Edelman is the world's largest public relations firm, founded in 1952 by 📝Daniel J. Edelman and still independently held by the founding family through Daniel J. Edelman Holdings. It employs more than 6,000 people across roughly 60 offices and works with corporations, governments, and nonprofits on communications, reputation management, and public affairs.
The founder is credited with inventing the corporate media tour, and the firm's early work helped define modern public relations as a discipline distinct from advertising. Richard Edelman has led the company since 1996, during which revenue passed $1 billion and the firm became the largest communications business in the world. Independence is its central competitive claim against the holding-company networks — WPP, Omnicom, 📝Publicis — since it answers to no public shareholders and can take a longer view on client relationships. Its most visible asset is the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey now in its twenty-fifth edition, which functions simultaneously as published research and as the firm's positioning engine: it establishes trust as the category Edelman sells. That framing has also been the source of sustained criticism, most pointedly over client work that sits uneasily beside it.