Alec Samways, CEO & head of creative strategy at Splendid Communications on the PRmoment podcast

 29th May 2020
 Ben Smith, Founder, PRmoment.com

This week we’re going to return to our roots - by going back to our regular career stories theme.

We’ve pretty much covered the Covid-19 angle of PR and agency management if you want more info on that then have a listen to the past 5/6 episodes of the podcast, or have a look at the 25 plus Covid-19 articles on PRmoment.com - I think you’ll find all you need to know. It’s quite a body of work.

This week on the PRmoment podcast, our guest is Alec Samways, CEO & head of creative strategy at Splendid Communications.

Splendid was co-founded by Alec in 2004. It’s a creative consumer PR shop with approximately 40 employees and a fee income of £3.5m in 2019.

Here’s a summary of what Alec and I discuss:

• Alec talks about how Splendid, as a consumer PR firm, has been impacted by Covid-19?
• How this period of lockdown is proving to be a reflection point for a lot of us about how we live our lives and our work-life balance.
• How Alec is envisaging a hybrid office/working from home arrangement might work?
• Alec talks us through the story of Splendid - and the ups and downs along the way!
  
• Why Alec left his job as a management consultant for Datamonitor and ended up working in PR.
• Why Alec joined Slice PR because of his passion for music.
• Why Alec left Slice PR to set up Splendid in 2004.
• Why Alec describes Splendid as “being on the edge of the PR scene.”
• Whether Alec believes the PR sector still places too greater emphasis on media relations?
• Why the hierarchical approach to creativity that ad agencies tend to have, doesn’t work in PR.
• Alec talk us through what type of business is Splendid today, in terms of the breadth of work?
• Alec glances towards the future and talks about what agency businesses might look like post lockdown and into 2021/22