Lansons - Public Relations Agency of the Year in Europe

Company: Lansons, London, NY
Company Description: Formed in 1989, Lansons is a leading reputation management and public relations consultancy with offices in London and New York.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Public Relations Agency of the Year in Europe

Nomination Title: Lansons London, NY

Founded 1989, Lansons is a leading reputation management and public relations consultancy with offices in London and New York.

We are a 31-year-old agency with the energy of a start-up that leads the industry on gender equality, ethical behaviour, giving back, employee ownership and staff welfare.

Our ‘no silo’ approach to client work means our varied areas of expertise and knowledge from financial communications, corporate reputation, public affairs, public relations and marketing communications integrate to deliver innovative, sector leading work for our clients.

In Q1 2021 we gave back to the UK Government the £109,000 we claimed under the furlough scheme as Lansons was more profitable than anticipated during the pandemic.

Last year, Clare Parsons and Tony Langham, on behalf of Lansons, donated a significant sum to the Barts Charity which includes the NHS hospital in our beloved Smithfield home of 30 years making us a “major donor”.

We’ve been certified as carbon neutral for 12 years by Natural Capital Partners. As part of this, we offset all our carbon emissions to support global energy saving projects.

Throughout the pandemic we have lived our values of doing great work, being a great place to work and contributing to society.

We’ve been at the centre of the corporate world during COVID-19, evolving our consultancy to focus on reputation management.

We’re advising two countries as they navigate the crisis, working with the Cabinet Office and Department for Enterprise of the Isle of Man Government – and helping the Cayman Islands Government develop a “Global Marketing and Communications Strategy”.

We had major success infintech winning work for Yolt, Webloyalty and FTRC – and continue to advise Tech Nation.

For Givaudan, we were appointed to develop their unified purpose and sustainability narrative, which supports their ambition to become a B Corp.

In the past 12 months, we’ve jointly pitched for some of the largest fintech organisations, winning mandates for confidential: Innoterra (GCP: UK/Germany/ Switzerland) and; SUSE (PROI: UK/Netherlands /Japan/Brazil/Singapore).

We’re helping to reinvent St. James’s Place’s leadership engagement and visibility programme in a ‘remote world’. We developed and communicated Phoenix’s response to the pandemic. We advised Hargreaves Lansdown on reputational recovery after the collapse of Woodford Investments.

We were appointed by British Business Bank as reputation management advisers on its delivery of the Government’s schemes to assist business, including the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loans Scheme, Bounce Back Loans and the Future Fund.

In December 2020 we advised one of the world’s leading bankers, Jean Pierre Mustier, on his highly contentious exit from the CEO at Italian banking giant UniCredit. Our New York office was named global AOR for one of the world’s first and leading wine investment companies - London-based Cult Wines.

As a business we have adapted to tackle the challenges presented by the pandemic and in equal measure supported our clients in their plight through Covid-19.

As a business we have demonstrated resilience and continued to grow with a 25% increase in fees in March 2021 compared to the same time in 2020.

We have worked hard to ensure we are effectively supporting our people as we moved to remote working. We have acted on the findings of our employee surveys to preserve work/life balance by helping each other stop the day expanding. We gave everyone £600 to spend on improving their home working environment. We launched virtual leisure activities such as Pilates and Barre, Bake-alongs and quizzes to introduce new ways for colleagues to feel connected and socialise.

We have been named as one of the 60 best SME workplaces across all sectors in the UK for the past 17 years by Great Place to Work® Institute.

We continued our charitable endeavours and in September 2020 we said goodbye to charity Centrepoint with a cheque for £15,000. Since then, we have raised £22,000 for Lansons new charity The Felix Project.

Since our founding partnership with the BBC 50:50 project in 2019, whereby we monitor and take steps towards a 50:50 gender representation across Lansons events and content, we have seen positive results with women taking a +6% lead in representing Lansons for events.