Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.  On the show today, we’re chatting with Michael Murphy and we’re going to talk about Michael’s guide to buying, selling and growing your PR firm. Michael is an advisor and non-executive for a range of PR firms. Notably, he’s helped WE since 2014. He also currently works with Coverdale Barclay, Alfred, and Lodestone, amongst others.  Previously he was CEO, APAC, Weber Shandwick and CEO, International from 1993 – 2000,  CEO, Trimedia International from 2004 –...

Welcome to our April 2024 Review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch, where we will discuss the biggest pitch wins and mergers and acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in April 2024. Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies. Andrew launched Andrew Bloch & Associates in...

Can communications help bridge the divide between the UK government and UK business community? Today on the PRmoment podcast, I am interviewing Iain Anderson, executive chairman of H/Advisors Cicero. Iain recently wrote a report for the Labour Party titled “A New Partnership: A Long-term Plan for Government Business Relations to Power our Economy and Society,”  and I thought it would be interesting to get Iain on the show to discuss how communications might help to change the relationship...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.  On the show today, I’m chatting with Jules Herd. Jules is the founder of PR agency Five in a Boat, which she started six years ago. It’s a tech PR firm with a fee income of about £750K. The business mainly does reputation advisory work, so it is at the more serious end of the PR spectrum. Looking to the future, Five is a Boat is looking to double in size and wants to launch in San Francisco in the short term. Five in a Boat has grown for five years since...

On the show today, I’m chatting with Will Hart, who is the CEO of PRmoment Leaders. Before becoming CEO of PRmoment Leaders, Will was the group MD of Unlimited Group and, before that, the managing director of PR agency Nelson Bostock for over ten years. Will joined PRmoment in January this year to lead its subscription training programme for agency directors - PRmoment Leaders. The first semester of masterclasses has just been released and includes the following themes: How to build and...

This week on the PRmoment Podcast, I’m interviewing Mitch Kaye, co-founder and CEO of The Academy, as we look back on ten years since he and Dan Glover launched The Academy. The Academy is an independent PR firm in London with a fee income of approximately £7m. It has 56 employees and was co-founded by Mitch Kaye and Dan Glover in 2014.  If you want to join your PR peers, don’t forget to buy your tickets for The PRmoment Awards. The Manchester Awards are on Thursday 11th April and the London...

Welcome to our March 2024 Review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch, where we will discuss the biggest, most seismic pitch wins and mergers and acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in 2023. Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies. Andrew launched Andrew Bloch & Associates in...

Braver co-founders Darain Faraz and Mike Levaggi on the PRmoment podcast Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.  On today's show, I’m chatting with two of Braver's co-founders: Darain Faraz and Mike Levaggi. Previously, Darain spent 11 years in-house at LinkedIn. Mike's career has included roles at Seventy Seven, Hope&Glory and Snap. Alongside Sheeraz Gulsher, they launched Braver in September last year. Braver is a talent consultancy specialising in helping PR employers increase the diversity...

On the show today, I’m chatting with Jo Ogunleye, B2B Communications Lead at Google UK  and Laura Wheeler, Head of Communications UKI, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, Google Cloud. Both are B2B communicators, and we’re going to talk about what creativity looks like in B2B communications, how it can be used and how it can be integrated across the appropriate B2B channels. Thanks to the PRmoment Podcast sponsors, The PRCA. A quick mention about the relaunch of PRmoment. If you take a look at...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.  On today's show, I’m chatting with Charlotte West, executive director of corporate communications at Lenovo, and Jo Patterson, UK MD at Zeno. Today, we’re discussing the findings of the Global Women in PR Annual Index, a research programme that aims to measure the status of women working in PR and communications worldwide. Before we start, we should pay tribute to GWPR co-founder Angela Oakes. Angela sadly passed away after a brief illness last year but her...

Welcome to our February Creativity Review. Here, we are talking about the best bits of PR creativity we’ve seen this month. On the show today are: James Gordon-MacIntosh, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Hope&Glory Leila Mountford, Partner, Creative Director at Portland Kim Allain, Creative Lead, MSL UK To remind the listeners of the only rule of our global creativity review, our creatives are not allowed to choose their own work! This is part of our regular series of creativity...

Welcome to our February 2024 Review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch, where we will discuss the biggest, most seismic pitch wins and mergers and acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in 2023. Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies. Andrew was also co-founder and managing...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. Today, we’re talking PR Ethics, basically because Mary Beth West, who is a senior strategist at Fletcher Marketing PR in the US, has funded research by the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE), which compares and contrasts 24 global ethics codes of PR. On the show today, Mary Beth is going to talk through some of the themes of this research.  Today’s podcast also sees the return of the finest voice radio voice in PR - Trevor Morris, who I suspect will bring some...

