by Our CEO & Global Managing Partner, Montieth Illingworth, was interviewed by the 50Pros Team as a part of their agency and expert spotlight.
What’s the backstory behind starting or joining your agency?
I worked for several years as a journalist and author, and then in 1995 started in public relations representing governments in economic development marketing and media relations. Over the following ten years, I was the head of office of the U.S. operations of a global PR agency. When I left that role, several clients I had worked with over the years still wanted to continue working with me. I knew I had to develop a unique offering given the competitive nature of our sector. For me, that differentiation was in developing specialist communications services and solutions. I thought our sector had become commoditized and I wanted to take a new direction. That’s not easy to do for a start-up boutique, but it paid off.
Central to that ambition was my work in issues and crisis management and litigation PR. By that point in my career, I’d done more and more of that work. I gravitated toward it because of the obvious stakes for clients, the intensity of it, and because I had insights into the journalistic process and newsroom priorities as a former journalist. Those insights into how a newsroom works were and are to this day key to managing a crisis and mitigating reputation risk effectively. That quickly led to my working on a number of crisis matters, many concerning the securities laws, but also on a wide range of other matters. As a firm, we’ve done everything from the Madoff Fraud to the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, Nazi- looted art recovery for descendant families, CEO terminations, and cybersecurity crises. Throughout that work, we’ve always tried to ensure that we could be proud of our work and do the right thing, for the right clients, aligned with our personal and corporate values.
Any personal rituals or habits that contribute to your success?
Care about the right things, work hard, and all good things will come.
Be singularly focused on the quality of your work, and work in a way that inspires people, enables them to know the difference between an average job and an excellent one, and encourages accountability.
We have a very diverse team across our three global hubs in New York, London, and Hong Kong. That means working to support and inspire everyone to reach their goals. But everyone is different, everyone has a unique path to excellence. I work every day to find that and guide them along to it.
Because we do so much work with high-profile executives and companies, with Boards of Directors, and both in-house and external legal counsel on our crisis matters, I’ve had to navigate the complex dynamics of the most “pressure-cooked” areas within an organization. For many executives, communications is something they normally delegate, not something they feel they need to get into the weeds of. That changes in a crisis. No crisis plan taken off the shelf guides all decisions about what to say, when, how, and for what purpose amongst stakeholders. In those moments, decision-making requires a thought process, and sometimes a debate, that is new for a lot of people. My job becomes framing what’s most important to achieve, advising on how to do that, and giving insights where needed most on the impact of any public statement or act on stakeholder sentiment. Ultimately, it’s about helping organizations act with confidence while building trust.
How does your agency differentiate itself from competitors?
We’ve taken “specialist” to more meaningful levels of relevance and benefit for our clients. We say to them, “bring us your biggest opportunities and challenges” because our team can address those with a comprehensive marketing communications and PR offering and do that globally across over 20 media markets. That globalization is truly differentiated. We provide a fully integrated, flexible, and efficient set of services and solutions for companies, large and small, who have global ambitions.
The fact that we can do that, globally, with some of the world’s largest companies but also small, high-tech businesses with, say, an AI product that has global relevance, would surprise most people in my industry. We’ve learned how to “punch above our weight” because we understand what makes a story truly globally relevant. We discovered years ago, for instance, what I call the “atomization” of the news media. We could find every reporter in 10 countries covering the use of AI in the engineering of HVAC systems to reduce energy consumption in 10 minutes. That’s because those media know that’s a global technology used in the same ways everywhere in the world, and they read what other like-publications are writing about across markets. Plus, newsrooms are getting smaller and more specialized, by beat, more narrowly focused. Keeping up with these trends, globally, adds to our competitive advantages.
Read the full interview on 50Pros.