McKinsey Private Markets Report: What Marketers Should Take From It

The McKinsey Global Private Markets Review is an annual report tracking capital flows, deal activity, and emerging trends across private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure. For marketers, it is not a document about marketing. It is a document about where serious money is moving, and that makes it one of the more useful strategic inputs available if you know how to read it.

The 2024 edition documented a significant cooling in private markets fundraising after years of exceptional growth, alongside a sharpening focus on operational value creation rather than financial engineering. Those two shifts have direct implications for how B2B marketers position themselves, what their clients are actually worried about, and where the next wave of commercial opportunity is likely to emerge.

Why Would a Marketer Read a Private Markets Report?

I have a habit I picked up early in my career that has served me well: reading documents that are not aimed at me. When I was running agency teams, I would read client annual reports cover to cover before pitches, not for the marketing sections, but for the chairman’s statement and the risk register. Those two sections told me more about what a client actually needed than any brief they ever sent.

The McKinsey Private Markets Report is that kind of document. It is written for institutional investors and general partners. It is dense with capital allocation data, fund performance benchmarks, and LP sentiment surveys. And it is genuinely useful for marketers who operate anywhere near financial services, professional services, technology, infrastructure, or any B2B sector where private capital is a meaningful buyer or influencer.

The logic is straightforward. Private equity and private credit firms are among the most commercially sophisticated buyers of marketing services and technology in the world. They are also the owners of a significant proportion of mid-market businesses. When McKinsey’s data shows those firms under fundraising pressure and pivoting toward operational value creation, that is a signal about what the businesses they own will be asked to do. And those businesses buy marketing services.

If you want to understand the competitive intelligence landscape more broadly, including how to build systematic intelligence habits across sectors, the Market Research and Competitive Intelligence hub on The Marketing Juice covers the tools, frameworks, and approaches in detail.

What Did the 2024 McKinsey Private Markets Report Actually Say?

The headline finding was a contraction. Global private markets fundraising fell meaningfully in 2023, with private equity fundraising dropping to levels not seen in close to a decade. The report attributed this to a combination of the denominator effect (public market volatility making private allocations look oversized in LP portfolios), higher interest rates reducing the return premium that private equity had previously enjoyed, and a slowdown in distributions back to LPs that reduced their appetite for new commitments.

Private credit was the notable exception. It continued to grow, taking share from traditional bank lending in leveraged finance and direct lending. Infrastructure also held up, driven by energy transition investment and the capital requirements of digital infrastructure, particularly data centres.

The more strategically interesting finding was what McKinsey described as a shift in the value creation model. During the low-interest-rate era, private equity returns were meaningfully supported by multiple expansion and financial leverage. As rates rose and exit multiples compressed, the firms generating strong returns were those with genuine operational capabilities, the ability to improve margins, grow revenue, and build management teams in portfolio companies rather than simply refinancing them.

That is not a small observation. It means the private equity firms that will win in the current environment are those with deep sector expertise and operational networks. And it means the portfolio companies they own will be under more pressure to demonstrate genuine commercial performance, not just financial engineering.

How Does This Translate Into a Marketing Signal?

When I was at iProspect, we grew from around 20 people to over 100 during a period when search marketing was moving from a specialist function to a core commercial channel. The growth was not because we were the loudest agency in the market. It was because we were paying attention to where commercial pressure was building and we were positioned to relieve it.

The McKinsey report creates a similar kind of signal for marketers who are paying attention. Here are the practical translations.

First, if you market to private equity firms or their portfolio companies, the message has shifted. The conversation is no longer primarily about growth at any cost. It is about profitable growth, operational efficiency, and demonstrable commercial performance. Marketers who position around revenue impact, margin contribution, and measurable outcomes are better aligned with what PE-backed businesses are being asked to deliver. Those who lead with brand metrics or awareness numbers will find the room cooling quickly.

Second, the bifurcation between large and small managers is a segmentation opportunity. Larger GPs are consolidating, expanding into new asset classes, and building out their marketing and investor relations functions. They are buyers of marketing technology, content production, campaign management capabilities, and campaign management infrastructure. Smaller managers are under cost pressure and need to do more with less. Those are two entirely different briefs and they require two entirely different propositions.

Third, the sectors attracting capital are worth noting. Energy transition, digital infrastructure, healthcare services, and supply chain resilience appear consistently in the report as areas of sustained investment. If your agency or in-house team serves clients in those sectors, you are operating in well-capitalised markets. If you are looking at where to build sector expertise, those are reasonable bets.

