by On specialization, the “super boutique” model, and why the future of PR belongs to firms that never stop evolving.
In this interview with Montieth Illingworth, the CEO & Global Managing Partner of Montieth & Company, he discusses creating the firm and AI’s impact on the industry broadly, and how there’s an emphasis on differentiation through specialization.
What’s your background, and how did Montieth & Company come to be?
I started my career as a journalist and author before moving into public relations in 1995, initially representing governments in economic development marketing and media relations. Over the following decade, I led the U.S. operations of a global PR agency.
When I left that role, several clients I’d worked with over the years still wanted to continue working with me. That was the opening, but I knew I couldn’t just hang a shingle. The sector is competitive, and differentiation isn’t optional — it’s survival. My view was that PR had become commoditized. I wanted to build something that went in a different direction: specialist communications services and solutions that could serve clients globally, with the same rigor and capability you’d expect from the largest firms.
It wasn’t easy to establish as a boutique start-up. But it paid off.
What makes your agency different from others in your space?
We’ve taken “specialist” to more meaningful levels of relevance for clients. We tell them: bring us your biggest opportunities and challenges. Our team can address those with a comprehensive marketing communications and PR offering delivered globally, across more than 20 media markets. That kind of global reach with boutique depth is genuinely differentiated.
We work with some of the world’s largest companies, but also with small, high-growth businesses — a tech startup with an AI product that has global relevance, for example. Most people in our industry would be surprised to learn we serve both ends of that spectrum with the same quality. We’ve learned how to punch above our weight because we understand what makes a story truly globally relevant.
Years ago, we identified what I call the “atomization” of the news media. Newsrooms are getting smaller and more specialized, more narrowly focused by beat. We could find you every reporter in ten countries covering AI in HVAC engineering in ten minutes — because those publications know it’s a global technology and they’re tracking what peers in other markets are writing. Keeping up with these trends globally adds to our competitive advantage.
What’s a belief you’ve changed your mind about in the last few years?
My view on AI. I initially thought its greatest impact on our work would be in making workflows more efficient. That’s now table stakes. AI is rapidly integrating into every aspect of what we do and the value we deliver to clients. The question now is how quickly clients will adopt it — and how quickly vendors will fall behind.
My projection: within a year or two, half the vendors currently offering AI tools to PR firms won’t be competitive anymore because they don’t actually understand what we need AI for. And eventually, AI will just be embedded in everything we do — it won’t be a selling point, it’ll be assumed. Clients will come to agencies and say, ‘You’re using AI — our costs should come down accordingly.’ Firms that aren’t already operating this way are going to be caught flat-footed.
What personal habits or principles do you credit for your success?
Care about the right things, work hard, and good things will follow. That sounds simple, but it requires real discipline to execute consistently.
Be singularly focused on the quality of your work — and work in a way that inspires the people around you to know the difference between an average job and an excellent one. Accountability isn’t just about holding people to standards; it’s about creating an environment where people want to reach them.
We have a diverse team across our three global hubs in New York, London, and Hong Kong. That means supporting people with very different backgrounds and paths. Everyone has a unique route to excellence. My job every day is to find that and help guide them along it.
What’s one mistake you made early on that taught you something lasting?
Early in my career, I failed to deliver for a client. When he came to me about it, what he said next has stayed with me ever since: what disappointed him most wasn’t the miss itself — it was that I hadn’t come to him first to flag the issue and offer a solution.
Since then, I’ve always tried to anticipate delivery challenges and arrive with a proactive plan. The instinct to get ahead of problems rather than manage them after the fact is one of the most important habits in client service.
The other thing I learned: don’t be too convinced by the opinion advanced with the most confidence. Those are often the most suspect. Building a consultative environment where you can constructively question and stress-test ideas — on what to do, when, and how — is how you arrive at the right answers.
What types of clients or projects are a “no” for your firm?
We vet all our clients for reputational integrity. That applies across every engagement, not just sensitive ones. We’re not afraid of complexity or challenge — that’s not the filter. The filter is whether the client and their organization meet a basic threshold of ethical and moral integrity.
And we hold ourselves to the same standard in how we operate. Our principle is straightforward: deliver on what you say you’ll do, and be completely honest and direct with clients about what it will take to achieve their objectives. If there are challenges within their own organization that make our work harder, we name them and work on them together. Be a collaborative problem-solver.
What’s a trend you’re watching closely in the PR industry?
Outside of AI, it’s the compression of the PR sector — especially following Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG. I worked inside agencies that were part of massive holding companies and got an inside look at that model. Clearly, it has run its course. Scale of that kind is becoming irrelevant.
The future of our sector is the “super boutique.” Smaller than the mid-sized firms, but more than straight-up competitive with them. Our offering — as long as we keep evolving it — has growing relevance and a strong future. Technology advances will only accelerate this trend.
What do you wish clients understood better about agency work?
The range of what we can actually do for them — in an integrated, seamless way — when they stop thinking about services in silos. Media relations, content development, social media, data analytics: these aren’t separate lanes. When they work together, they produce something much more powerful than any one of them alone.
The question clients should be asking their agencies is: ‘Show me everything you can do to achieve my objectives, tell me how you’ll measure success in a data-driven way, and do it efficiently.’ That’s a very different conversation than ‘We need a press release.’
And the most forward-thinking clients are also asking themselves the same hard questions we’re asking internally: what’s changing in our sector, and are we evolving fast enough to stay ahead of it? The firms and clients who are doing that together — aligned on where things are heading — are the ones producing the best work.