Matt Neale, CEO, Golin Ketchum on the PRmoment Podcast

Matt Neale’s return to the PRmoment Podcast is framed by one big question: what does scale, data and AI actually mean for the future of PR – and where does Golin Ketchum sit in that evolving landscape?

Beore we start the interview with Matt, one quick plug, The Creative Moment Awards always sell out, partly because it's an intimate venue, so if you want to come, best to get your ticket quick!

Here are a few quotes from Ben Smith's interview with Matt:

“Size doesn’t really matter when it comes to excellence in public relations.”
— Matt Neale [0:06:47]

“If we can be at the apex of human ingenuity and human creativity backed up by all of the audience data, the customer data, the consumer data, that now enables us to predict the outcomes of what we do – that’s core to the offering of the new agency.”
— Matt Neale [0:08:58–0:10:32]

“A holding company leaves you in splendid isolation as long as you’re doing well. An operating company is obsessed with the red thread that runs between the businesses.”
— Matt Neale [0:10:48–0:13:22]

On a soon to be announced pitch win:

“There’s no way that any of the agencies could have won this on their own or dislodged it from the partner they’d worked with for three decades.”
— Matt Neale [0:10:48–0:13:22]

“I think there is going to be a bifurcation in the market… small independents on one side, and big networked agencies on the other cleaning up because of access to this information.”
— Matt Neale [0:18:26–0:21:29]

“I don’t think there’s much evidence, on the aggregate, that the public relations market is booming at the moment.”
— Matt Neale [0:23:07–0:23:41]

“In the heartland of brand and consumer, any growth agencies are achieving is by taking market share from each other.”
— Matt Neale [0:24:12–0:25:34]

Ben Smith opens by rewinding Neale’s journey from co-CEO of Golin London in 2005 to Global CEO of the newly merged Golin Ketchum. 

The integration itself was done at speed. Neale admits he had “a little eye on Burson’s integration with Hill and Knowlton” [0:01:19]. 

The speed of the merger was helped by good cultural alignment and early trust, particularly with Tamara Norman from the Ketchum side, now President of Golin Ketchum. As Neale puts it, channeling his inner Margaret Thatcher, after his first meeting with Norman, he thought: “I can do business with this person” [0:01:19–0:03:03].

From there, he claim the task was classic post‑merger heavy lifting: set the vision, build a new management team, align values, restructure offices and, crucially, maintain client continuity.

Beyond the specifics of the merger, Neale is clear that scale alone is not the point.

He recalls Golin being “the 35th or 36th largest agency in the country (UK)” when it set out to win Agency of the Year – and did so within three years [0:06:47–0:08:04]. For him, excellence comes from the work, a point of view on the industry and the quality of talent, not headcount.

Where the merger gets Neale excited is in the offer: creativity plus data. 

Legacy Golin brings creative heat. Golin consistently performed well in PR creativity rankings and is a multi award winner at both the PRmoment Awards and the Creative Moment Awards [0:08:58–0:10:32] – while Omnicom supplies deep consumer and customer data. Neale wants Golin Ketchum positioned at the “apex of human ingenuity and human creativity backed up by all of the audience data” [0:08:58–0:10:32], using that to predict outcomes, not just report them.

A big structural shift for Neale has been moving from a holding company (Interpublic) to an operating company (Omnicom). Under IPG, Golin enjoyed “splendid isolation” as long as the numbers were good. Omnicom, by contrast, is obsessed with the “red thread” between agencies and uses technology to force collaboration across PR, PA and creative shops [0:10:48–0:13:22]. Neale says the biggest recent wins – including what he calls “the pitch of the year” [0:10:48–0:13:22] – simply could not have been landed by any single agency acting alone.

That scale and shared data are reshaping the market. Neale sees a bifurcation: nimble, often founder‑owned independents thriving in corporate advisory, public affairs and high‑touch media work; and big networks “cleaning up” at the top end because of proprietary real‑ID data and integrated AI. Omnicom, he notes, “know pretty much everything about 98% of the population through credit card data” in the US [0:21:58–0:22:28], and plugging AI into those data lakes is, in his view, the only real differentiator.

On market conditions, he’s sober rather than breathless. Globally, PR is “not booming”, but public affairs and corporate advisory are strong, tech is bouncing back and the US is outpacing the UK and Europe [0:23:07–0:25:34]. 

Growth, he argues, is currently largely about market share moves between agencies, not an expanding pie – Golin’s own compound growth of around 9% over five years came as some rivals shrank by a similar amount [0:26:52–0:27:23].

Creatively, Neale draws a sharp distinction between the UK’s still‑powerful newspaper‑driven culture – with humour and news‑hooked ideas – and the US bias to large‑scale activations and installations designed for influencers and creators [0:30:42–0:33:21]. 

Underneath it all, he credits PR’s structural advantages – small, close‑to‑client teams and an ingrained curiosity – with helping the discipline adapt faster than other parts of the marketing mix [0:28:31–0:30:10].

Three Cannes golds in a row for idea creation [0:36:01–0:36:41] suggest the creative momentum survived the merger. The task now, as Neale puts it, is to get “back into the fight on the new business” [0:35:32–0:36:41] – with a model built on head, heart and a very large data spine.

