35 Essential Thought Leaders on Public Relations Globally

Introduction

Ask most people what public relations is and they will describe a press release, a media pitch, or a crisis spin room. That picture was incomplete twenty years ago and it is unrecognisable today. Public relations in 2026 is a discipline that shapes how institutions earn trust, how organisations navigate crises that unfold in real time across dozens of platforms, how leaders communicate through complexity and uncertainty, and how the gap between what a brand says and what it actually does either closes or widens.

The global PR services market is projected to exceed USD $129 billion by 2026, and the Edelman Trust Barometer has documented for over two decades that trust is now the most consequential currency in business, government, and society. PR is no longer a support function. It is a strategic imperative. The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, drawing on nearly 2,000 global professionals, found that 73 percent of B2B buyers trust third-party thought leadership content over traditional advertising, demonstrating that the discipline creates measurable commercial value, not just reputational insurance.

The difficulty is knowing whose voice to follow. The PR field is large, fragmented, and genuinely global. The academy, the agency world, the in-house corporate function, the independent practitioner community, and the growing ecosystem of digital communicators rarely overlap. Lists of the best PR thought leaders tend to recycle the same ten names, all from the US, all from large agencies, and all skewed toward the media relations end of the discipline. This list is different.

The 35 thought leaders compiled here were selected for the breadth and depth of their contribution to how the PR and communications profession actually thinks. Some have built frameworks that practitioners around the world use every day. Some have documented and analysed the industry for decades with rigour. Some lead agencies that have set the standard for creative, purpose-driven communications. Some operate in markets and regions that most PR thought leader lists ignore entirely. Several are educators and researchers who have shaped how the next generation of communicators is trained. All of them are actively contributing to the field's evolution in 2026.

The global PR industry faces a convergence of pressures that no single practitioner or agency can navigate alone. Generative AI is reshaping earned media, media monitoring, and content strategy at a pace the field has never experienced. Trust in institutions continues to decline across the developed world even as it rises in parts of Asia and Africa. The boundary between PR, content marketing, SEO, and social media strategy has dissolved so thoroughly that even professional associations struggle to define where their remit ends. And the expectations placed on communicators to demonstrate measurable business impact have never been higher.

These are the 35 voices shaping how the profession responds. For leadership teams who want support putting great communications thinking into practice, Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000 copies sold globally and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams around the world to build the communication culture and team dynamics that make great PR possible.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Following the Right PR Voices Matters

The stakes of poor communications have never been higher. Research from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 63 percent of respondents globally distrust institutions by default, requiring explicit and repeated evidence of trustworthy behaviour before that trust is extended. A single mishandled crisis, a gap between an organisation's stated values and its documented actions, or a failure to communicate with clarity during a period of uncertainty can erase years of brand equity in days. The cost of getting communications wrong is not abstract. It is measured in share price, customer churn, employee disengagement, and regulatory scrutiny.

Organisations whose leaders are visible, credible, and consistent in their communications generate measurable commercial advantage. Executive communications directly shape buying decisions, talent attraction, and investor confidence. For communications professionals, this creates both an enormous opportunity and a genuine responsibility. Following the right thought leaders is how practitioners stay ahead of the shifts that matter. The people on this list are the ones generating the original frameworks, the provocative research, and the honest practitioner insights that separate genuinely effective communications from expensive activity.

The difference between following the right voices and the wrong ones is the gap between a communications function that creates strategic value and one that executes tasks. Organisations that invest in building leadership communication culture and team alignment see these advantages compound over time.

Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching 150+ countries, delivers keynotes and workshops that help leadership teams communicate with clarity and lead through complexity. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was developed through comprehensive research covering Thinkers360 PR leaderboards, ICCO Hall of Fame records, PRCA Global Advisory Board membership, academic institution faculty lists in communications programmes, PRovoke Media coverage, and extensive review of LinkedIn and podcast activity across the PR profession in 2025 and 2026. Candidates were assessed across five dimensions: formal credentials or deep demonstrated expertise in the communications field, geographic and disciplinary diversity, genuine contribution to how the field has evolved, active participation in professional conversations in 2025 and 2026, and realistic influence on other practitioners.

