PR firms consider passage to India - Sunday Herald

Back from a Diwali weekend trip where I got all excited about paragliding, stood on tiptoes etc and resolved to overcome my fear and try and learn it next time, I am back in Mumbai - and I found nice food for thought and dark mutterings waiting for me.

The topic that never dies is back - can PR be outsourced to India? Elizabeth Albrycht thinks its definitely within the realm of possibility. Now the Sunday Herald has published an article by Steven Vass: PR firms consider passage to India

But then I also found another article by him with the same dateline there: Offshore threat to PR work met with ridicule

Salient points:

1. There are dark mutterings at the high tables of PR about offshoring...

2. The industry is bitterly divided on whether it is possible or not.

3. Several big PR companies have a presence in India - Weber Shandwick, Burton Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton. Edelman recently acquired Mumbai-based R&P Management Communications.

4. Simon Quarendon, secretary general of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), which represents PR consultants in 24 countries including the UK, believes that the wheels are in motion.

5. Anne Gregory, the president of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), says: “I think some of the elements of practical PR are becoming commoditised and therefore price sensitive..." ...this kind of work accounts for 25% to 30% of industry billings in the UK, and that much of it could have relocated over the next few years.

6. If some of the agency side of PR work is set to follow suit, the next question is who might move first. Hill & Knowlton is seen as a possibility. Weber Shandwick, the number one PR company in India, is another.

Those, of course, are the sensational points I have gleaned. There are many more less sensational, but important points of veiw within the article. Read it and mutter darkly at your high tables... :)