Why PR must grow up financially

For decades, Public Relations (PR) leaders have operated under a convenient corporate immunity cloak. When asked to account for huge budgets, the standard defense is rolled out: “PR builds long-term brand equity; its true value cannot be measured in quarterly financial cycles.” 

Really? While PR managers plead for patience, they simultaneously consume short-term, high-velocity cash. In recent times, PR has aggressively snatched influencer marketing away from marketing departments. Today, PR budgets pay premium retainer fees to top-tier mega-influencers who charge an arm and a leg.

This creates a glaring corporate governance crisis. Firms cannot fund immediate, high-cap operations with vague, long-term promises. When shareholders demand their quarterly dividend yields, a board cannot tell them to wait three years because the PR campaign is still building “sentiments.” It is time for PR to grow up legally and financially.

Note that this mismatch is a classic agency problem in corporate finance. Under agency theory, executives (agents) must align resource utilisation with the explicit goals of the shareholders (principals). When PR leaders hide behind information asymmetry, refusing to attach hard numbers to their campaigns, they misalign themselves with the business.

[Short-Term Capital Outflow] —> (PR / Influencer Budgets) —> [Delayed / Vague Brand Metrics]

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v

[Immediate Dividend Demands] <— (Shareholders & CFOs) <— [Financial Friction Point] 

Okay. Let us state it as bluntly as possible to the extent it hurts: If “advertising buys visibility and PR earns it,” then PR must prove its earned value on the balance sheet. Marketing departments have long submitted to rigorous Return on Investment (ROI) metrics, tracking customer acquisition costs (CAC) and digital conversions.

By taking over influencer marketing, for instance, a field driven by immediate digital traffic and conversions, PR has forfeited its right to claim immunity from short-term accountability.

Mapping the cognitive dissonance

To understand how deep this disconnect goes, consider the operational friction between the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the PR Director. They do not speak the same language, neither do they share the same timeline:

This operational mismatch cannot survive the current Nigerian economic climate, not even any clime in the world. When financials are tight, every single kobo pulled out of the corporate treasury must have a clear, time-bound pathway to value realisation.

To stop FMCG clients from viewing PR as a cost centre, for instance, PR has to move past basic impressions and tie its campaigns directly to the retail value chain. Let us look at this in two ways: Digital attribution and physical trade push.

First, on the digital side, when we deploy influencer campaigns or experiential activations, we shouldn’t just measure likes. We must introduce exclusive, trackable promo codes or UTM attribution links tied to the client’s e-commerce platform or quick-commerce partners like Chowdeck or Glovo in Nigeria. This allows the CFO to see exactly how much digital traffic is converted into direct sales volume during the campaign window. Second, and most importantly for the Nigerian market, is regional distributor pull-through. When we launch an experiential PR activation in a key market tier, say, Balogun in Lagos or Main Market in Onitsha, both in Nigeria, our PR messaging must drive consumer foot traffic to local retail points. At Champion Breweries Plc, I learnt that if consumers start aggressively demanding a product because of a hyper-local PR buzz, open-market retailers are forced to restock. This creates a powerful demand pull that clears inventory for the regional distributors. We can measure this by auditing the client’s secondary sales data in that region 14 to 30 days post-activation, proving that our PR campaign directly accelerated product off-take.

For corporate and tech clients, revenue isn’t tracked in daily retail baskets, it is tracked in institutional trust, shortened sales cycles, and capital injection. When it comes to closing funding rounds, venture capitalists and private equity firms perform deep digital due diligence. If a tech founder is pitching investors but has no footprint in tier-1 global or local business media (like BUSINESS AM, TechCabal, BusinessDay, or Bloomberg Africa), it signals high risk. By executing a targeted thought leadership strategy, such as data-backed op-eds on industry whitepapers, we position the founder as a market authority. This media validation de-risks the investment, builds institutional trust, and directly helps the founder close the round faster.

When it comes to B2B enterprise clients, the sales cycle in Nigeria is notoriously long because corporate buyers are risk-averse. A tech startup trying to sell a ₦50 million SaaS platform to a bank or a conglomerate faces massive scepticism. When we secure strategic media placements highlighting their security infrastructure, compliance, or case studies of successful deployments, we build a ‘trust shield.’ When the startup’s sales team goes into the boardroom, the client’s decision-makers have already read about them. This strategic PR eliminates scepticism, handles objections before they are raised, and dramatically shortens the enterprise sales cycle from nine months to three months, saving the company millions in sales overhead and unlocking B2B revenue much faster.

This is exactly why an account director with a client-side commercial background is valuable to an agency. When a campaign fails to convert despite great PR metrics, a traditional agency gets defensive and points fingers. Having sat in the corporate boardroom at Champion Breweries, I’d take a collaborative, diagnostic approach instead. If the PR engine is firing, meaning awareness is high, sentiment is positive, and foot traffic is moving but sales are flat, it means there is a breakdown in the conversion funnel. I would immediately approach the client’s C-suite, not with excuses, but with data-driven diagnostics across three pillars: 

1. The distribution audit: I will look at the availability index. If our experiential PR creates heavy consumer demand in Ikeja, but the client’s route-to-market team has not supplied the supermarkets or open-market retailers in Ikeja, PR cannot fix that. I will then share our regional engagement data with their Sales Director to help them realign their distribution trucks.

2. The product/pricing reality check: If consumer feedback data from our influencer campaigns shows that people are trying the product once but complaining about the taste, packaging, or a sudden price hike, I will compile this raw sentiment analysis for their Brand and R&D teams. PR can get a consumer to buy a product once, but product quality dictates the repeat purchase that the CFO relies on. 

3. The tech/UX funnel: For tech clients for instance, if our thought leadership drives thousands of visitors to their landing page via our UTM links, but the sign-up process drops off because the payment gateway is broken or the app crashes, that is a Product Engineering issue. I will then share the traffic-to-drop-off conversion ratio with their CTO. 

By presenting these data, we shift the conversation from ‘PR failed’ to ‘PR exposed a bottleneck in your operations.’ This repositions our agency as a trusted business consultancy rather than just a vendor, ensuring the C-suite continues to value and fund our retainers.

With this little exercise, have we succeeded in dethroning the “Long-Term” Excuse? Oh…very yes. We have. So? PR must grow up financially. 

To survive corporate scrutiny, PR must establish a standardized, time-bound framework for value depreciation and asset realization. 

If a campaign requires millions in upfront cash, PR leaders must provide proxy financial metrics. This means tracking how earned media directly reduces customer acquisition costs, or how influencer engagements shorten the sales lifecycle, etc.

The cheese has moved. PR can no longer function as an insulated cost centre protected by corporate jargon. If Public Relations wants a seat at the executive table, it must accept the financial discipline that comes with it. 

Stop demanding immediate cash for unmeasurable, long-term results. Grow up, learn the language of the balance sheet, and justify your budget, or step aside and let traditional marketing and advertising bring in the numbers.

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QUEEN NWABUEZE