Segment earned BRL 4.9 billion last year and should renew record this year, evaluates Daniel Bruin, President of Abracom
the president of abracom (Brazilian Association of Communication Agencies), Daniel Bruin, 60 years old, estimates that the market for public relations and advisory agencies should grow from 15% to 20% in 2023. Last year, the sector earned BRL 4.9 billion, a record, according to the Corporate Communication Yearbook.
“It is very significant. Brazil is one of the most sophisticated countries in terms of communication in the world”Bruin said to Power360.
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The corporate communication market is led by companies such as FSB It is In Presswith revenues of R$419 million and R$266 million in 2022, respectively.
According to Bruin, the sector has been expanding services, mainly in the area of digital communication: “Communication agencies took the lead in providing this type of service. Today it already means 30% to 40% of our business”.
“We produce more content than all media outlets in Brazil. We produce an insane amount of content daily for more than 2,000 clients. We have 18,000 people every day, generating a very large amount”.
The number of professionals employed by PR and advisory agencies jumped 10.14% in 2022. Of the total number of employees, 51.8% are trained in journalism, followed by public relations (12%), advertising or marketing (7.6% ) and design (7.6%).
Read excerpts from the interview below:
Poder360: we published a report showing that public relations and advisory agencies earned BRL 4.9 billion in Brazil in 2022, an increase of 31.4% compared to the previous year. Was 2022 a good year for the sector?
Daniel Bruin: 2022 was a year in which we recovered losses from the previous 2 years due to the covid pandemic. I think that Brazil, in general, spent a long time with dammed investments. Last year –although it was the best year for us in the last 10 years– we have to wait a little bit to make a correct reading. This growth is influenced by a repressed demand. But, without a doubt, the value of our market today, of almost R$ 5 billion that the industry moves and employs more than 18,000 people, it is not possible to deny that we are a relevant sector in the economy and in the communication sector. We grew a lot and became significant in this scenario.
What drove this growth? Where do most of the revenues come from?
All those services that were linked to movements of outdoor consumption, launch of new products, obviously, were postponed. We didn’t have such a big drop as perhaps advertising did because companies maintained the need to continue to relate to their audiences. In some cases, we have maintained or even increased demand for services such as crisis management and customer relationship programs, at a time when companies’ traditional customer relationship channels were being affected.
In general, this part of open relationships with consumers has a greater weight. This did not cause the market to shrink, but to grow less than it could. Last year we recovered a little this demand. This year we will grow again, perhaps not at the same volume as last year, but we will maintain an interesting pace of growth.
What to expect from next year? Do you have any projections to share?
This year, from what we have seen so far, we are working with a figure of 15% to 20%, which is quite significant if we consider GDP growth, for example. We have continued to grow at double digits for a long time.
It is growth above inflation, a real increase. Where is this year’s growth coming from?
In recent years, agencies have become more professional. They began to offer a much wider range of services. It’s not that we had a boom in the number of customers overnight. This base barely increased much. What really increased was the range of offers in our sector.
Before, if we were to look back 8 to 10 years, the sector was very focused on the production of content, on the relationship with the media – which meant 80% to 90% of the business.
We had the advancement of digital communication. Communication agencies took the lead in providing this type of service. Today it already means 30% to 40% of our business: digital communication, social networks, influencer marketing, production of customized content, provision of relationship services with other audiences, events, internal communication. The market has become very sophisticated. Today, a good-sized agency certainly offers more than 30 types of service. This also reflects on the type of professional that works at this agency and had to follow this evolution.
There was a movement of large agencies buying smaller ones – many specializing in data management. Will this trend continue?
Over the past 3 years, we’ve been getting into data management analytics with a lot of appetite. This is the new frontier. We’ve seen big companies in our industry buying other companies in technology, consumer data, insights. I think this will continue.