Transcript

[0:00:03] PRmoment Voiceover: Welcome to the PRmoment Podcast, produced in association with the Markettierrs Network.

[0:00:16] Ben Smith: Welcome to this, the latest PRmoment Podcast. On the show today, we've got Matt Neale, who, as many of you will know, is Global CEO of Golin Ketchum. Matt's a regular listener to the show, and every couple of years we like to get him on. And now the Golin Ketchum merger is all done, it seems like a good time to talk. I first met Matt a few years back, just after we launched PR Moment in about 2008, when he was co-CEO of Golin in London, and since then he's moved to New York, been promoted goodness knows how many times, and now runs Golin Ketchum globally. It's great to see a Brit in a global role at a big global agency. Matt, welcome to the show.

[0:00:54] Matt Neale: Thank you, Ben. It's very, very exciting to be here in the studio.

[0:00:58] Ben Smith: Yes, it is quite nice to be doing it in the studio, isn't it? Where we can, we can look at each other in the eye longingly, Matt. So, you know, having seen a few PR agency mergers over the years, the trick seems to be, when I talk to people who lead them, get it done quick. And you certainly have seemed to have tried to get the Golin Ketchum one done pretty fast. Is that it? Is it done?

[0:01:19] Matt Neale: A lot of it is done. I mean, we did intentionally try and move quickly. I had a little eye on Burson's integration with Hill and Knowlton. I can't remember if they did it in six or nine months. And, being a little bit competitive, I'm like, okay, let's try and beat that. It was easier than I thought it was going to be to some extent, and I think we were quite lucky in that the cultures of the organisations were very similar, and therefore the trust that we had from the very early days was, it felt safe. I think Tamara Norman, who's from the legacy Ketchum side, who's now the President of Golin Ketchum, and I, within five minutes, I just thought, I’m going to quote Margaret Thatcher: I can do business with this person. And I think within a few weeks she and I had built up a relationship that, in my case, it had taken years to build up that kind of trust with someone from a previous agency. So that helped. So a lot is done, but there is still more work to do. The kind of big things, in terms of setting the vision, creating the new management team, aligning on the new values of the agency, making sure that we had created a new office structure around the world, teams are integrated. I think one of the things that made it kind of easier to begin with is that we said to all of our clients it was a promise that we made that there would be continuity. So unless you wanted us to change the team, we were not going to change your team, and we were quite complementary in terms of geography and services. So that bit was easier.

[0:03:03] Ben Smith: I mean, just without going into minute detail, because clearly we haven't got time, and it might not be the most exciting podcast…

[0:03:09] Matt Neale: We're losing, we're losing.

[0:03:12] Ben Smith: But what do you do? You basically start at the top, cascade down, think about client teams, think about roles?

[0:03:19] Matt Neale: Yes.

[0:03:19] Ben Smith: And that's interesting. I suppose a good practical point about the client teams, because you tend to keep things the same if you can, because why wouldn't you? There's obviously a bit of wastage where things overlap, and then there's… I mean, the thing about culture is interesting. I mean, if you'd have said to me, and I'm an outsider, clearly I don't know, if you'd have said to me, are the cultures of Golin and Ketchum the same, you know, two years ago, I'd have said probably not. I'm not sure they'd clash, but I'd say they'd be different. But you're saying they were… go on, there were a fair few questions there.

[0:03:45] Matt Neale: Yeah, no, I think in the UK perhaps the Ketchum culture had maybe drifted a little bit from what it had been for a century. In the US it was much more aligned, I think, to what people knew Ketchum as, and we had a line that we kind of developed together, which is we are fiercely ambitious for the work that we do, fiercely ambitious to win, and yet on the other side, fundamentally kind in how we treat each other. And everyone kind of coalesced around that as a kind of north star for how we behave. That kind of, on one side, ambition, but also kindness. And I think that did encapsulate where the two agencies were kind of coming from. And then when it came to, you know, deciding on who was going to have the big jobs in different countries or in different practices, or running kind of craft areas, we made it very clear that it was going to be a meritocracy of talent. So we would, in some cases, there were a couple of candidates for the role. In some cases, it was super obvious, but it wasn't like a, okay, one from this side, one from this side, one in, one out. It was based on merit, and I think when you have that as your guiding principle, it made it easier to get there.

[0:05:06] Ben Smith: But, I mean, it's interesting. How do you judge merit in… because you've got to do it fast, right? I mean, it's, first of all, as a leader, you've got so many decisions to make, and you've got a hundred decisions to make. You probably won't get them all right. But it must be tough to lead a business through that, and clearly you don't do it all on your own. But how do you make a meritocracy of that? Is it just, you know, just knowledge within the business of who's really, really good? Is that…

[0:05:31] Matt Neale: Yeah, I think past performance is a really good indicator of what performance in the future might be. Obviously, the alignment with the kind of future values and behaviours of the agency were very important, but again, it wasn't like we had to manage out any bad actors or anything like that. I think when you're looking at merit and looking at performance and kind of looking at past behaviours, it makes it quite easy, and in some cases we would have kind of one-on-one interviews, but we would make sure that there was, you know, a small panel of people from both agencies, and we would get together and go, you know, what do you think, and discuss it.

