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Agency Quality

The Public Relations Quality Crisis

Journalists ignore PR pitches. One in four clients fires their agency every year. Both problems trace back to a single issue.

Why are PR agencies held in such low regard?

Take journalists. Nearly half complain that the pitches they receive from agencies rarely match what they cover.1 That these pitches rarely show awareness of the publication or their readers. The result? Most journalists ignore agency pitches.

Journalists who report the pitches they receive are rarely relevant 47% Journalists who say pitches rarely show awareness of their publication or its readers 51% Journalists who rarely or never respond to PR pitches 54%
Source: Muck Rack, State of Journalism 2026. Survey of 1,044 journalists; 897 in the final analysis. Each figure combines the “seldom” and “never” responses to its question.

What about clients? One in four companies fire their PR agency in an average year.2 That is a devastating reflection on PR agency quality.

23%Share of agency clients who fire them each year
Source: O’Dwyer’s, Staff, Client Turnover Up at PR Firms. Roughly one client relationship in four ends each year — across the industry, the entire client base turns over about every four years.

What's going on?

The issue is simple: poor quality

Ask clients what's wrong and three complaints dominate.3 Their agency isn't proactive, misses objectives and churns staff.

That last one is the sleeper.

The cycle of failure

PR agencies lose 23% of their staff every year, double the rate for professional services as a whole.4 They also lose 23% of their clients. Same number, and not a coincidence.

Staff turnover drives client turnover.5
And losing clients drives staff turnover.

Harvard's James Heskett named it the cycle of failure: staff provide lousy service, the client gets angry and fires the agency, the staff are miserable and quit, and whoever inherits the account starts the whole thing over.6

Weak workClient firesthe agencyStaff are miserableand quitA junior replacementinherits the account
The mechanism: each turn of the loop leaves the account with someone less experienced than the last. Nothing in the cycle stops it — it has to be broken from outside.

The cycle of success

Heskett described the way out in the same paper: the cycle of success. Same mechanism, running in reverse. People good at the work like it, people who like it stay, and staying is what makes them better.

Strong workClient staysStaff enjoy the workand stayExpertise compoundson the account
Same loop, opposite direction. Heskett named both cycles in the same 1991 paper.

This isn't a theory. It's measurable.

SPI Research benchmarks 509 professional services firms a year. Among other things, they track how long the average consultant has been at the firm, and line that up against whether the firm delivers its work on time. The pattern doesn't wobble:

Average staff tenureWork delivered on time
Under 3 years66.9%
3 to 5 years72.1%
5 to 10 years75.6%
10 to 20 years81.3%
More than 20 years85.0%

Every single band. More tenure, better work. And it never levels off — the firms with the most experienced people are still climbing at the top of the scale.

Now the other half of that table.

SPI Research, 2026

2% of firms have average employee tenure of 20 years or more.Connect Marketing does.

From the same benchmark of 509 professional services firms and more than 245,000 employees. Deeply experienced teams are not merely uncommon in this business. They are close to nonexistent — which is what makes the bottom row of that table worth so much.4

Connect Marketing's average staff tenure is more than 20 years. Here's what that buys you.

What quality means at Connect Marketing

60%70%80%90%Work delivered on timeAverage staff tenure at the firmUnder 3 years3–5 years5–10 years10–20 yearsMore than 20 years1.9% of firmsConnect Marketing52% of firms
Where we sit. Connect’s average staff tenure places the firm in the highest band SPI measures — the one occupied by fewer than 2% of professional services firms.

Connect lives the cycle of success. Our account managers measure their tenure with Connect in decades, not years. The same is true for clients. And journalists take our calls because they know we won't waste their time.

All of which means we show up at client meetings with a proactive plan. You don't need to tell us what to do. We get things done. We hit our KPIs. Why? Because we've been doing this for decades and we love what we do.

What this means for you

Hiring a PR agency is a substantial investment in both money and time. Nobody wants to repeat the process every two years. The key is to make sure your agency can successfully answer these five questions.

  1. What is your average client tenure?

    A number, not a story about one client you've had forever.

  2. What is your average staff tenure?

    Compare the answer to the table above.

  3. How much of the senior partner's time will be spent working on my account versus managing junior staff?

    Both are legitimate. Only one is what you're being sold.

  4. How long has each of the staff assigned to my account been working in PR?

    Ask for names and years, not titles.

  5. How much experience does your agency — and the staff on my account — have in my specific industry?

    This is the one journalists notice first.

Find out where you actually stand.

We’ll analyze a full year of your coverage against your competitors’ — what’s working, where you’re losing ground, and what we’d do about it. No charge, and no obligation to hire anyone.

Request your analysis → Read: AI Transformation →

References

  1. State of Journalism 2026. Muck Rack, March 2026. Survey of 1,044 journalists fielded January 30 – March 2, 2026; 897 responses in the final analysis.
  2. Staff, Client Turnover Up at PR Firms. O'Dwyer's.
  3. The Impact of the Agency Selection Process on Public Relations Programs & Outcomes. RFP Associates, CommunicationsMatch and Researchscape International, with the support of the Institute for Public Relations, July 2019. Survey of 89 senior communications executives at Fortune 1000 corporations and large organizations.
  4. 2026 Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark, 19th edition. Service Performance Insight (SPI Research), February 2026. Survey of 509 professional services organizations representing more than 245,000 employees.
  5. Kumar, N., & Yakhlef, A. "Managing business-to-business relationships under conditions of employee attrition: A transparency approach." Industrial Marketing Management 56 (2016), 143–155.
  6. Schlesinger, L. A., & Heskett, J. L. "Breaking the Cycle of Failure in Services." Sloan Management Review 32, no. 3 (Spring 1991), 17–28.