The final 35 includes voices from ten countries across five continents. Disciplinary coverage spans crisis communications, PR measurement and evaluation, digital and social communications, executive communications, internal communications, public affairs, agency leadership, journalism and media analysis, education and research, and emerging market communications. The list deliberately avoids defaulting to the same faces that appear on every other PR thought leader compilation. Geographic and gender diversity targets were applied throughout the selection process, aiming for representation across multiple regions and disciplines, and ensuring that women, who comprise the majority of the PR profession globally yet are underrepresented in most thought leader lists, make up a substantial portion of the final 35.

Category 1: The Global Agency Leaders Shaping the Field

The agency leaders on this list are not simply successful business operators. They are practitioners who have shaped how the profession thinks about its role, its standards, and its future. They lead organisations that set benchmarks for creative and strategic communications, and they contribute to professional discourse well beyond their client work.

1. Richard Edelman, Edelman

The most recognisable name in global PR, Richard Edelman runs the world's largest independent PR firm and has built the Edelman Trust Barometer into the most cited research instrument in the communications profession. For over two decades, the annual Trust Barometer has tracked how trust in governments, businesses, NGOs, and media shifts across more than two dozen countries, providing communicators everywhere with a shared empirical foundation for conversations that might otherwise remain abstract. His public commentary on trust, purpose, earned media, and the evolving relationship between business and society is consistently provocative and closely followed by practitioners at every level.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer identified a phenomenon the firm calls structural mistrust, in which polarisation is so entrenched in some markets that institutions cannot build broad trust across the full population and must instead focus on building trust within specific communities. That finding has reshaped how many global communicators think about audience segmentation and message targeting.

2. Nitin Mantri, Avian WE / WE Communications

The first Asian to serve as president of ICCO, the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, Nitin Mantri leads one of India's most respected PR agencies and holds the role of APAC President at WE Communications. His career has spanned agency work in the UK and India, where he transformed Avian from a Delhi startup into one of the country's leading communications firms, growing its workforce forty-fold. Beyond his agency leadership, Mantri chairs the PRCA Global Advisory Board and has been inducted into the ICCO Hall of Fame. His perspective on communications across Asia-Pacific, including the specific dynamics of trust, public affairs, and executive communications in the Indian and broader Asian context, is rare and genuinely valuable.

Mantri's 2022 ICCO presidential address called for the PR industry to treat disinformation not as a reputational risk but as a professional responsibility, arguing that communications practitioners have a duty to actively counter false narratives rather than simply managing their clients' relationship to them. He also won the ICCO Global PR Leader of the Year Award and the Provoke News Individual Achievement SABRE Award for his contributions to advancing the profession globally.

3. Barby K. Siegel, Zeno Group

Global CEO of Zeno Group since 2009, Barby K. Siegel has overseen the agency's transformation from a boutique sixty-person shop to a global integrated communications agency with operations across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Zeno has been named PRWeek Agency of the Year and PRovoke Purpose-Driven Agency of the Year multiple times under her leadership. Her focus on purpose-driven communications, diversity and equity in the profession, and the business case for communications leadership has been consistent and substantive throughout her tenure. She serves as a national board member for Year Up and the Diversity Action Alliance, advancing equity in the broader profession beyond her own agency.

Siegel's Clarity 2030 study, launched in 2026 and drawing on surveys of more than 1,400 global communications leaders, identified a defining tension in the profession: communications influence is rising globally, but organisational readiness to leverage that influence as a strategic asset is lagging. That framing has given practitioners a sharper vocabulary for conversations with their own leadership teams about the strategic value of the communications function.