[0:06:14] Ben Smith: That's great insight because in so many roles, you know, that has to happen at scale and fast, doesn't it? And I think one of the things that I think a lot of people in the London market, anyway, the UK market, don't necessarily realise is that Ketchum was the bigger business than Golin pre‑merger. Golin had a lot of momentum in the last couple of years by doing great work, but Ketchum was the bigger business. So that must have been quite interesting – not about tension – but an interesting way to navigate through, because you had, in that sense, Golin as the business with a bit of momentum, Ketchum as the larger firm.

[0:06:47] Matt Neale: Yeah, in different markets, different brands had momentum, and different brands had scale. So Germany is a really good example. Ketchum was much bigger in Germany than the legacy Golin business was. Actually, in many markets it was a bit more complementary than you might think. But to be honest, size doesn't really matter, I think, when it comes to excellence in public relations. I remember when I first arrived at Golin way back in the day, 2005. We must have been the 35th or 36th largest agency in the country at the time, and we had set ourselves the mission to try and win Agency of the Year, which is obviously done through the work, within three years, and we did. And I think at that time we were maybe the 30th largest agency. So size doesn't matter, I think, as much as the work that you're doing for clients, your point of view on the industry, the quality of your talent. We're obviously a much larger agency together, as Golin Ketchum, but you know, it's never been a north star for us to become the biggest. We are, you know, we're now kind of getting up there.

[0:08:04] Ben Smith: Well, you're a multiple PR Moment Award winner now, Matt, so congratulations for that. Just on the work – you mentioned it there – what does a large, ambitious, growth‑focused PR firm do now? Because for many, I mean, earned media is having – I would say – having its moment. I think it's been important for a long, long time. But clearly, with AI, it's having another, an even greater moment.

[0:08:27] Matt Neale: Yes.

[0:08:27] Ben Smith: But for a long time, PR and media relations has been used as a bit of a Trojan horse for PR firms to then go and sell other services to important clients. What does that look like now at scale? What is the nuts and bolts of the Golin Ketchum offer, if you like? Is it still kind of that, or has it evolved a bit?

[0:08:47] Matt Neale: Yeah. Well, the Golin Ketchum offer is… good point. It's going to take a little while. You know, we've been going since…

[0:08:56] Ben Smith: Sorry, I’m sorry – the Golin…

[0:08:58] Matt Neale: What are the nuts and bolts of the Golin Ketchum offer, Ben? Well, I think, you know, I risk this sounding a little bit lofty, but the legacy Golin business had a reputation for creativity. You know, here in the UK for the last two years it has topped the league tables as the most creative agency in the country, and this is a market that is defined by independents in that creative space. I think we are the only agency that is part of a group that is constantly at the top of those lists. I think what Omnicom gave us, aside from just the deep, decades‑long client relationships that Ketchum was famous for, was the consumer insights, the customer data that Interpublic spent billions of dollars on, and now with Omnicom they have democratised it for everyone that works in public relations. So I think if we can be at the apex of clearly human ingenuity, human creativity, backed up by all of the audience data, the customer data, the consumer data, that now enables us to predict the outcomes of what we do – if we can be at that confluence, that's kind of… I don't want to be oversimplistic, but that's core to the offering of the new agency, which is really that kind of head and heart.

[0:10:32] Ben Smith: We chatted before, and it was an interesting difference that you made me think about when you said this before. You worked for a holding company in Interpublic, and now you work for an operating company in Omnicom. Just talk people through what the practical difference is for someone like you.

[0:10:48] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean it's a big difference. So a holding company, as the name suggests, they hold the assets, and their principal function is to report the financial results of those assets to investors, and then raise money from the Street or from the City in order to grow those assets. And as long as you're doing well, they kind of don't really interfere. So you're in splendid isolation for a lot of the time, which for us was great because we were crushing it for five years, and so they kind of left us alone. An operating company is very different. So they still have the same responsibility to report the results and to bring money in, but they're much more interested in what is the red thread that runs between the businesses, and how can those agencies work together, increasingly through technology, to solve complex problems together. So, you know, it's a big shift, I think, for us because we're used to just trying to have to solve everything on our own. And, you know, some people have worked for decades at legacy Golin, and were just used to kind of figuring it out ourselves, going away and doing it. So that's quite a shift of attitude and behaviours. And so now increasingly we are solving problems with other agencies within the Omnicom PR Group – so Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, Porter Novelli, Portland here in the UK, a whole slew of public affairs agencies. And I have a feeling this is the way that the industry is going. Omnicom PR Group, which is the group that we're part of, has won what I am certain is the pitch of the year. It's not out in the media yet, so I can't really name it – we have to see if the clients want to do that. And looking back at the work, it was a number of agencies that came together and formed a specialist business to tackle this. There's no way that any of the agencies could have won this on their own or dislodged it from the partner that they'd worked with for three decades. And so it's taken a while for me, but I think I am now starting to see the advantages of working in a different way. But after doing everything on your own for a long time, it takes a little while to get used to. But the last three wins that we've had have been partnering with our sister agencies.

