The head of one of the world's biggest PR firms says being Irish 'is an enormous gift'

THE BOSS OF global PR agency FleishmanHillard says that being Irish has been ‘an enormous gift’ in his work internationally.

Former RTÉ reporter and Dublin native John Saunders was appointed as the CEO and president of the US public-relations firm in November of last year.

The company has about 2,700 employees worldwide across 80 offices, including Dublin, and is estimated to be the world’s third largest PR agency by fee income with revenues of about $580 million in 2014.

Speaking on Thursday at the Public Relations Institute of Ireland (PRII) annual conference, Saunders said that his Irish roots have been an aid when working overseas.

“I think if you apply it in the right way, with a large degree of modesty, being Irish in a global environment is an enormous gift,” he said.

“I do think that our sense of neutrality, our sense of taking the work seriously, but not ourselves too seriously, helps enormously.”

Soft skills

He said that living in Ireland helped to teach him ‘soft skills’ which would serve him later in his career, and said.

“(Ireland) is a country with a very buoyant capital … a really vibrant public relations industry. This is as good as anywhere in the world, and we constantly get an opportunity to work on such a wide variety of issues that people don’t in America,” he said.

“In the years to come, it is going to be the soft skills that will become more important, being able to empathise with people. If I bring a skill to it, they are the skills that I learned here in Ireland.”

Saunders (centre) with PRII CEO John Carroll and president Jacqueline Hall

He added: “It’s only when you live in somewhere like London, or you work in Germany, or go to Hong Kong or Beijing, you realise that not everyone else has that.”

“The business that we have in Ireland punches well above its weight. Within FleishmanHillard and within other big PR companies and organisations, it is recognised globally that Ireland is a beacon and I’m proud to be a part of that.”

Saunders also said that the FleishmanHillard’s decision to appoint him as head of the company was “both brave, and a very big risk”.

“I’m not somebody who went to live in America 30 years ago, my home has continued to be in Rathfarnham. I came out of, in global terms, a small PR market. I didn’t work on some of the big global clients,” he said.

Financial responsibility

Fleishman’s parent company Omnicom reported that its PR business decreased by 0.9% during the first three months of 2016, the first full quarter in which Saunders was in the job, while advertising grew organically by 7.9% in the period.

Trade publication Ad Age reported that several senior staff left the agency during the early stages of the year and noted that it has lost some major accounts recently, such as Cadillac.

Shortly afterwards, another US trade publication, Observer, also reported that several senior staff had left the company.

At the time Saunders dismissed the idea that it was due to a change in the company’s culture and suggested it was instead related to a cost-reduction exercise. He also said that March 2016 was the best month in Fleishman’s 70-year history.

Speaking at the PRII conference, Saunders said that the company’s turnover will soon “go through the roof”.

“We are owned by a holding company, we’re an important part of a publicly traded company. We have quarterly results, we’ve got annual results. There’s a financial responsibility as well,” he said.

“If I personally don’t have a good relationship with our owners then that’s a real difficulty for the firm. In this year our turnover will go through the roof because on of our subsidiary companies, GMMB in DC, are the lead advertising agency on the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“Practically all the Hillary Clinton commercials that are made, are made by FleishmanHillard subsidiaries. While the profit margins on that are very small, the turnover is huge.”