About us.
Meet the Firefly management Team – Firefly public relations agency UK and Europe providing digital PR, reputation management and consultancy.
4
Firefly offices
1020
campaigns run
66
PR awards won
87
countries covered
Claire Walker
CEO
As a youngster I played competitive tennis and this taught me so much about strategy, dedication, follow-through, accuracy, positive thinking and the importance of winning. I still play tennis regularly, and win sometimes, but these attributes have guided me through my career and I have always applied bundles of energy, contagious enthusiasm and imaginative approaches in my workNo client assignment is too challenging. I’m calm in a crisis and I thrive on change, especially when it relates to making things better for people. Spontaneous and change loving may seem an odd statement given that I’ve been at the helm of Firefly for over two decades, but during that time the ways of doing business, protecting and building reputations, and enticing people to change their behaviour have changed beyond recognition. With three children to keep me busy outside of work, I love ‘time saving’ gadgets, but any new gadget gets my attention. I’m an ‘always connected’ person, tweeting, connecting with colleagues, friends and family on facebook, instigating events and discussions topics by setting up special interest groups on LinkedIn or Ning and most recently blogging through ‘fly on the wall’, our Firefly blog. I couldn’t live without the internet and the convenience it brings to my life – my smart phone is always with me, unless I’ve worn it out, which sometimes happens.
Follow Claire on Twitter @claire_walker
Adrian Wheeler
Non-executive director
I have always been fascinated by the media. I started writing for a local newspaper while I was at school: a weekly news column, monthly feature, rock concert reviews. It taught me something: ‘Stargazer’ got a bigger postbag than anyone else in the newsroom. While I was a student I worked on a beach in Cornwall and wrote articles about surfing, life-saving and rock-concerts we held on the beach. I realised that the media have an insatiable appetite for material. As long as you know the rules you have a market. I trained at a small PR consultancy in the City, where I became the firm’s Aerial Photographer. My boss was one of the UK’s PR pioneers. One wall of his office was covered with a picture of people crossing Waterloo Bridge on their way to work. He liked to explain this was our audience; but he also taught us the media were our customers. Over the last 30 years, I have worked with hundreds of clients across most industries, in most OECD countries and on all kinds of projects; from speeches at the World Economic Forum to guerrilla marketing on the Heathrow Express. For media junkies like me, who like to know a little about a lot and a lot about a little, a PR career is paradise.
Adrian also runs a popular blog the Aktualne
Clea Herrmann
Regional Manager (DACH)
Ever since I was little, I’ve wanted to go into communications. Back then, my social networking hub comprised a small hole in a fence in my back garden through which I watched, and conversed with, the outside world. My childhood was spent split between Germany, Spain and the UK, and the experience and appeal of foreign travel has followed me into adulthood. When, after three years at Firefly London I had the opportunity to set up the Munich office, I jumped at it. My return to Germany also signalled my return to skiing, another childhood passion. Apart from an accidental foray onto an Olympic black run and a near-fall off a cliff, I’m relatively unscathed. I take the same approach to my career as I do to skiing. I don’t do the same old things expecting different results; I get different results by doing something new. This is especially true of pan-regional activity. There is much to consider when shaping an intercultural approach to maximise impact, be it in Germany, or Austria, Switzerland, Poland and Eastern Europe – countries we touch directly from our Munich hub. Communications all about teamwork – and longstanding client relationships are often borne out of a team relishing a challenge (be it brand or PR) and offering a fresh perspective.