[0:13:22] Ben Smith: And is the type of work you're therefore offering similar to pre‑merger, or are you more focused on the earned creative bit? I guess you already were, but you know what I mean. Is it a bit more limited, or is it a bit more niched, or is it the same?

[0:13:36] Matt Neale: I think it's broader. So the assignments are getting more complex.

[0:13:41] Ben Smith: But your role within that wider brief is what I mean.

[0:13:44] Matt Neale: Oh, I see. I think the role is similar. It's just that when you're trying to solve something that's quite complex, maybe the data scientists might come from our side. Maybe the creative side might come from ours. We've got a really deep planning bench, so those are the things we're probably famous for within Omnicom. But we might be wanting to borrow public affairs capabilities from one of the US agencies or some technology capabilities from another. We have, you know, we have most of those. But if these clients are wanting the best in the world, then that's increasingly being sourced from multi‑agency client teams.

[0:14:29] Ben Smith: I guess for those global briefs, right? But I was going to ask you around big global accounts. How many would you say there are these days? It's hard, you know, it's hard to define. Broadly, has that number got bigger or smaller in the last 10 years? I had a theory for a while it was getting a bit smaller, but maybe things are starting to change.

[0:14:47] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean, just speaking at the agency that I used to run 10 years ago, I think we had one or two kind of big global accounts, and at the time of the merger, we had about 10.

[0:15:03] Ben Smith: I think Golin at that time would outperform the market, yeah, for that sort of stuff.

[0:15:07] Matt Neale: And some of these clients we've had for a long time, and they've just been trusting us with more and more work, so they're getting bigger. There definitely seems to be more coming up in review at the moment.

[0:15:20] Ben Smith: Okay, slightly, but let's deal with that now then, because that is interesting, isn't it? I mean, I suppose the first part of the question is: are there more or less global accounts than there were 10 years ago? I think what you're sort of saying is you reckon it might be about the same.

[0:15:31] Matt Neale: Probably. I think it's maybe just certain agencies are taking market share.

[0:15:35] Ben Smith: Yeah, which is, you know, the normal cycle of these things. But yes, there is definitely a trend, isn't there, for big account reviews happening in the last six months, maybe a bit longer. What's behind that? Is there anything, or is it just a random cycle of life?

[0:15:51] Matt Neale: No, I think it's quite specific, and it's hard to know what is the driving factor. But I think a number of things are happening. One, many big corporations have made significant investments in AI technology, and they are transforming their businesses. And therefore, they're looking to their marketing and comms partners and going, "Have we got the right partner for the company that we're going to be? Have we got the right partner to help us with our transformation?" I don't think they're unhappy with the work that they're seeing from their partners, but they're asking a question: have we got the right people for the next five or ten years? And I think this massive inflection point of technology is causing a lot of departments to consider whether they need to make a change.

[0:16:42] Ben Smith: Is that change to spend more, spend less, spend the same, or does it depend?

[0:16:48] Matt Neale: I think it's definitely to do more for less, but then that money is reinvested in another area. I don't think clients are spending less. They're wanting to get more efficiency for what they were doing, and they're wanting to reinvest that money in other channels, in some of the new areas of the business, to get more performance. And, you know, it's something that the best agencies are bringing to their clients. "Hey, we used to be able to do this for you last year. By the way, we think that we were investing money in this media, which is less important now, and we can find efficiencies of 5, 10, 15, 20%, and we think that this is an area that you should be investing it in." So I think a lot of those conversations are going on. And then there's obviously a lot of change in the industry scene at the moment, and I think when there's, you know, mega‑mergers going on, smaller mergers, private equity getting into firms…

[0:17:49] Ben Smith: A lot of PE, yeah. I mean, we're talking about that. I suppose, related to that theme is – and PR firms definitely can clearly run accounts on their own – but I suppose what you're sort of hinting towards is that you have a hypothesis anyway that for the real big accounts…

[0:18:10] Matt Neale: Yeah.

[0:18:10] Ben Smith: We're getting towards a potential time when no agency, whether it's PR, advertising, whatever, can do it on its own. Is that essentially where you think the market is headed?

[0:18:26] Matt Neale: Maybe not quite as blunt as that. I think there is going to be a bifurcation in the market.

[0:18:33] Ben Smith: Define bifurcation.

[0:18:35] Matt Neale: A split, a fork in the road.

[0:18:36] Ben Smith: Gotcha.

