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Speaking from experience at Edelman, the main difference for strategists and creatives at PR firms is that they are treated as add-ons, not core.
This applies to how they are scoped (as minimally as possible) and how they are treated (resources versus trusted or equal partners at the table).
At agencies, the strategy is an essential guardrail. At Edelman, it was frequently forgotten.
This is all 100% true as well!!
The client assignments tend to be brand activations or calendar moments vs. bigger platform ideas. You also sometimes have to work from a creative agency's platform and figure out the earned way into the assignment. But earned briefs are fun because they require cultural tension and figuring out what's going to pull people into a conversation versus pushing a message out. The timelines are bananas though.
Lots of ex creative agency folks at Edelman if you wanna try DMing some of them
I did a few years at big PR shops (incl Weber Shandwick) and the biggest difference to me was that 1) moving outside of the expected PR deliverables was a challenge for agency and client, and that 2) most people in PR resent the idea that they’re not the strategic partner AND the creative partner.
If you’ve ever been frustrated in a creative agency by an account person trying to dictate the strategy or the idea… that was literally every day and every project during my time in PR.
Yikes. Have heard similar sentiment but this sounds cranked up to 11
I’ve worked at Edelman and Ketchum both before and after working at traditional creative shops - the above is accurate to my experience as well. At the PR firms we were almost always working off a brand platform from another agency and our role was to amplify that through earned comms or were pulled into specific activations, and a lot of the time we were looking to steal share from the brand agencies - that made for fun ideas (that never saw the light of day). I much prefer creative shops where you control the narrative and actually define the brand vs the comms