communications spending.

7.
Agency CEO interviews
As well as the interviews with Burson chiefs Corey duBrowa and AnnaMaria DeSalva, and the Cannes CEO roundtable, both featured above, two other conversations with PR agency leaders were among our most popular longreads of 2024. In May, Omnicom PR Group chief executive Chris Foster sat down with Arun Sudhaman to talk about his three year tenure to date, including his efforts to reposition OPRG as much more than financial apparatus, and his thoughts on mergers, leadership, DEI, AI and more. And in March, Paul Holmes' conversation with Real Chemistry CEO Shankar Narayanan – part of the Disruptors series of interviews with disruptive independent agency leaders – looked at how how the firm has grown into a very different looking top 10 global player.

8. Beyond PR girls: how women have navigated challenges and changes over 25 years
It's been quite the quarter century for women working in public relations. In March, to mark International Women's Day, I looked back at my 25 years of writing about PR and how the industry has changed for women in that time, as a tribute to how women in PR have navigated and overcome challenges and forged positive change – and as a reflection of how far we still have to go to achieve equality, equity and balance in a fast-paced and rapidly-evolving industry. The piece looked at a wide range of areas, including how taboos around speaking about women and working mothers' lived experiences have been broken over recent years, as well as misogyny, female leadership, workplace flexibility, mentoring, and the female pay gap.

9. Headed for a crisis? Corporate culture can provide early warning
In March, Paul Holmes wrote this longread about the difference between core values and corporate culture, and the chasm that can exist between stated values and real-world culture in many high-flying organizations. He reflected on high-profile 21st century corporate crises including Enron, and said the vast majority of crises-certainly those crises that can do lasting damage to the organization-stem from cultural misalignment. The feature also covered a report by an independent panel convened by the Federal Aviation Administration, which found a "disconnect between Boeing's senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture." Holmes urged communicators to ask three questions of employees: do you understand our values?; do you believe the company management lives these values?; and do you personally feel empowered to make decisions based on these values?

10.
Anti-wokeism drives down DEI comms business
In this piece from March, Diana Marszalek looked at how the rise in“anti-wokeism” is affecting communicators. With companies trying to dodge the anti-woke bullet, demand for DEI comms support is down, putting the squeeze on agencies - many of which have spent nearly four years bulking up those services. The PR leaders she spoke to said they were feeling the pinch, after a year in which business leaders have scaled back addressing DEI publicly due factors such as the US Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action ruling, anti-wokeism and election year politics. Marszalek found the phenomenon is affecting agencies of all sizes, but firms that depend on companies needing their help with diversity initiatives for their livelihoods - often minority owned - are in danger of losing ground, putting the comms industry at risk of seeing a reversal in its own advancements in making PR more diverse.

MENAFN10012025000219011063ID1109077777