The Agency Future Forum - Agenda
Thursday 19th November

Speaker

Ondine Whittington

president, Golin Ketchum UK

Ondine is an experienced agency leader who has led businesses through acquisitions and mergers, turnarounds and business model transformations.

She is passionate and fascinated by how we evolve workplace cultures and leadership behaviours to drive high performance and growth. At the heart of this is a belief that organisations that are psychologically safe and lead with transparency, give feedback generously and build teams inclusively will in turn breed innovation, creativity and accelerate the performance of their teams and business.

Speaker

Alex Bigg

CEO, MHP Group

Alex is a skilled communications expert with nineteen years consultancy experience across corporate communications, stakeholder engagement, issues management and public affairs.

He provides strategic advice and political counsel as well as aids corporate repositioning and profile raising to senior executives in a range of organisations in both the public and private sectors. He is skilled at dovetailing stakeholder and media strategies and at leading communications campaigns encompassing a range of disciplines and sectors.

Speaker

Priti Mhatre

chief product & AI officer, Production WPP Open, WPP

With background in Tech & management consulting and a Post-graduate degree in AI from Oxford, Priti leads our AI strategy and is passionate about driving growth through technology & innovation. She is spearheading Hogarth’s Technology & AI strategy building industry-first suite of production AI service portfolio with successful track record of implementing it for global clients.​ Priti leads our Global Marketing Transformation practice & AI strategy. With over two decades of experience in digital transformation consulting and technology, she works with clients to create innovative solutions that combine production, technology, and data. ​She has successfully implemented global delivery models and established Hogarth's Marketing Transformation practice, which develops maturity and transformation strategies aligned to client challenges. ​

Speaker

Rob Waugh

freelance contributor, Press Gazette

Rob Waugh is one of Britain's leading technology and science journalists, and has written about artificial intelligence, apps and technology for newspapers including the Daily Mail, New York Post, Metro and the Telegraph over the past 25 years, and has recently exposed AI-generated ‘fake experts’ in Britain’s media in a series of articles for Press Gazette. His book on the history of AI and robotics, Nasa’s Bees, is out in Britain soon.

Panellist

Rachel Allison

founder, Axe & Saw

Rachel's mission is to build communications that reflect all of society by giving a voice to those often left out of the conversations.

She provides creative solutions, not ‘PR ideas’ that work in today’s world: a world where PR no longer operates in a silo but is blended into every waking thought and action.

Rachel thrives in developing brand and organisation culture to appeal to their community in terms they understand. Spanning strategic partnerships or developing creative concepts. The result is always to deliver real-world action and conversation.

Panellist

Nick Braund

founder, Words+Pixels

Nick Braund is the founder of Words+Pixels, the independent PR agency he launched in 2020 to tell the stories of companies shaping the future. By design sector-agnostic, the agency partners with ambitious brands across technology, consumer, and purpose-driven industries, and now works globally with partners in over 20 countries.

In less than six years, Words+Pixels has been named in the FT1000: Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies, recognised as Boutique Agency of the Year, and ranked among the top five Best UK Consultancies to Work For. The agency’s focus is on sustainable growth, building strong partnerships, and delivering creative excellence. An approach that saw it achieve nearly 50% year-on-year growth in 2024.

Equally important is its commitment to people and culture. Words+Pixels has kept retention at 92%, with no layoffs, no redundancies, and a +9 eNPS. It has also become a founding partner of People Like Us, retained a 0% gender and ethnicity pay gap, and is proudly London Living Wage accredited.

Speaker

Rebecca Grant

CEO of UK Influence practice & Chief Client Officer for EMEA Influence practice, Publicis Groupe

Rebecca is the CEO of Publicis Groupe UK’s PR, Social & Influence (PSI) Practice, overseeing MSL UK, Taylor Herring, Fabric Social, Salterbaxter and Publicis Sport & Entertainment. She is also Chief Client Officer for the PSI Practice across EMEA.

Rebecca joined the Groupe in 2024 having previously spent 13 years with BCW where she was CEO for BCW UK and global chief brand officer.

Rebecca has worked with major brands including Samsung, IHG, Shark Ninja, Microsoft and P&G.

Speaker

Adam Clyne

founder and CEO, Coolr

Adam is the founder / CEO of Coolr, a fast-growing team of nearly 200 social media and influencer experts based in London and the US.

Coolr are well known for helping brands like Burger King, Lidl, PepsiCo, Deliveroo and many others to connect with their audiences at scale using social media.

Their work is recognised as category-defining, with over40+ industry awards under their belt, including numerous ‘Agency of the Year’ wins, a Cannes Lions and of course, “the most liked tweet by a brand of all time”.

