Making a go of PR in London and beyond

WILD GEESE:Adrian Brady, chief executive, Eulogy PR in London

SLIGO-BORN Adrian Brady took his chances in London and went out on his own. Fourteen years later, the public relations agency he started has worked for the Royal Mail and the BBC, and recently won an industry award for “agency of the year”.

Following a marketing degree from UCD and a brief stint in the US, Brady moved to England in 1993. At the time, “London still seemed to offer significant opportunities” and he landed a job in marketing.

“It did seem to be a sector that offered great scope to use creativity and for development and from the outside, it appeared exciting and different; and it has proved so from the inside as well.”

Brady was working in database marketing, at the time “a fledgling but rapidly growing” field. It revolves around “developing loyalty from existing customers and [tapping] into the most lucrative potential customers” – essentially tailoring marketing by using information companies already hold about customers.

Brady worked with companies such as BP, who were developing a loyalty card scheme similar to the Tesco Clubcard. Then, egged on by a conversation with a headhunter who told him he was “too old to change industry”, he moved into the public relations (PR) industry. After just 18 months with agency RPPR, however, he decided to leave and start his own firm, Eulogy, in 1996.

“It was a mixture of naivety and ambition,” he says, about his decision to go out on his own, although he credits his wife with supporting him financially in the early stages and thinking up the name for the company.

He puts down his decision to start the company to “recognising that, as the market changed, there was an appetite among purchasers of PR for a more creative approach”.

“In 1996 things were beginning to change in London – you could sense the economy beginning [to grow again] and that more opportunities were becoming available. That particularly jumped in 1997 with the change in government. It felt like a new era,” he says of the time.

Fast forward 14 years and Eulogy employs 35 and seems to have weathered the downturn well – the company has avoided redundancies and has seen “continued growth”.

For him, “the key thing is not to cut to the bone and end up diluting the service . . . and delivering a poor service as a result”.

He says his Irish background has benefited him.

“Both culturally and from an educational point of view as a nation, we have a traditional bent towards creativity and an ability to be open and communicate well with individuals, and I think that certainly serves me well in the sector which I have chosen to go into.”

In London there has been, “in the last 10 years or so, tremendous change in how the Irish are received and perceived in business.

“Times have moved on from what traditional Irish emigrants did in the Fifties compared to what the young educated Irish end up achieving today.”

When he arrived, “the Irish factor was, at that stage, neither positive or negative, I think. It was a fairly neutral effect. Things like the peace process have really helped to raise the profile of the Irish in business.”

Earlier this year, his agency commissioned research showing that company directors from abroad in Britain are most commonly Irish – there are 44,352, more than the number of Indian, Australian and American directors combined.

In terms of business opportunities, there is “huge potential” in “tapping into the second and third generation Irish within the British community who are very proud of their heritage and are absolutely vast in number, especially in senior positions in British business”.

He feels that the diaspora of Irish business people around the world is “still something that as a nation we don’t tap into, doing enough business together and helping one another”.

Particularly so for young people, whom he advises to “tap up Irish people overseas at the very senior levels and approach them to identify opportunities together”.

He adds: “If you’re going to emigrate, identify where the opportunities lie for you as an individual. It is easy to jump on a plane in a moment of excitement and land somewhere but not have researched it correctly and perhaps find yourself in a sunnier climate but with equally limited opportunities.”

The future looks bright for Eulogy, which started operations in India over the summer, in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, and has also started a joint venture in Brazil.

He says the expansion is driven by his team at Eulogy (his finance director is Brazilian and another executive is Indian) and his desire to “build and develop based on the skillsets that you know you have internally”.

Brady certainly has none of the pessimism of his native Ireland today. For him, it seems things can only get better.