Paul Holmes 01 Jul 2025 // 12:39AM GMT

At the Cannes Festival of Creativity, usually focused on the marketing side of the business, I sat down with The Sway Effect founder and president Jennifer Risi to discuss DEI, values, and the challenges of managing corporate reputation in these turbulent times.
Key takeaways:
Key takeaways:
- Risi remains committed to diversity and inclusion at The Sway Effect “because I really believe in authenticity… we started the company with a certain way of working. We were very much committed to the belief that, you know, being more inclusive makes the work better, and actually drives profitability.”
- When it comes to clients, she says, “some of our clients are not wanting to talk about it at all. Some of our clients have talked about scrubbing websites.” But at the same time, “we have some clients who have always been authentically focused on these issues.” The key, she says, is to be sure clients have a genuine commitment, in which case they will stay the course.
- Addressing ESG and responsible business more broadly, she says “everybody is just worried about the next quarter…. I do think there has been some, you know, more focus on profitability, more focus on efficiency, more focus on AI and tariffs.” Even if clients remain committed to ESG and CSR in the long term, that takes a back seat to more immediate issues.
- Values, Risi says, are still important, even if companies are talking less about it. There are fewer conversations happening externally many clients still need to have those conversations internally. In the past, communications people “would go to the CEO and say, we're gonna go do this, and everyone get behind it. Now they have to really calculate the risk when they go into their CEO's and ask, do we really need to do it?”
- As a result, she says, a lot of CCOs have become more reactive in the last six months. “I need to ask, have you considered this? Have you thought of this? Whereas before they would be thinking that way, they'd be the ones bringing us into that conversation.” What she finds herself saying most is “let's stay the course, let's take a breath, let's regroup in three days and see if we still feel this way as opposed to we're just not doing it.”
- In the permacrisis environment and the fact that communicators are often the ones most focused on long-term reputation building, CCOs are feeling increasingly isolated. Says Risi, “There are some of our CCOs who I now talk to every morning because I'm the person they can talk to. So that's what I said earlier, a lot of my day now is being like, stay the course. Just keep doing the work you're doing. We're gonna get past all of this.”