Philippe Caillet
Country Manager (France)
Advanced science and marketing have always played an important role in my life. Through my PhD mother, I learnt very early on in life that computers could talk to each other – even back in the early Seventies – and that technology had the capacity to imitate human activity. Through my marketing father, I got an insight into the workings of ‘business’ and the importance of matching a company’s offerings with end user needs. Without a shadow of a doubt, this shaped my views on life and had a huge influence on where I am today; mixing communications with high tech, and being an early adopter of all kinds of new technologies, from mobile phones to social media. For many years, I’ve been a firm believer that social media provides us with a better way of communicating, whether it be with clients, influencers, journalists, consumers… and this has transcended into my personal life through my own blog. Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working on some of the most famous household and technology brands, but I have always found it equally challenging, enjoyable and fulfilling, to help a start-up rise from anonymity to notoriety. Variety is the spice of life they say – and that’s what I love about this job.
Ana Mangahas
Associate Director
My first account was a data cleansing and transformation company headquartered in the UK, with big aspirations in Silicon Valley. The client was a Richard Branson-esque persona – confident, breezy, with all the markings of future ‘Net entrepreneurs that epitomised Silicon Valley in the late nineties. It was an omen of (good) things to come, as six years later I relocated from San Francisco to London. At the time, the dotcom bust had rocked local industry and there were plenty of lessons to be learned. One of my first assignments involved a press trip to Malta where we feasted with 100 guests at a medieval-themed banquet, followed by a Maltese boat ride. I couldn’t have found myself in more alien territory. Years later, it’s still the variety that excites me about the European communications industry. No two countries have the exact same approach to PR; although as an industry, we’re getting better at creating efficiencies, especially for pan-regional campaigns, while respecting local PR needs. Our biggest challenge is thinking critically about the advice we give. The best advice is borne out of experience. Barring that, you need to have a huge capacity for information in order to present the client with different viewpoints; then work together towards the best outcome. The business is as much about partnership and collaboration, as it is about consultancy.
Sally Whittle
Editor-in-chief
I started my career on the other side of the media fence, as a technology journalist. From a young age, I knew I wanted to write so after completing a post-graduate diploma in periodical journalism at City University, I started working on a weekly business magazine at CMP Media. As first I worked as a reporter covering technology news, and gradually began covering more general business stories, specialising in writing features about technology strategy, HR and management. Over the next 12 years, I worked for a variety of online and print publications including the Guardian, the Telegraph, ZDNet, Computing, Computer Weekly and Personnel Today, many of which I still contribute to on a freelance basis. After having my first daughter, I continued to work as a freelance business and IT journalist but became increasingly involved in online blogging and social media. In 2010, I set up Flea Enterprises, a company that specialises in information and consulting services for social media projects. I set up my own parent blog, Who’s the Mummy, in 2009 as a hobby, which quickly grew out of hand, and allows me to write on a daily basis about my life, work and family. Today, the blog is ranked #1 in the Cision Top 10 Mummy Blogs list and 24th in Cision’s Top 50 UK Blogs list. I also Tweet prolifically and now organise the UK’s leading annual awards for parent bloggers, the MAD Blog Awards, as well as running the Tots100, a monthly index of the UK’s top parent blogs. What unites my career is that I’m always passionate about the written word. Whether I’m celebrating someone else’s writing, dashing off a blog post about my latest parenting embarrassment, or analysing the current trends in the outsourcing industry, I am always looking for ways to communicate more effectively through writing.
Reuben Milne
Creative Director
Creativity is one of the most essential components of PR. It not only generates the ideas for campaign content in the first place, but it is creativity which drives PR campaigns to make the most of that content to engage as deeply and effectively as possible. Not that it follows that a creative director has all the answers (and don’t believe them if they say they do). But what they should offer is the ability to help individuals, teams and whole agencies dial up their creativity and harness it in the service of a brief or client that requires a little bit of something extra special. So that’s what I do. As much a creative facilitator as a creative director, I combine a hands-on understanding of creative techniques and facilitation skills with a PR background that for nearly 20 years has straddled the issues-driven world of B2B PR, the product-based approach of technology PR and the brand-led mayhem that is consumer PR. What I hope that adds up to is a bloke who can bring a fresh approach to campaign thinking and a child-like enthusiasm for the boundless possibilities of a well conceived creative idea.