The Operational Value Creation Shift and What It Means for B2B Marketing

This is the section of the McKinsey report that I think deserves the most attention from B2B marketers, and it is the one most likely to be skipped because it reads like a finance paper.

When PE firms talk about operational value creation, they mean improving the underlying businesses they own rather than relying on financial structuring to generate returns. In practice, that means bringing in better management, improving pricing discipline, building sales infrastructure, reducing cost bases, and, increasingly, investing in marketing and commercial capability.

I have worked with PE-backed businesses at various stages of that process. The pattern is consistent: a new CFO arrives, a commercial review happens, and marketing is asked to justify itself in terms that the finance team can read. Brand equity scores do not survive that conversation. Pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, and revenue attribution do.

The McKinsey data suggests more PE-backed businesses will go through that process in the current cycle. For marketers inside those businesses, the message is to get ahead of it. Build the measurement framework before you are asked for it. Understand how your activity connects to commercial outcomes. Know your numbers.

For agencies and consultancies that serve those businesses, the opportunity is to be the partner that helps marketing teams speak the language of the boardroom. That is a positioning play, not just a service delivery one. The firms that can genuinely connect marketing activity to business outcomes will be better positioned to survive and grow in a market where PE owners are scrutinising every cost line.

Reading Macro Reports as a Competitive Intelligence Practice

There is a version of competitive intelligence that is entirely reactive: monitoring competitor campaigns, tracking keyword movements, watching what rivals are doing on social. That work has value. But the marketers I have seen build durable competitive advantages tend to be the ones who are also reading upstream, watching where capital is moving, where regulation is tightening, where talent is concentrating.

Reports like the McKinsey Private Markets Review sit at that upstream level. They are not telling you what your competitor said in their last press release. They are telling you about the structural conditions that will shape your market over the next two to three years. That is a different kind of intelligence and it requires a different kind of reading.

When I was building out a new business practice at an agency, I started reading the financial press differently, not for the headlines but for the signals buried in the earnings calls and the analyst notes. That habit produced better client conversations, better pitches, and better strategic advice. The McKinsey report is that kind of document.

The practical discipline is to read it with a specific question in mind: what does this mean for the clients I serve, the sectors I operate in, and the decisions I need to make in the next twelve months? Without that frame, it is just interesting. With it, it becomes useful.

For a broader view of how to build intelligence habits that go beyond tool-based monitoring, the Market Research and Competitive Intelligence hub covers frameworks for turning data into decisions, not just reports.

What the Report Does Not Tell You

It is worth being honest about the limits of this kind of document. The McKinsey Private Markets Report is a retrospective. It describes what happened in the previous year. The 2024 edition covers 2023 data. By the time you read it, the market has moved again.

It is also a document with a perspective. McKinsey serves private equity firms. The report is partly a marketing document for McKinsey’s own capabilities. That does not make the data wrong, but it does mean you should read it critically, the same way you would read any research produced by a firm with skin in the game.

What it does not tell you is how to act on any of it. It describes trends. It does not tell you how to reposition your agency, how to restructure your client conversations, or how to build a proposition that resonates with PE-backed businesses under operational pressure. That translation work is on you.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which means I have read hundreds of case studies about marketing that demonstrably worked. The pattern in the best ones is not that the team had better data. It is that someone translated the data into a clear commercial insight and then made a decision. The McKinsey report gives you better data. The decision is still yours to make.

Three Things Worth Acting On Now

If you have read the report, or read this summary of it, here are three things worth doing rather than just noting.

Audit your sector exposure. If a significant proportion of your clients or prospects are in sectors that the McKinsey report identifies as under capital pressure, that is a pipeline risk worth understanding now. Conversely, if you are underweight in infrastructure, energy transition, or private credit-adjacent sectors, that is a growth opportunity worth exploring.

Review your commercial positioning. If you are marketing to B2B buyers who are themselves under pressure to demonstrate operational performance, your messaging needs to reflect that. Claims about brand awareness, share of voice, or creative quality will not survive a PE portfolio review. Revenue impact, pipeline contribution, and cost efficiency will.

Build the measurement framework before you need it. The businesses that will be asked to justify marketing spend most sharply in the next cycle are PE-backed ones. If you are inside one of those businesses, the time to build proper attribution and reporting is before the CFO asks for it, not after. The intersection of marketing technology and commercial accountability is where that work lives.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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