[0:18:37] Matt Neale: And, I mean, this could not be true, but this is my theory at the moment. I think the small independents – there's always going to be a place for those. You know, I almost consider early Golin a small independent. We didn't own it, but we treated it like we owned it, and we were able to move very, very fast. So I think those small independents that I think are particularly in demand in areas like corporate advisory, public affairs, are still quite robust. Then also some of the parts of the consumer market that are quite media‑relations driven, quite media‑focused. I think that where clients are looking for quite a white‑glove service, and they want to see the same senior four people month in, month out. And I don't think those accounts are too reliant on artificial intelligence, on huge data lakes and data pools that you can drive to formula. So that feels pretty good, and I think that's really encouraging for people that are setting up a PR agency this year. And, you know, we wish them much, much success because a lot of innovation tends to come from the small players. Then I think you're going to see a confluence and building of scale around the very big agencies that have access to the kind of consumer and customer ID data that Omnicom does. And I think that, you know, the last two or three big pitches – so kind of seven‑figure pitches – that we've been part of, the data offering and the ability to walk in and demonstrate that we understand your consumers' behaviours as well, or close to as well, as the client does, and that we can predict the behaviour of consumers if they are exposed to this message, exposed to this content, if we place it with this influencer or on this newspaper, radio show or TV show, and then predict and then actually determine whether or not that led to a sale, which is something that has only been unlocked in the last two months. I think that's super powerful, and if you don't have that, I think it's going to be hard to compete at the higher end. So I think the only place I would maybe feel a bit uncomfortable in is the mid‑ and larger‑size independents that just don't have access to this data.

[0:21:29] Ben Smith: Yeah.

[0:21:29] Matt Neale: So you could get small agencies continuing to do very, very well, and then the big networked agencies, I think just because of that access to this information, they're going to clean up.

[0:21:41] Ben Smith: Right. Well, it's interesting. I mean, I suppose there is a school of thought that says, will they be able to buy access to that data through third‑party tools or whatever else? And that's interesting to observe. But yeah, what you're saying is, if you have the data in‑house, you have a strategic advantage, potentially.

[0:21:58] Matt Neale: I mean, the real‑ID stuff that Omnicom has in the US – they know pretty much everything about 98% of the population through credit card data and… yeah, we do this for some of the big banks. So you can't buy that. I mean, it cost Interpublic a couple of billion, I think they paid, in order to get that, and we see…

[0:22:22] Ben Smith: We see that with a lot of the acquisitions that the holding groups are making – that they're making data acquisitions. They're the big acquisitions, aren't they?

[0:22:28] Matt Neale: And then the kind of flywheel aspect of it, where you're seeing how that spend is going through to the major retailers. I think the same is true with AI. Yeah, of course you can get ChatGPT, but it can't just be a bolt‑on. I think the AI platforms that you're using have to be plugged into all of the data, consumer data. Otherwise, you're just using something that anyone can do, and it's not really much of a differentiator.

[0:22:58] Ben Smith: Right. How do you see the current state of PR globally, would you say? Which markets excite you? Which ones are growing? You can tell us which ones are struggling if you want.

[0:23:07] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's much evidence, on the aggregate, that the public relations market is booming at the moment. I think certain sectors are. Public affairs and government work, I think, is doing really well right now. If you just take the country that I now call home, you know, the more mercurial the White House is, that is just generating opportunities for public affairs shops as they're helping clients navigate through…

[0:23:41] Ben Smith: Everyone wants an answer.

[0:23:42] Matt Neale: Yeah, a challenging government environment – we should put it that way. And I think the same is true for corporate advisory. So I think that there's a lot of growth in that area. I think healthcare this year, or for the last 12 months, has been a little quieter. I do feel that's cyclical. We do expect towards the end of the year a lot of major briefs to come in.

[0:24:10] Ben Smith: Just as new drugs come to market, in essence.

[0:24:12] Matt Neale: Yeah, or it's due to M&A activity in the healthcare space, so that kind of needs to get resolved first before they come to market. But I think that's going to get very busy again. In the heartland of brand and consumer, I think any growth that agencies are achieving is by taking market share from each other. I think the efficiencies that you're getting in content creation through AI are obviously being passed on to clients. That feels probably a little bit flatter than some of the other areas, such as corporate and public affairs. And I think tech is starting to bounce back a little bit, and geographically, you know, the United States – I think just the exceptionalism of the US economy is… you know, we're seeing excellent growth there. I'm not sure if that's as true in the UK and Europe at the moment.

[0:25:18] Ben Smith: Geopolitical uncertainty tends to affect confidence, affects growth.

[0:25:23] Matt Neale: And change in government every couple of years probably doesn't help either. And then Asia's kind of been pretty robust – kind of low growth, but not spectacular.

[0:25:34] Ben Smith: Okay, so it's interesting that you're fairly robust there, and there are clearly some bits that are up, some bits are flat or maybe a bit down, but it's an overall positive picture. Although it's clearly not the post‑COVID boom times and things like that. It's interesting to talk about market share, isn't it? I've often pondered about how to measure market share in PR, and you must have thought about that as well. It's not an easy thing to do, is it?

[0:26:02] Matt Neale: No, it's not. I mean, you can kind of look at the league tables, although I think…

[0:26:09] Ben Smith: But that's revenue, isn't it, which is a related variable. You couldn't possibly… I mean, you can argue whether they're… I don't blame the publishers for that, by the way. It's Sarbanes‑Oxley that killed it, and unfortunately it's… we should probably just move on. But it's not market share. It's something, but it's not market share. But it's interesting, and I used to think about whether we could relate it to the number of employees, but now with digital and AI and efficiencies, I think that's become less relevant as well. So it's a tricky… But you do think about it as a leader. You're sitting there. You've got some mechanic, have you, that suggests whether Golin Ketchum's market share is going up, down, or staying about the same?

