Women in PR Ana Adi

The pandemic has brought communicators a variety of challenges, greater pressure and visibility and a renewed sense of value. It also required reorganization and rethinking of both delivery and process. Just think of all in person meetings that had to move online, from team events to press conferences and autoshows.

For this final episode, we’re coming home, to Germany, to chat with Katja Bott. She’s learning the Global Communications team of Mercedes-Benz Cars & Vans since October 2018 having worked with the company for more than 17 years in Germany and the US.

Is there something that unites PR practice globally? And more importantly, is there something that the PR practice as a whole can identify as its ideal professional self?
Anne Gregory will help us find some answers to these questions. She is currently Chair of Corporate Communication at the University of Huddersfield and has formerly chaired the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management. It is during her tenure there that she directed the seven continent team in developing the Global Capability Framework for the profession, a framework that we want to talk about today. Among many things she’s written (more than 80 publications) is the CIPRs AI in PR Ethics Guide.

I met with Marian Salzman, Senior Vice President, Communications at Philip Morris International, for a fireside chat at the Global Communication Summit in 2020. At PMI, her work is focused on designing a smoke-free future as the company embarks on its journey of transformation. She’s also a trendspotter, a professional hobby as she calls it, and a much awarded public relations executive being listed in PRWeek’s Global Power Book and as a PR News Top Woman in PR. Her most recent trends report is called Zoomsday Predictions

There’s often talk about international public relations yet it doesn’t seem to be very clear what exactly do we mean by it: PR work done by the same organization in multiple countries, PR work done together with an international team. What’s more, international PR and cross-cultural communication are often conflated, implying that communication practitioners are by default cultural translators and intermediaries too. But are they? Can they be?
We’ll talk about all that and more with today’s guest, Jo Osborn who has both an international career and has worked with multinational organizations, both in house and as a consultant, in government and for blue-chip businesses. A graduate in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, she started her career in her hometown Hong Kong, before moving to Italy and then onto London. Jo is currently the Head of Communications and Corporate Brand for Reckitt.

How can teams perform better and how can team members work better together. In this week's episode we talk about alignment as a process, the science behind it and the applications in practice.

Today we’ll focus on public relations for social justice, on the times when activism is public relations. To do so, we’ll also consider whether public relations practitioners themselves should be change agents. And we’ll be introducing a new view on theorizing public relations: queer theorizing.
This is all part of Dr Erica Ciszek’s research and it is with them that we’ll be chatting today. They are an Assistant Professor with the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas with their work published in many of PR’s most valued academic journals including Public Relations Review, Journal of Communication and Public Relations Inquiry to name a few.