By Tim Fordham-Moss
WixHill
It would be cool to know how Brexit will affect the PR industry in the UK - though at the moment no industry has any real knowledge of how Brexit may affect their business - because until the details of the eventual trading relationship are negotiated and agreed, no-one knows quite what the parameters of any trade across our new borders will be.
General Data Protection Regulations - introduced across the EU in 2018 - put forward new, protective laws relating to the storage, use and sharing of e-mail addresses and other personal data, a relatively complicated piece of new compliance work for agencies who mail newsletters, hold databases, collate new emails from promotional activities and the like. For WixHill, compliance to these new rules was expensive more in time than money. However, GDPR is an EU ruling, so after 31st December this year, those rules may disappear - or they may not, or they may be changed. We simply don’t know.
Brexit won’t necessarily narrow our market, or impede working for companies based in EU countries but it will alter how we can interact with them - financially, legally and, possibly, professionally. And until such agreements have been negotiated, agreed and made public, exactly how Brexit will affect this country’s ability to trade with our former EU partners remains a bit of a mystery.
One of our major clients is French jam brand, Bonne Maman. If there are tariffs imposed on the import of jam into the UK then this will mean either an increase in the retail price, or a decrease in the company’s margins if they decide to bear the costs internally. Either way, it could get difficult for us. Or the tariffs on jam imports could be set at zero - in which case, nothing much changes.
There could be barriers to travel by way of new visa requirements which could cause a headache for our travel clients, there will be barriers to free movement and cross-border employment. And the exchange rate hasn’t been helping in recent years as the pound continues to lose value, or at least trade low.
How Brexit will affect the big agencies with multiple offices across the EU and shared international clients - is also unclear and luckily no longer my problem.