4. Dini von Mueffling, DVMC

Founder and CEO of Dini von Mueffling Communications, Dini von Mueffling is a crisis communications specialist who has been inducted into the Platinum PR Hall of Fame and recognised by PR News as one of the Top Women in PR. Her agency has won more than 32 Cannes Lions, including four golds. Von Mueffling specialises in public relations for individuals under intense public scrutiny, including groundbreaking work helping Monica Lewinsky reclaim her public narrative and representing Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Her work sits at the intersection of reputation management, advocacy communications, and narrative strategy in high-stakes personal and institutional situations.

Von Mueffling has written and spoken extensively on the ethics of crisis communications, challenging the profession to distinguish between communications that protect legitimate interests and communications that obscure genuine wrongdoing. Her 2026 appearance at the PRWeek Crisis Comms Conference addressed the specific challenge of managing reputational crises in the deepfake and bot-amplification era, offering the most practically concrete guidance available on a challenge the profession is only beginning to understand.

5. Jennifer Risi, The Sway Effect

Jennifer Risi is the founder and president of The Sway Effect, an independent communications consultancy she launched after senior leadership roles at Ogilvy and WPP. A vocal advocate for the boutique agency model and for senior-level access that clients often struggle to secure at large networks, Risi has written and spoken extensively on the transformation of the PR industry. Her perspective on the consolidation reshaping the agency landscape in 2025 and 2026, and on what she argues is a coming wave of clients moving toward transparent, senior-led independent models, has been widely cited by industry analysts tracking the sector.

Risi published an influential essay in PRovoke Media in late 2025 arguing that the wave of agency consolidation, including the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger, would accelerate a flight of clients toward boutique independents, and that the coming two years would represent the greatest market share opportunity for independent agencies in a generation. Her commentary consistently cuts through the self-congratulatory tone that characterises much of the agency world's public conversation.

Category 2: The Framework Builders

These are the practitioners and researchers whose intellectual frameworks have changed how the profession operates, not just within individual agencies but across the entire field. They are the people other communicators cite when they explain why they do what they do.

6. Gini Dietrich, Spin Sucks

Creator of the PESO Model and founder of Spin Sucks, Gini Dietrich has done more than almost anyone to give communications professionals a coherent architecture for integrated strategy. The PESO Model, which maps the interaction between Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media, is now taught in university communications programmes worldwide and used daily by tens of thousands of practitioners. In 2026, Dietrich rebuilt the PESO Model Certification in partnership with the S.I. Newhouse School for Public Communication at Syracuse University specifically to address the reality of AI-driven discovery and zero-click search environments, making it one of the most current and applicable frameworks available to working communicators.

Dietrich's blog and podcast at Spin Sucks reach more than 100,000 subscribers, and her willingness to publish original research, challenge conventional wisdom, and engage with dissenting views in public makes her one of the most genuinely educational voices in the profession. Her co-authored book Marketing in the Round, written with Geoff Livingston, remains a foundational text for integrated communications strategy.

7. Johna Burke, AMEC

Johna Burke is the Global Managing Director of AMEC, the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, and the central figure in a multi-decade effort to professionalise how the PR and communications industry measures its work. The Barcelona Principles, which AMEC developed and has updated through multiple iterations, remain the most widely adopted framework for PR measurement globally. Burke has been relentless in pressing the profession to move beyond vanity metrics like advertising value equivalency and toward outcome-based measurement that connects communications activity to genuine business results. She was a central voice at the 2025 PRovoke event on communications leadership and the future of measurement in the AI era.

Burke's advocacy on measurement intersects powerfully with the current pressure communications professionals face to demonstrate return on investment to senior leadership. Her work through AMEC's Measurement Month and the annual AMEC Summit has built practitioner capability in measurement across more than fifty countries, creating a genuinely global professional infrastructure for a discipline that the rest of the industry relies on but few organisations fund adequately.

