Rob Flaherty is Chairman of Ketchum, the global communications consultancy with 130 offices and affiliates worldwide. He is on the board of the Arthur W. Page Society, the Institute for Public Relations and the advisory board of Room to Read, which focuses on literacy and girls education in developing nations. Follow Rob on Twitter at @flahertyrob.
For many years now, experienced CCOs and agency counselors have appreciated that issuing segmented and conflicting messages to different stakeholders doesn’t work anymore. Fueled by the transparency of social media, what you say to employees had better be consistent with what you say to Wall Street and your customers, and vice versa. Everyone sees everything. […]
This post was originally published on the Page Society blog. I had the privilege today to moderate a discussion among more than 100 leading chief communications officers and agency leaders, all members of the Page Society. The topic was how companies are and should be responding to COVID-19. There was broad agreement that this unprecedented […]
Six years ago our agency celebrated our 90th birthday in a big way, including 90 pro bono brainstorm sessions for 90 non-profit organizations all over the world. The occasion dated our origins back to 1923, but that date — long the official date of our founding — obscured one inconvenient fact that is worth noting.
Last year Harold Burson did an interview with Boston University Professor Don Wright in which he said that a critical fault in our field is that we provide “exquisite answers to the wrong problems.” Intrigued by this phrase, I emailed the 97-year-old founder of Burson-Marsteller and asked him what he meant. He explained in the […]
A relationship is a collection of many one-of-a-kind moments. And we are grateful to IBM for so many of those. Seventeen years ago, we began a journey as “One Blue,” the name given to our Ketchum-led, multi-agency solution – one that would lead to many lifelong industry friendships, a high volume of award-winning work, and […]
In a world dominated by algorithms and data, and a diminishing of traditional media’s reach and impact on the general public, does influencing people still matter? I recently had the pleasure of tackling this subject on stage at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal with The Economist’s Gady Epstein. My answer: Yes. More than ever. Here’s […]
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