A slightly different and shorter podcast today to briefly talk about Agency proof points, PR agency growth rates and The PRmoment Awards early entry deadline is this Friday 13 December

Here's a brief summary of the themes of this show:

I've just finished some analysis of the top 100 agencies in the UK looking at the number of full-time employees they have.

The source was LinkedIn, so it's not a fool proof measure, but it gives a decent indication of the employee hiring growth and decline of UK agencies and one top line stat is that of the 100 largest agencies in the UK, the average full-time employee growth over the last 12 months is 2.5%.

This, in a UK PR market that by and large seems to be picking up.

I've asked a handful of agency founders and CEOs in the last month or so, if during this golden quarter, on a score of 1-10, if 5 was normal, where are we at at the moment from a new business/pitch busyness perspective.

PR agency CEOs and the like seem to put PR on a score of 5/6 currently.

This time last year they'd put us PR's pitching busyness barometer at a score of 2/3. So relatively speaking, we're on the up!

As ever, hanks so much to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors the PRCA.

A PRmoment Award is a proof point your work to clients. And proof points are really important for PR agencies and indeed in-house PR teams.

If you're thinking of entering the PRmoment Awards, the early entry deadline is on the 13th of December, and the final entry deadline is on the 17th of January.

If you are a regular listener of this podcast, and don't enter already, go on, take the jump and enter the awards - join many of your peers.

It's also probably worth mentioning at this point that we offer an excellent feedback loop for anyone who doesn't make the shortlist. More details about how this works can be viewed on the PRmoment Awards microsite - but I'd argue this functionality alone makes entering the PRmoment Awards a uniquely useful benchmarking exercise for the quality of your work