8. Mark Weiner, Truescope

Mark Weiner is the Chief Insights Officer at Truescope and one of the most rigorous voices on data, analytics, and measurement in the PR profession. His book PR Technology, Data and Insights, named one of the top three PR books of 2022 by BookAuthority, provides one of the most comprehensive treatments available of how communications professionals can use data to demonstrate impact and improve decision-making. Weiner serves on the Arthur Page Society, is a Trustee of the Institute for Public Relations, and was the 2018 recipient of the Jack Felton Medal from the IPR for lifetime achievement in communications research.

Weiner's most consistently cited argument is that the PR profession's credibility problem, specifically its failure to earn a genuine seat at the revenue table in most organisations, is fundamentally a measurement problem. Until communicators can speak in the language of business outcomes rather than media impressions, he argues, they will continue to be treated as a support function. That argument has been a consistent provocation in industry conversations for over a decade and remains as relevant in 2026 as it was when he first advanced it.

9. David Waddington, Comunicado

David Waddington is a UK-based PR professional, researcher, and host of the PR Podcasts series, and one of the most thorough analysts of measurement, technology, and professional standards in the global PR industry. His Forward Thinking PR newsletter and podcast are closely followed by practitioners seeking evidence-based commentary rather than trend-chasing content. Waddington's particular contribution is connecting academic research in communications with practical implications for working professionals, serving as a translator between the academy and the agency world in a way that few others manage. He has served on the CIPR Research and Evaluation Committee and is consistently cited by practitioners seeking rigorous perspectives on the evolving PR landscape.

Waddington's research on AI adoption in PR agencies, published in 2024, was one of the first systematic assessments of how communications professionals across different market segments were integrating AI tools into their workflows. Its finding that adoption was fast but critical evaluation of AI outputs was lagging has been widely referenced as a more nuanced and accurate diagnosis than most industry commentary on the topic.

10. Philip Sheldrake, Euler Partners

Philip Sheldrake is a principal at Euler Partners and one of the most philosophically ambitious thinkers in the digital PR and communications space. He is the author of The Business of Influence and a contributor to the development of the Influence Scorecard framework, which attempts to provide a rigorous conceptual foundation for measuring influence in the digital age. Where much of the PR industry treats influence as an intuitive concept that everyone understands but nobody can quite define, Sheldrake insists on defining it with precision and measuring it with evidence.

Sheldrake's contribution to the CIPR AI in PR research has been substantial, and his ongoing writing makes the case that the PR profession needs not just new tools but new conceptual frameworks to navigate the AI era effectively. His argument that the profession's current measurement frameworks were designed for a media landscape that no longer exists, and that AI requires a fundamental rethinking rather than incremental adaptation, is among the most provocative and substantive arguments currently circulating in the field.

Category 3: The Digital Natives

These practitioners built their reputations in the digital communications space and have been consistently ahead of the curve on how platforms, technologies, and audience behaviours change the practice of PR. They are the practitioners most likely to have already solved the problem your organisation is only beginning to encounter.

11. Frank Strong, Sword and the Script

Frank Strong is the founder of Sword and the Script Media, a B2B public relations agency, and the author of one of the most consistently high-quality practitioner blogs in the PR profession. His monthly roundup of original research relevant to PR professionals, drawing on academic journals, industry surveys, and trade publications, is a genuine service to the field. Strong's commentary on social media, AI, measurement, and the evolving relationship between earned and owned media is characterised by intellectual honesty and a willingness to distinguish between evidence and assertion that is rarer in practitioner commentary than it should be.

Strong's research synthesis essay on the declining effectiveness of the press release as the default output of media relations work sparked a genuine professional debate about the future of media relations as a discipline and forced many practitioners to confront data they had been comfortable ignoring. His content consistently helps practitioners stay intellectually rigorous in a field that is frequently seduced by novelty and repackaged conventional wisdom.