[0:26:52] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean, if I look at the last five years, which I can talk about because it's all public information, I think the compound growth across the last five years was around 9%, and there are other agencies that were shrinking by around 9% over that period. So you can draw an inference that, okay, the market share within this category moved from these groups of agencies to these groups of agencies. I think that's fairly accurate.

[0:27:23] Ben Smith: Yeah, it's never going to be bulletproof market share data. It's just interesting. What does a PR firm look like these days, would you say, in terms of service offers? You touched on it in terms of Golin, but is that more broadly where you… because PR firms have had quite a good 10 years of offering different stuff. Do you see that as the way forward – that continued expansion of services – or do you think the handbrake might come on that a little bit?

[0:27:55] Matt Neale: I think the PR industry is brilliant with its agility and moving as fast as it needs to, you know, just being slightly ahead of probably where clients are comfortable. So you're bringing new innovation. It's a remarkable part of our industry's success. I think there are other areas in the marketing mix that cannot pivot as quickly, or have not shown the evidence of pivoting as quickly, as public relations has, and that's continuing to happen right now.

[0:28:31] Ben Smith: I have a theory, by the way, that the structure of PR teams, in terms of how close they are to the clients on a day‑to‑day level, just gives it such a competitive advantage compared to other agency structures. And I suspect that might be the critical bit that means that PR tends to pivot a bit quicker, and they're a bit smaller, so maybe things happen a bit easier.

[0:28:52] Matt Neale: I think that's a very sound theory. I mean, in the UK, you know, a PR team around a big brand could be half a dozen people, maybe at the top end a dozen people. In the US, those numbers would be bigger, but the same… you know, teams on the advertising side can often be hundreds of people.

[0:29:10] Ben Smith: And they don't get that day‑to‑day… They get contact, but it's not day‑to‑day, hour‑to‑hour contact, I don't think.

[0:29:17] Matt Neale: No, and there's often layers of hierarchy, and…

[0:29:20] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[0:29:20] Matt Neale: And, you know, it's a company within a company, so it's harder to be agile. But then again, I just think public relations people – we know this – are just inherently curious, and it's that curiosity about what's next, embracing what's next, that has defined our longevity, and I'm sure it will do today, as all client organisations and agencies are going through this huge moment of transformation. Some of which is directly related to our industry, like media changing. Some of which we are reacting to, which is, you know, Company X has spent billions on AI infrastructure, and then they're just… you know, they are then asking their teams and their agencies to work in a completely different way.

[0:30:10] Ben Smith: I thought you were going to tell me that PR people were more intelligent and creative than advertising people then, Matt.

[0:30:16] Matt Neale: Well, if you put it out there, I'm definitely not going to contradict it.

[0:30:19] Ben Smith: Fine. Well, you've worked in America for a long time now. What's the biggest difference between the UK and US PR creatively, would you say?

[0:30:28] Matt Neale: Creatively?

[0:30:30] Ben Smith: Yeah, we talked a bit about the market in a previous podcast – I'll include that in the show notes – which I think that's broadly… I mean, market‑wise, basically six times the size, isn't it? Six times population, six times the size. Just on the creative.

[0:30:42] Matt Neale: I think it's a product, partly, of geography. So if you are doing a national campaign in the US, you know you're reaching hundreds of millions of people potentially, 50 states. There is a functionality and a pragmatism to some of those campaigns that is understandable. You know, you can't do a stunt in London and hope that it carries across the entire vast country. Also, the newspaper culture, whilst nowhere near the power that they used to have like 10 years ago, you know, pre‑Leveson Inquiry and all of that, it's still here. Our offices are at Bankside, just behind the Tate Modern, I go to M&S Food Hall for my lunch. They sell newspapers before you check out – you would never see that in an American supermarket.

[0:31:44] Ben Smith: Is anyone buying them?

[0:31:47] Matt Neale: Maybe they worked out that there's a massive public relations agency there, and they can at least point… I don't know.

[0:31:53] Ben Smith: No, I know what you mean. There is still a focus on… we still have the paper review on the news, which I thoroughly enjoy. I'm quite surprised we still have it, but…

[0:32:04] Matt Neale: Exactly. Absolutely.

[0:32:04] Ben Smith: They might do that on a Sunday in the US.

[0:32:04] Matt Neale: So even though they're less influential, and for good reason they don't have some of the powers that they used to have, it is a part of the creative culture and therefore the shape of creative work in the UK: leaning more towards humour, leaning more towards the kind of things that these papers are writing about around contemporary culture.

[0:32:27] Ben Smith: What's the equivalent of that in the US then? When you think about the earned media creative over there, is it less about humour? It's obviously less media‑focused.

[0:32:37] Matt Neale: I mean, British humour doesn't work quite as well in the US. So I think humour is less of a factor. Activations and installations are very popular in the US, and I think those work particularly well with creators and influencers because it just gives people a lot of content. So you could maybe say that some of the influence of newspaper culture has just been displaced to influencers.

[0:33:06] Ben Smith: Well, I think that's interesting. That's a trend that's happening here, but I suspect you're a bit ahead of that. That creator economy and the interaction between that and the public relations sector in America is probably 18 months or so ahead, I suspect.