Adam is most proud of the culture they've built at Coolr with a highly diverse team of brilliant creative specialists.

Panellist

Erica Firmo

head of communications, Linkedin

Erica has spent more than 20 years building communications across many continents, from Latin America, to the US, Asia, and now Europe.

Today she leads communications for LinkedIn across the UK and Pan-Europe, shaping how the company is understood in one of the most demanding media landscapes in the world. That means steering LinkedIn through the sensitive, high-stakes moments when its reputation is on the line, guiding how its senior leaders show up in public, and building the creator and influencer partnerships that carry LinkedIn's story beyond traditional media.

Panellist

Sam Cole

global PR and events director, Cunard

Sam is an experienced senior communications professional with extensive experience leading the development of marketing and communication strategies for some of the best-known brands in the world. Responsible for internal and external communications, PR and social media, digital, advertising and effective crisis and issue management.

Panellist

Alistair Kent

director global PR & influencer marketing, SAP Concur

Alistair has been working in PR and Social Media for over 20 years now – working for B2B technology companies from numerous sectors – including mobile, IT services, financial services and telecoms.

Panellist

Darshna Kamani

director, PR & Communications, International, Dynatrace

Darshna is an experienced communications professional in the technology and cybersecurity sectors.

She believes that communications should be integrated within the sales cycle.

Darshna has spent the last 10 years of her career in in-house roles, working for international firms FireEye, Barracuda, and now Dynatrace. Before that, she worked agency-side for 7 years.

Speaker

Dr Clea Bourne

reader in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dr Clea Bourne is a Reader in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is founder and director of Goldsmiths’ MA Promotional Media: Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing. She also designed and teaches the undergraduate module, The Future of Media Work.

Clea current research examines how digital economies and markets are mediatised. Her most recent work analyses the public legitimisation of narratives surrounding digital technologies, and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation on work, culture and society.

Clea’s sole-authored books include Public Relations and the Digital: Professional Discourse and Change, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. The book unpacks the rise of digital platformisation and its impact on public relations practice. Clea locates public relations within broader scholarship on the digital disruption of professional work. She explores public relations’ current trajectory in the face of increased digital automation and commoditisation of professional skills. Throughout the book’s chapters, Clea dissects issues ranging from digital skills and recruitment, to the commoditisation of creativity, changing relations with journalism, and the implications of AI and automation for the future of public relations.

Clea has also published journal articles on the rise of the AI economy in AI & Ethics and Public Relations Inquiry, as well as book chapters on AI in Artificial Intelligence in Public Relations and Communications (Quadriga Press), and the forthcoming Sage Handbook of Promotional Culture and Society. She is currently writing her third sole-authored book entitled Understanding Promotional Media: Professions, Culture, Practice for Sage Publications.

Speaker

Andrew Bruce Smith

director, Escherman

Andrew Bruce Smith, FCIPR, MPRCA, is a well-known expert in artificial intelligence and its applications in PR and communications. With a foundational education in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic from the University of Edinburgh (1981-1985), he developed a keen interest in AI early in his career. Andrew further honed his skills in AI programming languages in the late 1980s, a time when AI was still nascent.

Pioneering the adoption of AI content tools such as Wordsmith in the early 2010s, Andrew has consistently stayed at the forefront of technological innovation. This, coupled with his leadership as the Chair of the CIPR’s AI in PR panel, makes him a much sought-after speaker and commentator on the impact of AI.

Andrew is the co-author of 'Share This' and 'Share This Too' (publisher: Wiley), best-selling handbooks that reflect the evolution of media.

Andrew’s commitment to digital innovation is evident in his early adoption of communication technologies such as e-mail (1990), the World Wide Web (1994), and Twitter (2007). Known as the "de facto godfather of PR blogging", Andrew continues to influence the industry with his insights on the confluence of PR, social media, search optimisation, and AI.

Speaker

Warren Johnson

founder, W Communications

Warren is a lifelong entrepreneur, founder of W Communications, and investor via W Capital.

Warren set up W Communications in 2009, building it into a multi-award-winning, employee-owned global marketing communications agency, famed for disruptive creative work that unites brands with culture to drive commercial success.

Today, W operates globally from hubs in the UK, US, Middle East and APAC, and has built a reputation for being among the very best, winning PRWeek’s Agency of the Decade and working with leading brands including Unilever, Virgin Atlantic and Adidas.

W Capital is an investment initiative, providing a blend of capital, strategic counsel and real-world brand-building expertise – giving founders access to the same creative, communications and commercial firepower that built W Communications.

Warren backs founders with the potential to make a disproportionate impact – commercially, culturally, or both – at every stage of the investment cycle, from seed funding and awareness-driving campaigns through to exit and beyond.