BNC and PMK/HBH to Merge

Fascinating things I stumble upon online. The firms BNC and PMK/HBH have merged creating the largest public relations firm focused on entertainment. The links tell the story:
http://bit.ly/6OHgcG and http://bit.ly/6LTIbm

The blog article below really goes into detail and calls the merger:

"A nuclear explosion has occurred in the world of Hollywood public relations, atomizing the once-invincible PMK/HBH in the space of two short days."

I imagine that this is a bit of hyperbole but the articles and blog do make some interesting points.

They note that providing pr services to celebrity clients is not exactly lucrative. Although a celebrity can pay a pr firm $4000 to $6000 a month, a corporate client can pay as much as $100,000 a month.

A better strategy, hence, is to combine celebrity representation with corporate clients.

A firm can leverage the celebrity clients it has to win corporate clients.

For example, a firm that represents Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Lopez can argue to a potential corporate client: Hire us and not only we will represent you, we can guarantee Ms. Jolie and Lopez at some of your events or in some of your publicity materials.

It will be interesting to see if the new PMK/HBK can pull this off. The "nuclear" blog post above doesn't think so but I would give it 2 years and see what happens. In my experience, firms merge and people leave.

But if you have a good strategy, you can emerge much stronger. Hopefully, this is what happens at this new firm because it will be fascinating to see whether this experiment actually works.