[0:33:21] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean, Cannes this year – that was obviously a really big theme. We do a lot of influencer work for Adobe, and it was interesting listening to influencers and what they need, and even Adobe's… I’ll call it a booth, but it's nearly a city. It was designed so that influencers could have a backdrop and post from. So there's probably a lot of that. And then I think – and this is important – because the amounts of money that you're spending often for national campaigns in the US are so vast, there is a pragmatism to how that money is being spent, and also, is it really closely tied with business outcomes, which it needs to be if you're unlocking, you know, three, four million dollars to spend it. And that's quite… yeah, it's a different kind of pressure on the creative to make sure that it's really aligned. And I think we're going to see more of that because of the impact of consumer and customer data on planning, media, targeting. You know, we can now target media with the same degree of science that only paid media could a few years ago.

[0:34:38] Ben Smith: Absolutely.

[0:34:38] Matt Neale: Years ago.

[0:34:39] Ben Smith: Golin was on a march pre‑, indeed pre‑merger. How do you keep that momentum up as Golin Ketchum? Because, I mean, you must want to. But you must scratch your head and think, right, how do I actually do that? Because momentum is… you can't touch it, can you?

[0:34:58] Matt Neale: No, and momentum is everything in our game. Well, you know, we're still… the people that drove the success on the Golin side, they're still here, and now we've got incredible depth of colleagues from the Ketchum side. So there's that. But, you know, over the first five, six months of this year, we definitely took a step back from new business, and you know, that is the driver of momentum.

[0:35:32] Ben Smith: The cause of momentum.

[0:35:33] Matt Neale: And that was right that we did, because we really had to work on the communication, bringing the two companies together, making sure that people feel they belong to the new thing. But that's now in the rear‑view mirror. So we're kind of open for business for pitching again. So I think six months, if you know you're doing it in a planned way, it's not like we suddenly started losing a bunch. We just stepped back from it, and now we're fully engaged again.

[0:36:01] Ben Smith: Well, the profile of some of the creative work you've done must mean the phone's ringing, I should think.

[0:36:08] Matt Neale: Yeah, I mean, whilst we definitely did less pitching over the last six months, what I was really happy to see is the performance of the work continued. I mean, the work has continued to deliver. We had a really good Cannes. This was the third year in a row that we had won gold for idea creation. I don't think anyone's done that before. So we're able to keep the client work consistently high, and now we're going to get back into the fight on the new business.

[0:36:41] Ben Smith: Right. Of your competitors, who do you worry about the most?

[0:36:46] Matt Neale: Well, it used to be Ketchum, so this has worked out super well for me. Seriously. Particularly here, you know, in the UK. I think more broadly – and this is going back to my time in the UK, but it's stayed with me ever since – any agency that is owned by the person that you're pitching against, I'm like, we have to want it as much as they do, because they are literally paying themselves. And if we do not have that same energy and enthusiasm for the work, it's going to be difficult. But when we have that, I think we're quite hard to beat. So in this market, very, very respectful and admiring of some of the great independents that are out there, and we know that we have to be at our best.

[0:37:42] Ben Smith: It's interesting you said that, because there's a lot of… we talked about global account wins earlier, which is obviously incredibly important. But it's also important to win domestically, isn't it? Everyone always says that.

[0:37:52] Matt Neale: Yeah. I think a healthy business in any country in the world that's part of a network – you want two‑thirds of that business to be local, culturally relevant, and then if you get a third that's coming your way from the network, that's great.

[0:38:07] Ben Smith: Right.

[0:38:08] Matt Neale: But you don't want to be one of these blancmange, cookie‑cutter networks that's just reliant on global work and doesn't really have…

[0:38:18] Ben Smith: You can do that, but you're not going to grow.

[0:38:21] Matt Neale: No, you're not going to grow, and then if those big global accounts go away, you've got nothing.

[0:38:26] Ben Smith: And you see that. I mean, let's not name names, but you can see that in global offices that, you know, get merged into whatever.

[0:38:34] Matt Neale: Yeah, and that's why I love what Undine's built here. It's always going toe‑to‑toe with the most British, UK, English, London agencies, and I don't think there's anyone else that's really doing that.

[0:38:54] Ben Smith: Yeah, and you're right; it comes down to people, doesn't it? It does. I mean, we can say what we want about this PR brand or that agency. In the end, clients buy the people. It's such a cliché I'm hesitant to say it, but it is the reality.

[0:39:08] Matt Neale: Fortunately, it's true.

[0:39:10] Ben Smith: Yeah.

[0:39:10] Matt Neale: Fortunately, it's true because we've got some great ones.

[0:39:11] Ben Smith: And what do you actually do every day, other than this and the PR Moment Podcast? I mean, don't give us a day in the life of Matt Neale, but as an agency CEO, what do you spend your time on? Are you all on the numbers? I'm not imagining you do a great deal of client work. What are you up to?

[0:39:25] Matt Neale: I mean, there's been a little bit more of the numbers because of the merger of Omnicom and Interpublic, and same with Ketchum. But in normal times, you're based in a… you've got a leadership team, in my case 20 people, and you're trying to create the conditions in which they can perform at their very best. You're trying to career‑path the best people that you have. You're trying to create belief that we can do… you know, we're capable of anything. You're trying to make sure that the values and vision of the agency are understood and practised, because it's when you get a bad apple in there that can cause all sorts of issues. And then, for me, my favourite bit is just getting involved in the work.

