Maja Pawinska Sims 03 Feb 2023 // 3:16PM GMT
LONDON — Two leaders from executive reputation advisory Transmission Private have spun out a sister agency to focus on executive profiling, in response to growing demand.
The new agency, Profile, is co-led by commercial director Jordan Greenaway (pictured, right), who founded Transmission Private in 2014 to advise high-net-worth individuals, entrepreneurs, business leaders and family offices on their public relations, and client director Sam Patchett (left), who joined Transmission Private last year from Grayling.
Profile has already recruited a team of 10 people including specialists in media engagement, earned and paid social media management, multimedia production including video and audio, content creation and copywriting.
The agency works exclusively on briefs to build the profiles of company leaders and leadership teams in corporates, mid-size businesses and start-ups, and executive thought leadership.
Greenaway told PRovoke Media he was seeing increasing demand for executive profiling and had invested heavily in the new venture: “Over the past two years we’ve had a different type of client approach us at Transmission Private with a brief that we weren’t servicing – they don’t need PR counsel, and they have their corporate communications sorted, but they need to proactively build their own profiles as CEOs, founders and C-suite leaders. They view social media specialist agencies as a bit too focused on influencers, and publicists feel a bit too 'celebrity'. They want something more strategic, beyond LinkedIn.
“We didn’t want to keep turning down exciting clients, so when Sam joined us we sat down together and started to sketch out what a dedicated executive profiling agency would look like. We’re currently signing up clients at the rate of about two a month, and we want to more than double this and grow to 15 people by the end of this year.”
Greenaway said Profile had a “bold ambition to become the go-to agency for executive profiling”, including partnering with other agencies, “who are great at corporate communications and brand work but often find that executive profiling for clients drops to the bottom of the to-do list.”
On the make-up of the agency’s team, Patchett added: “It’s all about the content we’re creating, and controlling the content is at the heart of the agency. 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.
“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.”
To mark the launch, Profile commissioned research from OnePoll showing that employees and customers increasingly want companies to have visible leaders. The research found that 74% of the 2,000 British adults surveyed would prefer to work for a company with a visible leadership team, and 60% would prefer to buy products and services from companies that were led by visible leadership teams.
“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,” said Greenaway. “It is important that companies have recognised, well-regarded, and credible leadership teams with a public profile to match.”
Patchett, who previously held roles at Aegon and New Zealand-based PR agency SweeneyVesty, will be responsible for overseeing client projects at Profile. Greenaway will focus on agency partnerships, marketing, business development and client acquisition. Both leaders also have a background in advising politicians, with Patchett having been a private secretary and communications advisor to various ministers in the New Zealand government, and Greenaway having worked as an aide in the House of Commons.