This year has been like a rollercoaster: Nikhil Dey, Executive Director, Adfactors PR

It’s time to review the most significant industry developments as 2022 draws to a close. Adgully is reviewing the year 2022 for the M&E, advertising, digital, marketing, PR and communications, along with leading names in the industry as part of our annual Rewind series.

Recapping the year 2022, Nikhil Dey, Executive Director- Adfactors PR, shares his insightful feedback for the PR industry, and highlights some key trends and developments.

He also emphasised the importance of safe space to work in an organisation for its employees.

The year 2022 for PR & marketing communications

This year has been like a rollercoaster; one moment it is filled with exhilaration and excitement and then next its fear and frenzy, full of highs and lows, and yet it draws  close to  adrenaline pumping and that is always a good thing. The firms that have ridden the rollercoaster well are those who have invested in building capacity the year before. As the market opened up, they were quick out of the gates and able to grab onto the handrail of opportunity with both hands and that has made the difference. Agility and flexibility have been huge differentiators, and will continue to be critical success factors.

Key trends and developments in PR

Today companies are in a hurry to get back to the way things used to be. Pent-up demand when released needs to be captured. Hence, there seems to be a huge demand to deliver business impact. Vanity metrics don’t work anymore. Impact on the bottom-line and demonstrating the value of communication is critical. Demonstrating how reputation and trust intersect with stakeholders voting with their wallets is the key to success. The implication of this is the need to stay close to the changing business priorities month by month. The pandemic has focused everyone on the short to medium term and the need to keep pivoting to find new solutions to problems never seen before. If PR can stay close to the problem or opportunity of the month, it will be a true partner to the business it supports.

Overall performance of Adfactors in 2022
Adfactors marked its 25^th year of delivering “knowledge driven communications” and we put the building blocks of success for 2022 into place in the year before. We did a number of things that others did not. Two critical pieces of this puzzle were people and practices.

People: We did not allow a single job to be jeopardised and therefore created a psychologically safe space for our team to work. This enabled them to put all their energies into serving clients, rather than worrying about saving their jobs. Creating a fearless team, inspires creative work and client centricity. This was one big thing that we did that helped us grow exponentially in 2022. We also hired approximately 150 people from campus in both 2021 and 2022, and created a 9 month induction and orientation program that ensured we had fresh energetic minds ready to take on the surge of work that came our way. In addition, we also brought in a number of senior practitioners to strengthen the depth of our leadership team.

Practices: We also reimagined our service offering and launched a number of new practices and strengthened existing ones. For example, the mobility practice, the new energy practice, the ESG and social impact practice, health & wellness, new economy, digital reputation and frontier tech were other areas absolutely in tune with emerging market needs. The BFSI, corporate reputation, media relations, deep India access, crisis and issues work continue to be a huge need and that holds strong as well.