With 50 years' worth of history under its belt, marketing and comms agency, The Bliss Group isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. 

Ranking 9th on O’Dwyer’s top New York and New Jersey PR firms in 2025, and 36th overall, the mid-size independent has serious transatlantic chops. But, in the UK, the Group is still making a name for itself.

Currently in its UK infancy, having opened a London office in April 2024 under the leadership of newly-appointed (2023) CEO Cortney Stapleton, the Group is by attempting to crack the UK market by leveraging it's US clout.

Senior vice president Miles Hill — with the full support and expertise of The Bliss Group team behind him — took the challenge of developing the Group’s UK presence. A year on, PRmoment caught up with Stapleton, Hill and the London offices’ associate director, and first official employee, Charlotte Chadwick, to get the latest on The Bliss Group’s London operation.

You celebrated your one year anniversary on 30th April, how has it been going?

Miles Hill: It has been going really well, it has also flown by and our anniversary crept up on us. A lot [of our work so far] has been the typical things of setting up a business, getting HR admin, payroll, benefits and that fun stuff. Then there's the flipside of actually bringing a US brand to the UK. We are coming up to 50 years in business [in the US] in June, but nobody knows us over here so its going from a name brand in, B2B financial technology professional services, healthcare in the US to coming over here and nobody knowing who we are. So, we are having to get really succinct and specific about what we do, who we are and why anyone should care.

Cortney Stapleton: It's a natural evolution. As Miles said, we have 50 years of business in specific, highly-regulated B2B spaces but thinking of our clients, globally we had done work on every continent. It’s really nice to have a presence on the ground in London and it's a very important, special market. To go there and be able to hire and expand that team to handle more global clients in different timezones, and to handle the more nuanced media market in London was an awesome opportunity. We have been really pleased and have been learning a lot. It's been a lot of fun. We are handling a lot of global clients and hoping to find more businesses. We have a unique approach to marketing and communications with PR mixed in there. We have always been a pretty consultative agency, underpinned by analytics and that feels a bit different for some of the businesses we have been talking to.

Charlotte Chadwick: To have Miles, who has been at Bliss for 10 years having worked in NY, coming to London…he knows the business inside and out. It's not as if we operate [in silos], we talk to the teams all over America day in, day out. They may as well be in the next room. UK clients have found it very beneficial, especially those looking to expand over to the US, to be able to have a team that works 24/7 together. They’re not separate entities so it’s been very beneficial for clients and prospective clients.

What's the client situation so far, did you bring any over or are you starting from scratch?

Stapleton: We have multiple clients that are handling both UK and US work, so many of them were very excited at the prospect of having boots on the ground in London. We are working with all of them, and then looking to expand and find clients here [in the UK] as well.

Hill: Our way of working, and this has been validated over the past year from having literally hundreds of conversations with industry people and people in-house, we have a bit of a different mindset to most traditional PR agencies. It’s not just about serving the niche of US companies that need a UK presence, or vice versa. But, also aiming to be a best-in-class option for UK businesses that are trying to reach audiences over here.

What is the different mindset that you have?

Hill: We look at problems and create solutions based on the problems. I struggle to say this to a PR trade publication and a PR audience, but we don't just think of ourselves as a PR agency. We want to figure out truly what you’re trying to solve from a business perspective and what you are trying to accomplish. We have a methodology where it really starts with deep understanding, with tools and focus groups finding out what your audience cares about and what keeps them up at night, then we layer on behaviours, such as, do you want them to know about your company or get them to buy a product. Then comes content, the right messaging and its delivery. A traditional PR agency sells PR, whereas for us a lot of the programmes we create may or may not have a PR component to it, it really just depends on what type of problem you’re trying to solve. Lastly, we look at how you measure that, does it work, is it moving the needle and iterating on that.

Can you talk me through some of the tools you have at your disposal?

Hill: It's about staying really tapped into the news landscape. We have clients that are trying to reach a wide array of audiences and we need to know [for example] what CFOs in manufacturing are dealing with, or what private equity investors care about and we have tools to help us do that.

Stapleton: Our AI tools are fairly sophisticated. We co-created them with a firm that was focused on AI, so instead of hiring a developer or using someone from the [Bliss Group] team, it's a firm that is only developing an AI marketing solution that we co-created with them. Our head of innovation is on their advisory board, so it's very sophisticated. We are doing AI focus groups and all sorts of things that are very specific to our clients, such as using multiple LLMs and putting things together with workflows. I think we can also talk very intelligently about how that's used in the UK. We have an ongoing rolling trends presentation we do for clients and Bliss 'friendlies’ and we have one that's very UK specific, so we are talking to the market about what's happening globally but also what's happening in our backyard, and also what will happen as it's fairly predictive.

Use of AI in the UK PR sector is a huge point of debate and interest, how is that playing out for you?

Stapleton: Because our clients are heavily regulated, we are using it in the same way as the UK; very smartly and carefully. We are helping some of our clients to figure out their recipe for using it and what their standards are. We have very strict standards about it. Because we have co-created a model, everyone in our company is able to use it internally to check logic, look at workflows and do research. We also have a tool with intent data, for example, we had a global investment bank that wanted to target 70 companies, and we were able to create a programme from a marketing perspective to pull data, and then we created a programme to target those folks. It ended up netting a lot of business for them. So, there are ways to use it but it doesn’t trump using humans. It's an additive tool that, if used correctly, can be very interesting. People say it's going to replace junior jobs but we haven't seen that, we are still hiring for junior roles and we are using AI quite extensively.

You are actually hiring for UK roles, aren’t you?

Hill: Yes we are hiring for two roles and one is a junior level position. When we were drafting the job description we made it so it's not a traditional junior PR role. You won’t come into a large agency and start with this steely structure of nine to five, and work your way up the career ladder. We want someone who can come in and immediately make a difference. We think of ourselves as a startup with rich parents in New York — which is a fun way of working, and we get a lot of leeway. There’s a realisation that the UK market is different to the US. While we have the tools, process, structure and access to [various figureheads like] head of innovation, the digital innovation team, strategy teams and all the things that come with being a strong mid-size agency, Charlotte and I are on the ground every day figuring out what will resonate with the market over here, what people care about, what they don't. As we grow to five people or 10 people, they will get access to the same kind of opportunities of thinking big and strategically about how we grow this business in the UK.

What are your plans for the future of The Bliss Group, UK?

Stapleton: We would really like to grow. Myself and my managing partner Michael Roth, we would really like to grow the UK, the London offices and the UK presence. We are hiring now but I’d love to grow to 10 people [in London] by next year. I want folks in the UK to know we are committed to the presence there and being deliberate about hiring locally. We want to have both; we want a strong large UK presence while continuing to evolve in the US, and keeping true to our roots of B2B and highly regulated industries. That's really what we are hoping for, is to do more local and global business out of the London/UK office.