[0:40:22] Ben Smith: Right. And you still do that a fair bit, do you?

[0:40:24] Matt Neale: Yeah, but I'm very careful not to be at the brainstorm, because, you know, I'm 52. I shouldn't be coming up with ideas.

[0:40:34] Ben Smith: Everyone starts looking at you, going, "I don't think so, Matt."

[0:40:38] Matt Neale: No, the problem is in certain cultures where it's quite hierarchical. They'll just go, "Yes," and they'll write it down. And you're like, no, this is probably a really bad idea.

[0:40:49] Ben Smith: There's always the danger that because we've been around so long, we go, "Well, that didn't work before," but it might well be brilliant now.

[0:40:55] Matt Neale: Yeah, I know. "I've seen that 20 years ago." Doesn't matter. I mean, there was stuff at Cannes this year where you were like, I've so seen that before – it's just done in a different way. I think the safest thing to do, what I do, is work with the senior creatives when it's kind of like 70% there, particularly on the stuff we're taking to Cannes, particularly on the stuff that we think has award potential or has real impact for our clients. So I get involved in the last 30% of it, which I think is a safe place.

[0:41:27] Ben Smith: You say 70, 70%?

[0:41:28] Matt Neale: Yeah – so 70% of it's been worked out.

[0:41:32] Ben Smith: It's like an eight out of 10 or seven. How do we get it to nine out of 10? That sort of…

[0:41:37] Matt Neale: Yeah, that sort of critical voice at the end, towards the end of the process, that goes, yeah, not sure about that.

[0:41:42] Ben Smith: Okay. And finally, what if you weren't a PR guy? I'm not sure you define yourself as a PR guy, but what would you do if you didn't have a career in public relations?

[0:41:58] Matt Neale: This obviously sounds deeply sad, but the original idea was to somehow get hired by MI6, and my plan was I did the Foreign Office exams, and I think there's eight rounds.

[0:42:13] Ben Smith: Quite tough, aren't they?

[0:42:14] Matt Neale: Yeah, which is why I'm in this industry now. There's eight rounds, and I fell quite hard at the fourth fence, so that didn't happen.

[0:42:26] Ben Smith: So you got almost halfway.

[0:42:27] Matt Neale: No, but I have met a couple of people from the intelligence world afterwards, and I don't think I would have done so well.

[0:42:38] Ben Smith: Almost by definition, you have to be wired a bit differently, don't you? And hopefully they didn't tell you that they were in the intelligence world.

[0:42:45] Matt Neale: I don't know. One was through work, and another just by chance – who knows, maybe they weren't telling the truth. So that didn't work. And PR was the second thing. And then, looking back, I think I would have liked to get involved in film production or TV production, because when we make ideas, we put so much love and sweat into them – we're writing scripts, and they live… Yeah, but they live for… you know, some of them just live for a day, some live on for months, some you might remember the next year. To have been involved in helping people create ideas that you remember decades later, I think that would have been incredible.

[0:43:32] Ben Smith: Well, in a sense, that was the golden age of advertising, wasn't it? And sadly we're no longer there, I think to all of our regret, actually. But yeah, that would be the dream. Maybe you hinted at the future of public relations there, Matt.

[0:43:46] Matt Neale: What was yours? Did you have one?

[0:43:48] Ben Smith: That was… do you know, that was always my problem. I didn't really, and I wish I had. My sister, she's a doctor, and she basically always wanted to be a doctor from when she was tiny. And so I fell into publishing, stroke sales, and you know what it's like – you end up being, often after X number of years, you end up being all right at it.

[0:44:11] Matt Neale: Yeah.

[0:44:11] Ben Smith: And you keep doing it, and that's… but I would have loved – it's an interesting thought – I would have loved to have something I absolutely wanted to definitively do, but with regret I didn't. And I think that's true for lots of people. I'm the majority on that, but I've always been slightly jealous of people who had a vision of what their career wanted to be, because in that sense, it makes that decision a hell of a lot easier, doesn't it?

[0:44:38] Matt Neale: Yeah, it does. Yeah. I'd like to have a bookshop one day. Doesn't need to make any money.

[0:44:43] Ben Smith: I don't think you need to worry about that, Matt. It won't make any money. But…

[0:44:51] Matt Neale: Money pit.

[0:44:51] Ben Smith: Yeah, it'll be fine. I'll come along, and as long as you serve coffee as well, I'll come to your bookshop.

[0:44:51] Matt Neale: Yeah.

[0:44:51] Ben Smith: Matt Neale, the CEO of Golin Ketchum, thanks so much for being on the PR Moment Podcast.

[0:44:56] Matt Neale: Thank you, Ben. It's been an absolute pleasure.

[0:44:59] PRmoment Voiceover: Thanks for listening to the PRmoment Podcast, produced in association with the Markettiers Network.

[0:45:09] Ben Smith: If you've enjoyed the show, please do review us on iTunes and give us a decent rating.