Communication agencies, if you are going to do a more objective analysis, we produce more content today than practically all media outlets in Brazil. We produce an insane amount of content daily for more than 2,000 clients. We have 18 thousand people every day, generating a very large amount of content. I like to say that the big agencies, a good part of the associates here at Abracom, have more journalists than the communication vehicles themselves. We have agencies that have 300 to 400 people working – not all journalists.
The focus now is on attracting talent from the technology, management and data analysis areas, in the acquisition of companies in this sector. I think it will be the new growth frontier for our segment. Perhaps in the next 4 to 5 years this will mean a very reasonable share of the sector’s revenue.
With the cooling of the pandemic, is the sector maintaining the hybrid work regime?
We are facing the same dilemma that most companies in Brazil and around the world have been facing. There was, during the pandemic, the adoption of hybrid work, preserving some characteristics. Our work has its own dynamics, more subjective, intellectual, it is not a more factory work, which favors you to do this work anywhere.
It is obvious that there is a need to preserve the company’s culture, to have a coexistence, an exchange of ideas. We have been working in groups here to discuss this issue. This return is being done very carefully, with a lot of planning. But it’s obvious to us that it’s not going to be like before.
What is the challenge for corporate communication in communicating with audiences on very different platforms? Today, the younger generation deals a lot with TikTok, which has a different language than YouTube, for example.
I usually say: in our market nobody dies of boredom because it reinvents itself every week. In fact, for a few years now, we have observed a phenomenon that is influencers, the emergence of content generators outside the traditional system that we knew from traditional media. Before it was a much more predictable media, it followed patterns. Today we live with a variety of people generating content at all times, speaking to audiences that, depending on the influencer, is greater than that of any vehicle – it even competes with TV. We had to adapt to understand who these new agents are, know how to speak their language, what content they need, bring the content of customers to them. But it was a whole cultural adaptation.
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This is where the great transformation and the great opportunity for growth in the sector are coming from.
Are companies realizing this?
Companies are noticing. If you analyze the investments made by communication companies in recent years, a good part migrated to other channels, other types of media. Today, we no longer think about a communication campaign focused only on the traditional media: putting an advertisement on television, an advertisement in the newspaper and that’s it. Maybe that’s even the smallest part. Today, you have to think first about which audience you want to reach, the generators of the content that will reach them, they are not always the big names. Today we have sector influencers with an audience of 5 to 6 million people – with much greater loyalty.
Businesses have noticed this change. esare directing their investments to make this type of communication. That’s where our great opportunity comes in.
There has been a migration of investment from traditional media –which includes traditional journalism– to these new media. What is the weight of traditional journalism when a company is going to decide whether to invest or not?
As a journalist, I consider that the great role of journalism, in addition to producing good quality content, is to be the tipper of the balance. The information produced by the traditional media is reliable information. It is the great source from which all others derive. Today there is a very big fight that belongs to our sector and other sectors against fake news and I think it involves a little bit of us preserving the role of the traditional media as a reliable source.
I think everyone has their role. Perhaps traditional media is no longer the sounding board it was when it was pretty much all it was. Today she shares this role with influencers, with independent content producers, with the companies’ own channels. But this role of giving credibility, of being the source of real and safe information, that is forever. I think companies have to continue to understand this – direct investments to traditional media as well. The dimensions, the proportions have changed. The picture never changes abruptly from day to night. The economy and communication itself will always go through a process of accommodation.
Even with the emergence of new actors, the day to day makes us settle down. Today, the role of traditional media is preserved, of course. It needs investment because we cannot do without traditional media. It has a place for everyone. We earned almost BRL 5 billion last year. It is a market that we calculate for communication at R$ 35 to R$ 40 billion. It’s very significant. Brazil is one of the most sophisticated countries in terms of communication in the world. That’s not me talking. These are all the international forums that Abracom participates in.
We will continue to grow – all of us – living with technology. It has been proven that technology is not a threat to anyone. Technology is a driving force that we have to use properly to keep growing.
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