Young Changemakers Podcast: Amira Williams In Conversation with Paul Holmes

0:01The Provoke podcast brought to you by Provoke Media and produced by the international broadcast specialist Marketeers.

0:16Paul Holmes: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Provoke Media podcast, Young Changemakers edition. As many of you will be aware, we've been running the Young Changemakers competition in conjunction with We Communications for several years now. We are identifying young people now. It used to be just young women, but young people who come from underrepresented backgrounds and are making a difference in the public relations community. And the first of those this year comes from London, Amira Williams. And Amira, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background? Thanks so much, Paul. So I'm Amira.

1:10I've been working in comms for about eight years now. I currently work in corporate affairs at the Fleischman Hillard London office. But throughout my career, I kind of started in consumer PR, worked my way up there, and then I moved into B2B tech, where I spent the majority of my career. So I worked at an agency called Harvard, which is now part of VCCP Raw. And I was there for three and a half years. And then I moved to another agency called Missive. And I was there for about three and a half years as well. And now working at Flashman Hillard. Tell us a little bit, though, about your journey to becoming a PR professional in the first place.

1:53Paul Holmes: and sort of what your educational background is, how you decided that PR was the way you wanted to spend your life. Yeah, absolutely. So I went to the University of Sussex and I studied, at the time it was called media practice, but essentially the course was a combination of lots of different practical media elements. So I did photography, documentary making, script writing, graphic design, everything kind of under the media spectrum. And whilst I was at school, it was probably during my A-levels, I became really interested in media and the changing world of media. And how things at the time, it was the shift from films being first shown in cinema to then moving very quickly to them being available on DVD.

2:47that makes me feel really old now that I say that but it wasn't that long ago um and then also the shift or the rise in youtubers and how that was shifting um how many people were engaging with broadcast television so at that time I was really interested in how these kind of digital media platforms were impacting traditional media platforms and I delved a lot into that during my A-levels and I wanted to delve more into it during my university degree and where I primarily focused actually was ironically photography but I kind of split that alongside media theory so looking at how communications and partly like sociology and psychology and things like that would change how people perceive different things and how they impact the types of things that people engage with.

3:41So it's quite a mixed, a mixed media of things that I kind of engaged with. But photography really allowed me to talk a little bit more about the things that I saw day to day that maybe other people were going through as well, but hadn't necessarily found like a mechanism to talk about it. So my final year project ended up being about whitewashing and how there's lots of different products that are marketed to everybody, but actually aren't catered to everyone. So I guess that kind of is a bit of an insight into the change side of things and why that's really important to me. But I then ended up going into PR purely because of the Taylor Bennett Foundation.

4:21I saw this industry and doing the traineeship program with Brunswick at the time. I saw it as an opportunity to kind of combine my creative thinking with my interest in media theory and my strategic thinking and apply all of that into lots of different types of comms work and that's what kind of led me here really.

4:46Paul Holmes: Okay and it sounds like you tried a couple of different sort of practice areas and sector specific stuff. What is it about corporate affairs that interests or excites you? Great question. I think now with lots of different social media platforms and lots of organizations that were previously maybe more so in the background to the everyday consumer's life are now kind of put to the forefront and I think those companies reputations are more visible and fragile than they've ever been and I was looking at how I think at the time it was um the uh Sydney Sweeney has done many atrocious ads at the moment but Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle and kind of that uproar for me really signaled a huge shift in how we think about organizations and that really the end consumer still has quite a lot of say in how these brands are perceived today so me making this shift into corporate affairs really was about kind of taking my PR career with where brand reputation is going and where comms needs to be a little bit more at the forefront to help protect reputation and help it continue building Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that after the most recent sort of Sydney Sweeney commercial, we were thinking about making Sydney Sweeney a whole separate category of crises as we do our crisis review.