12. Scott Monty, Scott Monty Strategies

Scott Monty built his reputation as Ford's first global digital communications executive from 2008 to 2014, during a period when corporate social media was genuinely uncharted territory. The Economist ranked him number one on its list of 25 Social Business Leaders, and Ford's CEO Alan Mulally described him as a visionary. Since leaving Ford, Monty has operated an independent consultancy advising brands and agencies on executive communications, storytelling, digital strategy, and leadership communication culture. His newsletter This Week in Digital is a fixture in the inboxes of communications professionals globally.

Monty's 2025 essay on the difference between authentic leadership communication and performing as a communicator thinks they should perform is widely cited as a precise diagnosis of why so much corporate content fails to land even when technically competent. His work increasingly focuses on the character-based dimensions of leadership communication, drawing on his humanities background and expertise in storytelling traditions far older than digital media.

13. Neville Hobson, Independent

Neville Hobson is a UK-based communications strategist, podcaster, and one of the longest-serving voices in the digital communications space. As co-host of the For Immediate Release podcast, which he has maintained for nearly two decades, Hobson has created one of the most enduring independent voices analysing the intersection of technology and PR. His commentary on AI, the changing media landscape, and the evolving role of communicators is grounded in his own experience as both a practitioner and a continuous learner. The FIR podcast community represents a genuine practitioner learning network that predates LinkedIn newsletters, Substack, and most other forms of professional content by years.

Hobson's analysis of how generative AI is changing the economics of content production in PR agencies, developed across multiple FIR podcast episodes in 2025, provided one of the most nuanced practitioner perspectives on a topic where most commentary either underreacted or catastrophised. His ability to place current developments in a longer historical context, drawing on nearly two decades of observing how the profession has responded to each successive wave of digital change, makes his perspective distinctively useful.

14. Michelle Glogovac, The MLG Collective

Michelle Glogovac is the founder of The MLG Collective, a PR and podcast strategy agency, and one of the most practically useful voices on the strategic use of podcasting as a PR tool. Her book How To Get On Podcasts is the most comprehensive practical guide available to communicators wanting to leverage the medium for earned media, thought leadership, and brand building. As podcast bookings as a PR tactic have grown by double digits in recent years, with more than 50 percent of B2B marketers increasing investment in the channel, Glogovac's work sits exactly at the intersection of traditional PR thinking and the media landscape that modern practitioners need to navigate.

Glogovac's argument that podcast appearances, structured and pitched correctly, represent a more durable form of earned media than traditional press coverage, because they are searchable, long-form, and indexed permanently, has been influential in how progressive agencies position podcast strategy within integrated communications planning. She is consistently generous in sharing both what works and what fails in podcast PR, making her content practically actionable in a way that more promotional commentary from the agency world typically is not.

15. Sarah Evans, Zen Media

Sarah Evans is Partner and Head of PR at Zen Media, where she has been at the forefront of merging earned media strategy with what she calls Singular Source Authority, the practice of positioning a brand so thoroughly across earned, owned, and shared media that it becomes the default citation for AI systems and search engines alike. With more than two decades of experience guiding companies through funding rounds, product launches, crises, and AI-driven reinvention, Evans has developed a distinctive perspective on where PR and SEO are converging in the AI era. Her commentary on Answer Engine Optimisation and its implications for PR strategy is among the most practically actionable available.

Evans contributed to the development of Zen Media's proprietary framework for measuring PR's contribution to organic search authority, which has become a model for how progressive agencies are starting to demonstrate the long-term SEO value of earned media coverage in terms that resonate with CMOs and CFOs alongside the traditional audience and reputation metrics the profession has relied on.

Category 4: The Crisis and Reputation Specialists

These practitioners have built their professional identity around the highest-stakes corner of the communications discipline. Crisis communications is where PR earns its most consequential credibility, and these are the voices the profession turns to when organisations are under genuine pressure.

