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Nicola Nel is the first woman to be appointed as Global Managing Director (GMD) of PROI Worldwide (PRIO). She is also the first person from the African continent to be appointed to this position.
(Photo courtesy) Nicola Nel has been appointed Global Managing Director (GMD) of PROI Worldwide (PROI), the first woman to be appointed to the position and the first South African and African woman to be appointed to the position.
Nel founded Atmosphere Communications 22 years ago and took up the position in July this month after selling Atmosphere Communications to Accenture Song in 2021 and fulfilling his commitment earlier this year.
PROI is a partnership of independent organizations and a communications powerhouse with 90 partners, more than 8,800 employees in more than 165 cities and 65 countries, and total revenues in 2022 exceeding $1.128 billion.
It ranked fifth among combined communications groups and was the only group to crack the top five based on a unique partnership of independent agency owners.
perfect person
Jeff Lambert, global chairman of PROI and CEO of Lambert by LLYC, who led the GMD search committee, said: “As a board member and long-time partner of the organization, and with her own successful experience as a communications agency entrepreneur, Nicola is the perfect person to lead the network into a bright future.”
She explained that Atmosphere Communications has been a member of PROI for about 14 years and that she and her senior team regularly attend their summits and conferences.
“I find it very valuable because you get different ideas from agency leaders around the world. I like the individual thinking because all are entrepreneurial communication owners.”
Her work with PROI Worldwide began as a volunteer member of the EMEA regional board, and they later asked her if she would be interested in applying for the global managing director position.
“I applied but didn’t think much of it because I knew I was facing stiff competition from other candidates. Imagine my surprise and joy when they told me I was successful.”
New challenges and directions
She says she really enjoys the work. “After Atmosphere was acquired by Accenture, I briefly considered starting a new communications company.”
But then, she said, the opportunity came.
“I love and am very excited about this new challenge and the direction I have chosen. I am enjoying being part of a nonprofit organization that is led and driven by its partners.”
What she particularly likes is that although PROI Worldwide is global, its partner agencies are the best in their respective local markets.
Nell is based in Cape Town, but reports to the chairman of the board in Melbourne, Australia, and the rest of the team she manages is scattered around the world, from Vancouver, Canada to Brussels, Europe, to Chicago, USA.
“Meetings are scheduled across multiple time zones. Time-and-date is my best new app! It can be challenging, but it shows that you can work from anywhere in the world.”
The power of creativity
Nel has always believed in creativity, and her previous agency’s award-winning record proves this. “Creativity is not limited to creating campaigns for clients, it also impacts the running of your business.”
She hopes to bring that creativity to PROI’s agenda. “The organization has been around for more than 50 years, so the foundations are solid. I hope to add a little creativity to that.”
Trends Impacting the PR Industry
She served as a judge for the 2024 Global PR Week Awards and has been closely following the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, especially the PR Awards.
In May, she went through a transition period and traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where about 80 PROI partners gathered for a global summit.
Based on these insights, she shares the trends impacting the global PR industry.
- AI
The first one she mentioned was artificial intelligence (AI).
“It’s permeating everything, not just in campaigns but even in agency operations, whether it’s a small agency in Ghana that’s rapidly adopting AI or a large agency in Germany that’s helping clients upskill in AI, everyone is embracing AI in a big way.”
She found it particularly interesting that AI was being used not just in campaign work but also in agency operations, such as client and staff onboarding.
“As a result, major agencies are leapfrogging their competitors, even big competitors in their own markets, by embracing AI in a big way.”
Another striking phenomenon is that organizations that use AI effectively have AI champions.
“This person is either an expert who has fully embraced AI or a senior person who is a flag bearer for AI.”
She added that transparency is important. “Agencies are putting up guardrails and being transparent with clients, especially around copywriting, creative generation and image generation.”
Copyright is an issue, for example, if you use AI to come up with an idea, that idea may have been learned by the AI from someone else in the world.
“So you have to double-check and triple-check all the information that’s coming through AI,” she said. But for her, there’s no doubt that AI is influencing the creative process.
“We saw this in some of the work at Cannes, with more than 10% of the winning works this year using AI in some way.”
- Unlimited Media
Another trend she noticed was that despite the endless media opportunities around the world, the media is quite fragmented and traditional media is continuing to decline, as we have seen recently in South Africa with the closure of several newspapers.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach a wider audience, and this is no longer just a landmark piece in a reliable publication.
“A few years ago, PR firms were only focused on placements, now PR practitioners have become a bit like media planners, looking for multiple opportunities, using SEO and taking a strategic approach.
She added that the audience was very fragmented.
“Then they’ll use TikTok, then they’ll use here, then they’ll use Threads and so on, so it makes sense to use a media planning approach to PR campaigns.”
Despite these challenges, she added, the limitless media landscape creates opportunities for savvy PR agencies.
- A world without truth
Her third trend is that we live in a world without truth, filled with misinformation, political movements and coordinated misinformation campaigns, and even companies spreading misleading information.
“The lessons that the PROI Worldwide agency taught me were consistency and transparency.
“With so much misinformation out there, we have to keep finding the facts and being the source of the truth. Our role in ethics, facts, consistency and transparency becomes increasingly important.”
- Think global, think local The final trend she cited is that successful agencies, whether independent or part of a global network, think local but think globally when developing campaigns.
In conjunction with Nel’s appointment, PROI also announced Angela Scaffidi, founder and managing partner of Australian consultancy SenateSHJ, as the partnership’s new global chair for the next two years.
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