6:31Paul Holmes: But more seriously, I do think that over the last couple of years, we've seen an uptick in what I think of as advertising gone wrong, where the marketing folks have come up with what they think is a great creative idea for selling stuff. You can take this probably back to Kendall Jenner and Pepsi and, you know, and the number of ads that get signed off without anybody thinking through the corporate reputation implications just seems to be increasing every year. so that that's a real challenge and having somebody with a broad cultural perspective to sort of look at that and help avoid those pitfalls has to be more important today than ever absolutely um tell us tell us a little bit too about your involvement with the taylor bennett Foundation and for people outside of the UK who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about what the foundation does and how you got involved there.

7:43Yeah, so Taylor Bennett Foundation is a registered charity in the UK. I think they're one of the only charities that helps entry-level talent from ethnically diverse backgrounds enter the communication industry. They have a couple of different ways that you can engage with the foundation, but their main kind of program is their traineeship program. It's about eight weeks, maybe six to eight weeks, and you kind of are assigned with a corporate communications agency. And during that time, you will learn about the entire world of PR from theory to kind of what that means in a day to day for the different types of clients and the sectors that you're working in.

8:23So I did that program back in 2018. And I'm now back in the foundation's fold because there was a huge need well a recognized need from the foundation to better engage our alumni community the foundation has been going for nearly 20 years and there's over 1.7 000 alumni that have come to various different programs by the Taylor Bennett foundation and that's a huge amount of people in a lot of time and you know not everybody works in the industry still but there is a huge amount of us that still do so there was a real need and desire from the foundation to look at what can we put in place to better energise and mobilise the alumni community and remind them that the foundation is still here whether you finished a programme one day ago, one week ago or 10 years ago and how can we have a continuous stream of events that keep our alumni coming back into the community.

9:24So I think it's now a year and a half ago they set up the alumni advisory board so I chair that board and there's seven of us on the board at the moment and we are basically responsible for delivering events and providing support for the alumni community and over the last year and a half we've gone from a period where there was no events to having done six events in a year we've done in-person events virtual events and my main focus has really been making sure that it is fit to what the community needs today I can absolutely hold my hand up and say what the job market was like when I was first coming into the industry is very different to what it is now and also the way comms as an industry works as well so we've been very meticulous about designing events that are going to equip people whether they are at the junior level, whether they are looking to progress into that account management level, or if they're thinking about making that move into in-house and reminding them that there's so much to comms and that if you haven't found your place yet, I'm sure there is a place for you out there.

10:35Paul Holmes: How generally would you assess the progress that the public relations business has made when it comes to both diversity and inclusion? So not just hitting the numbers, but also creating a genuinely supportive environment for diverse candidates and applicants and employees? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think when I first entered the industry, you're kind of made very aware that it's not a diverse industry, meaning that there are not many people from ethnic minority backgrounds. And when you come in and you are aware of that, it kind of makes you a little bit hyperconscious of like, what does that actually mean?

11:27And how am I going to navigate that space? And I think when I first started my career, maybe through to like the account manager senior account manager level so the first four to five years I would say we've made huge strides I would say a large part of that is due to George Floyd's murder and the kind of ramifications of that and I think it was a wake-up call for all industries really to really think about how they are not only protecting but promoting people from ethnic minority backgrounds and creating safer spaces for all. So I definitely saw a huge rise in the industry kind of coming together and figuring out what does DE &I look like for us?

12:13And as a result of that, we have so many different networking groups because of it. People like us, Asian comms network, Black comms network, those things exist because it was necessary to have additional spaces for people from those groups to go to.

12:30Paul Holmes: I mean, more and more agencies, it seems to me, have those very specific employee resource groups that are designed to provide mentoring opportunities and just sort of emotional support, I think, to people from diverse backgrounds. I want to ask you quickly, because I think a lot of people in the US may not be aware of how broadly the George Floyd murder reverberated outside of the US. And you talk about that being sort of an inflection point. But the other thing that's interesting to me is that the reverberation seems to have been more permanent in markets outside the US than it has been in the States itself, where, you know, that whole period seems to have been memory hold.

