When in-house wins.
An in-house PR person knows the business in a way no agency ever will. They sit near the data, the product roadmap and the spokespeople; they can get a quote approved in an hour and spot a story in a corridor conversation. For organisations with constant communication needs, press office queries, internal comms, investor updates and partnerships, an employed generalist is the sensible backbone.
In-house also wins on institutional memory. Agencies rotate staff; your own person accumulates context that compounds year after year. If your PR need is broad, steady and reputation-shaped, hire.
When an agency wins.
Campaigns are a different job from a press office. Earning coverage month after month takes ideation at volume, data analysis, writing, and above all daily pitching, because knowing what a news desk wants right now is a perishable skill. An agency pitches journalists every working day across many sectors; an in-house team of one pitches occasionally, and it shows in the hit rate.
Agencies also bring range: an angle that worked in one category can often be rebuilt for another, and a bank of warm journalist relationships transfers across clients in ways one brand could never justify building alone. And commercially, a retainer can be switched off; a salary cannot.
The cost comparison, honestly.
Run the in-house vs agency PR sums properly and they are closer than either side claims. A capable digital PR specialist costs a full salary plus employer costs, plus media databases, monitoring tools and data resources, plus the months they take to reach speed. That total usually lands well above an entry-level retainer, and you still have one person's ideas, one person's contacts and a gap whenever they are on holiday or leave.
Against that, our retained campaigns start from £2,750 per month and come with the whole bench. The fair caveat: an employee does far more than campaigns. If what you need is a press office, the comparison is not like for like, and an agency is not the answer.
Hybrid models that actually work.
Most in-house vs agency PR debates resolve into a hybrid, because the strongest setups are rarely pure. Common patterns:
- In-house owns strategy, brand voice and sign-off; the agency owns campaigns and journalist outreach
- A generalist handles the press office; the agency delivers the big quarterly swings
- The agency builds the programme and its processes, then trains an in-house hire to run parts of it
The division that fails is the vague one, where both sides half-own media relationships and neither owns results. Decide who pitches, who approves and who reports before anyone starts.
Questions to ask before hiring either.
For an agency: who exactly will write and pitch our work, what coverage have those people earned recently, how do you measure and report, what happens when a campaign flops, and who keeps the media contacts if we part ways? For a hire: have you personally pitched news desks in the last year, can you show coverage you earned yourself, and how will you generate story ideas without an agency's bench around you?
The answers matter less than the flinch. Anyone comfortable with those questions, employee or agency, is probably safe to work with.