16. Tonya McKenzie, Sand and Shores

Tonya McKenzie is the founder of Sand and Shores PR, a reputation management and crisis communications agency, and one of the most candid practitioner voices on the realities of PR relationships. A podcaster, author, and speaker, McKenzie consistently shares honest, difficult truths about how and why PR relationships succeed and fail, bringing a level of transparency to practitioner-client dynamics that is genuinely rare in a profession that often presents its own work uncritically. Her focus on reputation management for individuals and brands navigating public scrutiny, and her particular expertise in PR for the sports and entertainment industries, gives her a perspective on the human dimensions of communications that is frequently missing from more technical commentators.

McKenzie's widely shared commentary on the difference between PR for the brand and PR for the person behind the brand has been influential in how many practitioners approach executive positioning and personal reputation strategy for senior leaders who are inseparable from their organisations' public identities. Her willingness to discuss the failure modes of PR relationships, including when client behaviour makes good PR work impossible, is genuinely educational for practitioners and clients alike.

17. Kristi Piehl, Media Minefield

Kristi Piehl is the founder and CEO of Media Minefield, a PR agency specialising in crisis communications preparedness and response. Her particular focus is on equipping organisations for crises before they occur, a discipline she practises with the conviction that most organisations that suffer serious reputational damage are suffering from a planning failure rather than a communications failure. Piehl was one of the earliest and most consistent voices warning the PR profession about the specific crisis risk posed by deepfakes and AI-generated content, and her 2026 predictions for PRNEWS on the role of bots and deepfakes in crisis scenarios were cited as among the profession's most prescient early warnings on this challenge.

Piehl's framework for proactive social media monitoring as a crisis early warning system, which she has refined through work with clients across sectors, represents a practical contribution to the discipline that sits between reputation monitoring and crisis communications planning. Her approach treats crisis preparedness not as an insurance policy but as an ongoing operational discipline that organisations should embed into their regular communications practice.

18. Paul Holmes, PRovoke Media

Paul Holmes is the founder and chair of PRovoke Media, formerly the Holmes Report, and has spent more than twenty-five years building the most comprehensive journalistic and analytical coverage of the global PR and communications industry. PRovoke's Global PR Agency Rankings, the SABRE Awards, the Global PR Summit, and the annual Influence 100 compendium of key industry figures have become the industry's most trusted benchmarks for quality and performance. Holmes' own commentary on the business and practice of PR is consistently well-informed and appropriately critical of the profession's tendencies toward self-congratulation and measurement avoidance.

Holmes' 2025 essay arguing that the Omnicom-IPG merger represented not just a business consolidation but an existential challenge to the independent thought leadership and creative distinctiveness of the agencies being absorbed was one of the year's most debated pieces of industry analysis. His decades of sustained, rigorous coverage of the profession from a journalistic perspective, rather than a promotional or self-interested one, represents a contribution to the field's intellectual health that is difficult to overstate.

19. Sandra Fathi, Affect

Sandra Fathi is the founder and president of Affect, a communications agency with deep specialisation in technology and healthcare PR. A long-time contributor to the professional development of the PR field through her work with PRSA and other industry bodies, Fathi has built a reputation as a thoughtful voice on client-agency relationships, the professional standards of the PR industry, and the specific communication challenges facing technology companies navigating complex stakeholder environments. Her commentary on media relations strategy in a world where journalists receive hundreds of pitches per day and trust in media is declining has been consistently useful to practitioners across the profession.

Fathi's research on what makes a media pitch genuinely successful in the current environment, published through PRSA channels, challenged the conventional wisdom that shorter pitches always perform better and instead argued that pitch relevance and the quality of evidence offered to journalists matters more than length in determining journalist response rates. That finding, running counter to much received wisdom in the profession, sparked productive debate about what media relations fundamentals actually look like in 2025.

