A new London-based PR and communications agency has launched to focus exclusively on proactively building the profiles of company leaders and leadership teams.
Launching today, the new agency, Profile, has recruited a dedicated team of 10 people over recent months, with competencies covering media engagement, social media management, multimedia production, and copywriting. It will work exclusively on briefs that involve executive profiling and executive thought leadership.
The agency was founded by the team behind Transmission Private, a communications agency known for advising high-net-worth individuals and family offices on their public relations.
It is now being spun-out as a standalone business to capitalise on increasing demand for positive profile-building programmes amongst executive leadership teams. The launch of the new agency naturally builds on Transmission Private's existing track-record of managing the profile of high-profile business figures.
The new agency will be co-led by Sam Patchett and Jordan Greenaway. Sam Patchett previously spent 2 years at Grayling before joining Transmission Private at the start of 2022. He previously held roles at Aegon and New Zealand-based PR agency SweeneyVesty. Patchett will move full-time to the Profile business from Transmission Private, where he will be responsible for overseeing client projects.
Jordan Greenaway originally founded Transmission Private, the award-winning reputation management firm, in 2014. He will focus on agency partnerships, marketing, business development, and client acquisition.
The launch of the new agency coincides with the publication of newly commissioned research from Profile that shows employees and customers increasingly want companies to have visible leaders.
The research, carried out by polling firm OnePoll for Profile, showed that nearly three in four people (74%) said that they would prefer to work for a company with a visible leadership team. Similarly, 60% of people said that they would prefer to buy products and services from companies that were led by visible leadership teams. The poll was based on a survey of 2,000 British adults.
Profile intends to grow rapidly into the executing profiling space by targeting both corporate, mid-market, and start-up clients seeking to run focused campaigns to raise the profiles of their leadership team.
Alongside traditional media engagement, in advance of launch, Profile has focussed on building its in-house content creation capability, recruiting team members with a dedicated focus on video and podcast creation as well as paid and organic social media management.
At launch, the agency also has an additional three open positions across PR, account management, and social media, which it hopes to fill over the coming months.
Jordan Greenaway, Commercial Director at Profile, said: "We believe that there will be increasing demand for executive profiling over the coming 5 years, and we have invested heavily to take advantage of this trend. We want to establish ourselves as the go-to leader in this fast-growing niche, which we think is currently underserviced by the industry.
"Companies are starting to wake up to the fact that corporate brand-building only gets them so far, especially amongst recruits, investors, customers, partners, regulators, and others. It is important that companies have recognised, well-regarded, and credible leadership teams with a public profile to match. The new research demonstrates that.
"We believe that executive profiling has been largely overlooked so far by the industry. Executive profiling is either tagged on as an afterthought to broader corporate communications programmes, or drops to the bottom of the priorities list for other agencies.
"We believe there is space not only to grow through direct client acquisition but through partnering with corporate agencies that do not feel as comfortable in this space."
Sam Patchett, Client Director at Profile, said: "We are seeking to establish ourselves as the end-to-end agency for executive profiling projects.
"We've built a team that can operate across traditional media engagement and coverage generation, as well as setting up strong in-house capabilities so we can produce creative multimedia content.
"We took the view that clients would benefit from having access to video, photography, audio, writing, social media, and digital media services all under one roof.
"It was important for us to launch an agency that has a real point-of-difference in the marketplace. There are fantastic agencies in London and, indeed, worldwide, but we wanted to create something that we didn't believe was being appropriately serviced at the moment.
"Even in the early days of the launch, we have seen high levels of demand. Our success will be built on the strength of our team, which is why we are continuing to invest in new hires as we take our offering to market."