On the show today, I’m chatting with Delphi co-founder Ellie Thompson and ZOE’s communications director, Danielle Restivo, about how to find your organisation's reputation North Star. Ellie was previously CEO at Harvard. She launched Delphi alongside Louie St Clare and Pete Marcus in May last year. Danielle has had in-house experience in senior roles at the likes of Linkedin, SAP, Google and Vodafone. She joined ZOE as its communications and PR director in 2023. The central premise behind...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. This is a bonus podcast where we chat about RAJAR results for Q4 2023 with Alex Blakemore, newsroom producer at Markettiers. For those of you who aren’t aware of RAJAR - it was established in 1992 and operates the single audience measurement system for the radio industry in the United Kingdom. Each quarter, it publishes the listenership figures for UK radio. This offers a really interesting insight for PR people on how the UK public engages with this...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. On the show today, we've got Matt Neale, Golin's global CEO. I first met Matt just after we launched PRmoment in around 2008 when he was co-CEO of Golin in London. Since then, Matt's moved to New York, been promoted goodness how many times and now runs Golin globally. It's great to see a Brit in a global role at a big global agency. Matt joined Golin in 2005 from its then sister agency Weber Shandwick - he was appointed joint MD of the London office...

Welcome to our January 2024 Review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch, where we will discuss the biggest, most seismic pitch wins and mergers and acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in 2023. Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies. Andrew was also co-founder and managing...

 Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast.  On the show today, I’m chatting with Sharon Bange, joint managing director at Kindred. Sharon has been at Kindred for an extraordinary 20 years. In that time, the business has seen huge change, including nearly going out of business when the then-new Conservative government came into power in 2010.  It’s one of those firms that has consistently punched above its weight when it comes to creative, award-winning work. Kindred is a consumer PR firm that has a...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. On the show today, I’m chatting with Ashwani Singla, founding managing partner of Astrum - Reputation Advisory. Astrum is an Indian PR firm which specialises in reputation management and corporate communications. It employs 30 people in India and one in America! Ashwani set up Astrum in 2015, previously he worked for the likes of Genesis Burson Marsteller and Penn Schoen Berland. Most of the listeners of this podcast are in Europe, so I thought it would...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. On the show today, I’m chatting with Lewis Iwu, founding partner at Purpose Union, about the intersection of Purpose, ESG and CSR. Are the terms interchangeable? Has Purpose superseded CSR and how much confusion is there both amongst communicators and consumers about the crossover between these terms? Purpose Union was co-founded by Lewis in 2019, has about 20 employees and previous clients include Natwest, Sky and The Wellcome Trust. The agency...

Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast. On the show today, I’m chatting with one of my favourite people, the wonderful Bieneosa Ebite. Bieneosa is head of communications and government affairs, inclusion & diversity at GSK. In this regular format of the PRmoment Podcast with Ben Smith, we’ll be catching up with UK public relations leaders - and our guests will share their, in hindsight, secrets that they wish they'd known when they started their careers! Bieneosa Ebite joined GSK 18 months...

Welcome to our 2023 Creativity Review, where we talk about the best bits of PR creativity we saw last year. On the show today to help us review some of the best creative work are: Clare Morris, Clare Morris, associate director, PremierDon Ferguson, Don Ferguson, deputy MD, Hope & Glory PRLora Martyr, creative director, Taylor HerringTo remind the listeners of the rules - our creatives are not allowed to choose their own work! You can enjoy the video version of this episode here. This...

It’s been a funny old PR year. Some firms have had a tough time. Some firms have sadly gone bust, but many, possibly the majority, have seen growth of 5-10%. And in a decent number of cases, they’ve grown more than that. So it’s a difficult year to try and sum up, but on the show today, I’m joined by W founder Warren Johnson, and we’re going to talk through the key themes and challenges that 2023 has brought to the PR agency market. Warren founded W Communications in 2009, and it now has...

Welcome to our 2023 Year in Review of PR Pitches and mergers & acquisitions in the UK PR scene with Andrew Bloch, where we will discuss the biggest, most seismic pitch wins and mergers and acquisitions that the PR sector has seen in 2023. Andrew is the lead consultant - PR, Social, Content and Influencer at the new business consultancy firm AAR and a partner at PCB Partners, where he advises on buying and selling marketing services agencies. He is the founder of Andrew Bloch &...