NEW YORK and LONDON—The Holmes Report is making several changes to its annual Report Card publications, in an attempt to make them more digital, more dynamic, and more helpful to clients, prospective employees and agency partners from around the world.

The changes will see the elimination of the print publications, which have a 20-year heritage, and a new emphasis on digital formats—e-books, which will be available at the holmesreport.com website and distributed via email, as well as profiles that will be integrated into a redesigned website that will include pages dedicated to the agencies profiled in our reports.

At the same time, the regional report cards—which have historically focused on the Americas, EMEA and the Asia-Pacific—will become more selective, with a strict limit on the number of firms in each, so that the Americas region Agency Report Card, for example, will become The 100 Best PR Firms in North America.

Those regional reports will be joined by a series of global reports focusing on sectors and practices such as consumer marketing, digital and social media, healthcare, public affairs, and technology, all designed to better fit with the way clients search for agencies.

The format of the individual agency reports will also change, with profiles for each firm featuring spotlights on Best Clients, Best Talent, Best Work, Best Thinking and other similar areas. And because everything will be published digitally, there will be greater scope for multimedia content, particularly case histories.

“Once we made the decision to move away from print, it became apparent that digital publishing provided greater opportunities to improve the content, the presentation of information, and the way we go to market,” says Paul Holmes, editor and publisher of The Holmes Report. “What won’t change is that the reports will provide a comprehensive overview of the world’s leading public relations firms, and present clients and employees with a subjective, independent perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of those firms.”

Firms will be selected for inclusion based on a number of factors, including size; financial performance and growth; the quality of their work (with a particular emphasis on peer reviewed submissions to the SABRE Awards); industry leadership; and word-of-mouth from peers, clients and other industry experts.