By Mark Macias

We aren’t even in the 4th quarter yet, but 2016 has already been a great year for Macias PR.

Finance Monthly just selected Macias PR as the 2016 “Financial PR Firm of the Year – USA.” We are the only public relations firm in the USA honored with this award, and recognized for the second year in a row.

So how did we get it?

I like to say that this isn’t some made up PR award given by other publicists. This award was given by the people who matter most in the world of PR – journalists, researchers and clients. Without clients, we don’t have a business; without journalists, we don’t have media placements; without researchers, in-depth reporting doesn’t exist. All of these people were part of the selection process in naming Macias PR the firm of the year.

How Finance Monthly Identified the PR Firm of the Year

Researchers with Finance Monthly applied a 10-point criterion in selecting the best firms in legal, accounting, public relations, consulting and asset management across Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East. Other big names honored with the award in other sectors include: KPMG for Taxation Firm of the Year, UBS Wealth Management for Investment Firm of the Year, Deloitte for Business Outsourcing Firm of the Year and China Bank for Banking and Finance Firm of the Year.

And then you have Macias PR – the scrappy PR firm that lives with the motto we must out-think and out-work the competition. We might be smaller than the larger firms, but we are more hungry – especially around 12:30pm EST when we go to lunch as a team.

Public relations is competitive, especially in New York. Every year, agencies are forced to merge or shrink in size as the competition gets tougher. But Finance Monthly described it best how public relations is changing. In their profile story on Macias PR, which you can read here, they wrote:

The world of financial public relations is changing rapidly as new regulation and technology disrupt the finance industry.

The outdated PR business model of writing a press release and distributing it on the newswires no longer ensures media coverage like it did a decade ago. In most cases, a press release today doesn’t even land your business in the news section of Google.

Despite this industry change, most PR firms continue to stick with the outdated approach of writing and distributing press releases. They rarely bring creativity and innovation that is desperately needed in finance, but there is one public relations firm in New York that is completely revolutionizing the world of financial PR.

And that public relations firm is Macias PR.

While these awards hopefully bring an extra sense of confidence with our firm’s ability, what ultimately matters most is what I said at the end of this Finance Monthly article, “I have no desire to become the biggest PR firm in the world or USA. I just want to be the best.”