13:31Paul Holmes: So tell me a little bit about sort of, you know, were there frank and open discussions about the George Floyd murder? And was that a topic of discussion at work? Or how did that filter through here? Yeah, I think the conversations were not immediate, but when it became apparent that there was a need to have conversations, they did started happening. So for the organisation, for the time that I was in, I think everybody knew that it was a terrible thing that had happened. It should never have happened. And it's not something anybody would stand by. But I think what started to happen was that different people were reacting in different ways so some people were like we've had this happen and we're kind of moving on to the next thing for me personally it hit home a little more differently and I kind of reflected on it as we can't continue in a society like this where behavior like this is still kind of happening and being okay and I kind of took it upon myself to raise that with the CEO at the time because I felt like it was so important that people that looked like me knew that they could still feel safe in their organization even if we weren't talking about it like every day right in that moment.

15:01So that's kind of how it was slow and steady those conversations and I think leaders at the time really had to stop and listen and listen to learn rather than to interject it was a space that we hadn't really navigated definitely as an agency but probably as an industry before and it was about making sure that the people that wanted to speak on this topic and talk about how it could change how we work moving forward had the space to do that and if people didn't want to know that their feelings were heard that they were going to be supported and they could kind of go about their day and however they chose.

15:43So that's kind of how it started from my perspective. Okay.

15:47Paul Holmes: We talked a little bit about those employee resource groups and support networks and that kind of thing. And I wondered whether there has been any particular individual over the course of your career who has either inspired you or mentored you or helped you along and whether you feel there is that kind of structure in place now for for young professionals like yourself how long do you have I'm inspired by so many people um feel like my entire LinkedIn connections inspire me um oh I mean who inspires me I'm very grateful that I have a lot of people in my network that I can go to for whatever kind of chapter I'm going through in my life um I would say people like Ellie Thompson um and Louis Sinclair who now work at Delphi they have been huge in my career not only um when I first started but even long after we don't work together anymore and um they have always been championing diversity and inclusion and everything kind of underneath that umbrella and so they've been instrumental for me in kind of providing guidance not only for my career but also their reflections on how the industry is changing what they're doing in their own organization and things like that um on a um kind of day-to-day level um veronica pattenkem she works at blood um she has been a huge resource for me um it i think there's a real difference in when you have conversations with people about what it means to be in this industry um with another black woman because there's someone opposite you that has gone through what you've gone through for maybe five or ten years even longer and so having conversations with her has been very affirming of like oh so this is what is happening and this is what this means and kind of decoding some of those things that I might not even realize or understand at the moment and then one of my really good friends Whitney Simon she now runs her own D &I consultancy Anchor and Flow she's an amazing person but has a really interesting perspective because she's born in the US and came over to the UK like 10 years ago.

18:17So she has a perspective of both what's happening in the US and also how things from the US impact what happens in the UK and how the UK kind of navigates DE &I conversations. But she is always kind of flying the flag for change and inspires me immensely on keeping up with, you know, if something isn't right, it's important to call it out and look at how that can be addressed. And, you know, you're not going to win all of those things that you put forward and say, this is something you should change. But it's really important to me that I'm always calling it out at the very instance. Yeah.

18:54Paul Holmes: So I'm interested when you talk to people like that, is their experience because they were presumably part of a much more pioneering generation where perhaps they didn't have those kind of role models and mentors going through ahead of them. Is your experience dramatically different from theirs or is it disappointingly similar, I guess? Great question. There's similarities for sure. And I think where we are with the D &I conversation in PR, we've kind of done a bit of a circle and the pendulum swung a little bit the other way, maybe a little bit too far the other way but I think we're making steps to get back to where we as an industry should be from my perspective but there are definitely similarities and what they might experience or have experienced in the past is kind of coming back around again and so their perspective on how they might have tackled certain issues is really important but they can also speak to where things did change at that time and how those processes could probably be applied now.

20:08So yeah, there's a familiarity in a lot of that.

