Ed Williams

Spear’s Review

‘Our clients are managing through a period of immense disruption across all aspects of life: politics, both domestic and geopolitical, technology and public expectation,’ says Ed Williams, who leads Edelman’s 28-country business outside the US.

Six years advising former BBC director-general Mark Thompson and former Reuters CEO Tom Glocer helped Williams understand the pressures of executives and companies in the spotlight, but the real problem, he explains, is that ‘underfunding in journalism has led to partial reporting and sensationalism’.

He also believes that reputation management is seeing dramatic change: ‘Options to stop a crisis in its tracks are increasingly limited, and the focus is often now more about crisis handling than the issue itself,’ he tells Spear’s.