Expert to Know: Montieth Illingworth
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, and the intensity of it, and because I had insights into 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 doing 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, 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 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 you 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.
What core principles and values guide your agency?
Deliver on what you say you would do and be completely honest and frank with the client on what it will take to achieve the objectives of the program. Sometimes, that means conveying to the client that when they have challenges within their own organizations that make your work harder to accomplish for them, you can work on addressing those together. Be a collaborative problem solver.
The other is always read the tea leaves about what’s changing in our industry and never stop evolving. This is particularly relevant to our crisis work. We developed a proprietary AI-driven system for honing in acutely on stakeholder reaction to any kind of announcement or event, minor or major, and how that shapes sentiment and ultimately either forges further or erodes the trust bond. We built this on decades of experience in crisis work and it gives us a systematic, contextualized viewfor a kind of predictive analysis that helps make communications recommendations. Combined with our experience and judgment it takes to the next level what’s needed to make communications decisions in a more informed way. I’ll never need a machine to tell me what to think but I do like smart machines!
What's your approach to hiring and building a team?
Making a hire is not a small decision, but it might seem that way at the outset. The biggest impact we’ve achieved was because of the people who I am fortunate to call colleagues and who have worked hard to learn what they need to do to excel, to inspire others, and to truly believe in who we are as a firm and what we do. I try to live in a state of gratitude to all of my good fortune and by far the people I work with are what I’m most thankful for.
What types of clients or projects do you say no to?
In our issues management, crisis, and litigation PR work, we choose clients carefully, not based on how challenging the matter could be but on the reputational integrity of the client and the organization. We vet all of our clients for this same integrity. Clearly, bad things can happen to good people and good organizations but there’s a difference between that and making decisions that on their face alone are just simply wrong, ethically and morally, let alone in terms of the governing regulations and laws. It isn’t always black and white to sort this out but you have to have some architecture for making decisions like this.
Of course, you always find out more later as you dive into a matter than what you knew at the beginning. Then, the question becomes, “does that change the conclusion about integrity, how much, and what do you do about that?” Those are the tough decisions. I always try and default to giving the best advice I can to the client even when that’s really hard for him to hear. As tough as those situations become, that’s the real test of professional integrity, for both parties.
What do you predict for the industry in the next 5-10 years?
Outside of AI, it’s the compression of the PR sector, especially following the acquisition of IPG by Omnicom. I worked at agencies that were part of massive, sprawling holding companies and got an inside look at that “model”. Clearly, it has run its course. Scale like that is becoming irrelevant. The future of our sector is in becoming a “super boutique”. We are smaller by comparison to the mid-sized and of course the bulge bracket multi-national firms but we are more than just straight-up competitive. We know that our offering, as long as we keep evolving it, has growing relevance, benefit, and more than just a bright future. Technology advances will accelerate this trend in our sector.
What advice would you give someone starting an agency today?
Early in my career, I wasn’t able to deliver for a client and he came to me to point that out. What he said next stayed with me: what was more disappointing than not delivering was that I hadn’t come to him first to acknowledge the issue and provide a solution.
Since then, I’ve always tried to anticipate challenges in delivering to clients and come up with proactive solutions.
But there are others too! I learned over the years not to be too convinced by the opinion that is advanced with the most unquestioning confidence. Those are often the most suspect. So, learning how to question, constructively, to stress test views on what to do, when, and how is key to creating a consultative environment for consensus.
Beyond that, it’s don’t make too many assumptions about what a journalist is going to do or not do with a story. Here as well, you need to open a channel of communication where gathering information from the journalist is almost as important as giving it to them. Listen to them, ask good questions, draw boundaries of course, but also convey that you’re being as helpful as you can. I can’t tell you how many times journalists have told me that the opposing side in a matter lost credibility because they were being too aggressive, too critical, and attempted to control something they couldn’t really ever control.
What's a belief you hold about the industry that most would disagree with?
I changed my mind about the impact of AI in communications. I initially believed it would have its greatest influence in making workflows more efficient. That’s now table stakes. AI is rapidly and comprehensively integrating into every aspect of our work and the evalue we provide to our clients. The question is how quickly clients will adopt it. My projection is that within a year or two, half the vendors offering AI to us won’t be competitive anymore because they don’t really understand what we need it for. I also think that PR firms will stop talking about AI integration across their offerings because it’ll just be a given that it is embedded in our work. Eventually, clients will come to agencies and say “We just saved 10% on costs using AI. You should be able tout my fees by 10% using AI as well.”
What do clients often misunderstand about agency work?
The range of services and solutions we can array for them in a seamless and integrated way to achieve their marketing communications objectives. I’m not talking about cross-selling. I’m talking about jointly seeing how leveraging on the fact of where the future of our sector is heading (yes, AI driven to some degree) is providing a multi-faceted offering that doesn’t exist in silos (media relations vs content development vs social media). Clients need to ask the question “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.”
Also, just like we’re asking ourselves the tough questions about what do I need to do to evolve, I think clients need to be doing the same thing. The more thoughtful they are about what’s driving change in their sectors, the more we can align on being sure we’re delivering on what they need in the most relevant, meaningful and valuable way. We’re all working not just for but toward the future we want.