20:12Paul Holmes: So do you worry that there is some backsliding going on or that there's a backlash against increased inclusion? I do worry there is a backsliding, but I think the conversation is a little bit more nuanced than it was before. So where I probably noticed the most changes in what our industry looks like is that entry level talent. And like who gets hired and who sees as opportunities. I feel like it's very much becoming again, it's about who you know, not what you know. And your network has always been important. But I feel like there's an increased, particularly as the job market is quite scarce there's an increased emphasis on about your network and there are different demographics of people now entering the workforce and I think recruitment strategies around that have changed as well so I see the changes from that perspective there's also changes in the language that we're using and I think there's maybe not a good understanding of what diversity means versus what equity actually means versus what inclusion means and I think there's a slight conflation between access and inclusion that it's no longer enough really to just have a flurry of ethnic minorities coming into the workplace you need to retain them and then it's what becomes what are you doing to actually retain them and I think a lot of the work there is hard to define hard to measure and therefore sometimes forgotten about but super important as part of that journey.

21:56Paul Holmes: Yeah I think you know that the point about the point about network and the importance of a network is is one of the things that we thought about last year as we talked to last year's class of young change makers which is that there are There are other forms of discrimination and disadvantage that have to do with your socioeconomic background. You know, if your parents are factory workers and, you know, shopkeepers rather than professionals, then you don't naturally have the kind of network that somebody whose parents are lawyers and accountants might have. And, you know, that is also a concern.

22:50Paul Holmes: And obviously there's, I'm not even sure we're supposed to use the word anymore. I suspect if I was in the States, I would be told off the intersectionality of that, that, you know, there's a crossover between socioeconomic background and ethnic background that amplifies the challenge for some people. and you know I think I think we have to continue to be really intentional about it how how would you how would you change the PR business if you could what are the sort of what are the things that we could improve that would really make a difference in your opinion oh um there's probably a couple of areas there's obviously a um there's a d and i pillar for me that's really important and um when i talk about d and i i want to encompass everything underneath that i think there can be a huge emphasis on race and ethnicity those are still really important um and i'm glad that we're starting to see broadening outs of those conversations to look at disability and neurodiversity, socioeconomic backgrounds, gender, etc.

24:13So that's a huge thing. I want us to kind of redefine what does that mean in our industry? What do people that identify with those different backgrounds actually need from the industry today and kind of build plans around that rather than sometimes can be finger in the air guessing what that should look like. and like we have new words new language new terminology new technology that can enable us to make these things better um the other side i really think about is um the short-termism of pr and how pr is kind of viewed um from an agency perspective how it can be viewed by your clients or even sometimes how it might just be viewed in an organization generally.

25:04I think there's still an expectation that if you hire a agency or you hire a comms person to build out a comms function within your business, that if you put a couple of things out there, your reputation is going to change overnight. You're going to be on the front page of the FT. Everyone's going to want to talk to you. But that couldn't be further from how PR works. And if we think more broadly just about reputation, it is built over time and it takes time to maintain that as well. And a part of that problem is I think comms are still being brought in too late to the conversations. We're still a little bit on the outskirts and you're often being asked to communicate about a decision that's already made and you don't have the ability to change that.

25:49So I want to see comms teams and agencies be more embedded in businesses and get involved earlier. I think that's how we'll really start to change the perception of comms and what it can do for an organisation. Yeah, still so much conversation around, can't you just fling it out here and fling it there and it'll be magic and it's done. And I'm like, no, we do a lot more work than that.

26:14Paul Holmes: Yeah, there are three or four conversations that don't seem to have evolved dramatically since I started doing this 40 years ago. And that, I mean, the diversity conversation is one of them. It's, you know, something that has received a lot of lip service over the years, but where the progress has been painfully slow. The same is true of measurement and evaluation. And the same is true of that kind of short-term view that communications isn't part of forming policy. It's just there to spin it after the decision has been made. And we have not made the progress that I had hoped to see on any of those questions.

27:01Paul Holmes: So hopefully by the time you reach my age, things will be better. But this industry doesn't move quickly sometimes. Anyway, thank you. I'm very looking forward to seeing you in Chicago. um for our event in Chicago you'll be on stage with the other young change makers I hope you can draw inspiration from each other um and I hope you'll find the experience rewarding but thank you very much for your time today thank you Paul really looking forward to it

27:44you've been listening to the provoke podcast brought to you by provoke media and produced by the international broadcast specialist, Marketeers.