Why Weber Shandwick is thinking beyond PR—behind the shop's new identity

Weber Shandwick doesn't want to be pigeonholed as a PR shop. Instead, the firm is looking to reposition itself to help brands think more broadly about how they fit into culture. To this end, the agency has spent the last year investing in consultant practices centered around geopolitical strategy, media security, and workforce transformation as well as what it calls its "culture intelligence engine" with 250 employees. The Interpublic Group of Cos. agency also picked up significant wins last year, such as being named global consumer agency of record for McAfee and AB InBev’s global corporate reputation agency of record. Weber Shandwick’s new brand identity was created by IPG's FutureBrand, with the development and launch supported by brands within The Weber Shandwick Collective, including Flipside, which is focused on web development; That Lot, focused on social content; Resolute Digital, specialist in media buying and planning; and United Minds, Powell Tate and KRC Research, a trio of companies that led the work to update the agency’s corporate values and behaviors. Upcoming Ad Age events Ad Age Next: Multicultural Marketing on May 9 Ad Age In-Depth: TV Pivot on May 24 and 25 To find out more, Ad Age spoke with CEO Gail Heimann. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Can you explain your 'in-culture' repositioning and how it benefits brands? If you are a brand or company, do you want to play a role in culture? For sure. Do you want your brand to be threaded through culture? Yes. If you take it from most of the organizations who are out there talking about it, [culture] falls into the trend space. A trend is by nature sort of ephemeral and sort of transient. I like trends as much as the next person, but that's what they are. Our thought is what can we do that creates an enduring space for a brand to truly shape culture? Some of the work we've done over the years that I think is [a good example] is the work for Mattel and Barbie. You take a look at that work—'You can be anything'—and suddenly there's a Maya Angelou Barbie, a Queen Elizabeth Barbie. Suddenly a doll plays a very different role in a little girl's life and has changed the nature, of that business, changed the role of that product in the world. The higher purpose is what we're going for of shaping culture. Do you consider yourself a PR agency? Are we a PR agency? Sure. Do we believe that the kind of PR we do is in cultural communications? 100%. I wouldn't walk away from the PR piece just now. I think it is interpreted differently by everyone who speaks about it, but know that it's really one of the oldest conversations in the industry—should we be a PR agency? Should we not? What are we doing? I've seen culture banded about, and some people are using it as kind of a slug for PR. I don't think that's quite right, either. The complexity of what we do and the forces we bring to it, I think, are a little bit different from perhaps how [PR is] being used. What spaces have you been investing in? We have within the Weber Shandwick Collective a consultancy called United Minds and its sole business is organizational transformation and helping clients with issues of workforce and issues around equity, etc. We continue to make investments there. Right now, if you think about what’s keeping clients and businesses awake at night, it's issues of threat, and that may be misinformation, disinformation, data security. [Last year] we created and invested in what we call the media security center, which is a consultancy around media security working on behalf of our clients. Several years ago—and this actually predated COVID—we set up a unit focused on geopolitical strategy and risk. We brought an individual from the State Department back [to work at Weber]. Witness what the world that we are inhabiting now and the war in Ukraine. We continue to beef up that unit, add so that we can counsel our clients on how best to cope with what is a very complicated situation. We believe that what we're seeing and we've seen so clearly in the last two-and-a-half years is the interrelationship between communications—what public relations has done for many years—and business strategy, which has [traditionally] been done in consultancies. You can't really separate communication from the business strategy. Therefore, we'll be investing heavily in consultative muscle to help further that relationship between communications and business strategy. We think that's an important need for our clients. Sign up for Ad Age’s Agency newsletter. What are you doing in terms of workforce transformation? Typically, pre-COVID, in a situation of M&A, two companies that don't have any cultural resemblance to one another merge, and somebody has to come in and consult as to how to bring those two companies together. What's the best way to do that? That's a very typical situation. There are other situations where there's some kind of event that goes on in a company that creates some cultural issues. Then how do you get in and work with the workforce? Then you get into the gears that we've lived through COVID, where people are working hybrid, people are working solely remote, figuring out how to create, a lot of this is around work culture. How to create and shape high-performance cultures in whatever state that workforce should be and how to figure out how to shape your workforce. All of those things right now are critically important to clients. Those are the kinds of things that United Minds focuses on. What client challenges have stood out for you? Everybody wants to feel that their business is as best protected as it can be. The reality is in incidences of misinformation, it impacts the market and businesses. Doing the adequate preparedness, as well as having a real plan around mitigation, is really important. That's why we built a partnership with an organization called Blackbird AI. They are a technology solution around threat detection. [We might work for] companies that simply want to have the best means to protect their business in any event, or they might be companies that have had an issue and then want to better protect [themselves]. We've seen it again and again where businesses are heavily impacted as even the most unusual thing moves across the internet at velocity and can have an impact.

Why Weber Shandwick is thinking beyond PR—behind the shop's new identity

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