20. Eleanor Hawkins, PR Daily

As editor-in-chief of PR Daily, Eleanor Hawkins is positioned at the intersection of journalism and the PR profession in a way that gives her unusual visibility into both what practitioners need to know and what the most important conversations in the field actually are. Her daily editorial decisions shape what thousands of PR professionals read, think about, and discuss. Hawkins' own commentary on LinkedIn consistently demonstrates strong editorial intelligence applied to PR topics, making complex or contested professional questions genuinely accessible without sacrificing nuance or precision.

Hawkins' editorial focus on the integration of communications and the C-suite, particularly the growing expectation that communications leaders will contribute directly to business strategy rather than simply executing against it, reflects one of the most important professional conversations happening in the field. Her practical, working-practitioner framing of strategic questions makes her commentary more immediately useful for most practitioners than the more abstract academic or consulting perspectives that dominate much industry publication.

Category 5: The Educators and Researchers

These practitioners have built their contribution primarily through teaching, research, and writing that has shaped how the next generation of communicators is trained and how the profession thinks about its own intellectual foundations.

21. Deirdre Breakenridge, Pure Performance Communications

A seven-time published author and veteran of more than thirty years in PR and marketing, Deirdre Breakenridge occupies a rare position as both a working practitioner and an active educator. As CEO of Pure Performance Communications, she continues to advise senior executives and corporations. As an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions, she shapes how emerging communicators understand the discipline. As a LinkedIn Learning instructor with six video courses and host of the Women Worldwide podcast, she reaches practitioners at every stage of their careers. Her most recent book Answers for Modern Communicators provides a comprehensive treatment of strategic business communication for an audience that cannot rely on traditional PR playbooks.

Breakenridge's co-authored book with Brian Solis, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, was ahead of its time in arguing that social media required PR to fundamentally rebuild around two-way conversation rather than broadcast messaging, a transition the profession is still completing. Her consistent advocacy for emotional intelligence as a core PR competency, rather than simply a nice-to-have, has influenced how many training programmes approach the development of early-career communicators.

22. Arun Sudhaman, Earned First / PRomise Foundation

Having spent fourteen years as CEO and editor-in-chief of PRovoke Media, where he transformed it from its Holmes Report origins into the world's foremost PR media and events platform, Arun Sudhaman now focuses on ventures at the intersection of communications, reputation, and emerging markets through his roles as founding editor of Earned First and CEO of the PRomise Foundation. He serves as non-executive chair of ICCO and as ambassador for the Asian Communications Network. Named the youngest-ever inductee into the ICCO Hall of Fame in 2015 and winner of Journalist of the Year at the 2022 PRCA Asia-Pacific Awards, Sudhaman brings a journalist-analyst's rigour to questions about where the PR profession is going.

Sudhaman's work covering Asia-Pacific communications in particular gave PRovoke a genuinely global perspective that many industry publications claim but few deliver. His extended analysis of how the Omnicom-IPG consolidation would reshape the global agency landscape, and his decade of substantive coverage of communications in markets from India to China to Southeast Asia, represent a body of work that gives him a perspective on the global profession that very few practitioners can match.

23. Maja Pawinska Sims, PRovoke Media

Maja Pawinska Sims is a senior editor at PRovoke Media and one of the most prolific and respected journalists covering the European PR industry. Her coverage of UK, European, and global agency news, leadership changes, and industry trends represents some of the most consistent long-form journalism available to communications professionals. Beyond news coverage, Pawinska Sims has built a distinctive editorial voice on the human dimensions of the communications profession, including her work on the Young Changemakers programme identifying future leaders from underrepresented backgrounds globally.

Pawinska Sims' investigation into the structural barriers preventing women from reaching senior leadership positions in PR agencies across Europe, despite women comprising the majority of the entry and mid-level workforce, was among the most important pieces of journalism about the profession in 2025. Her coverage of communications in Central and Eastern European markets, particularly Poland and Germany, brings perspectives to the global conversation that Western-centric publications consistently miss.

24. Michelle Garrett, Independent PR Consultant

Michelle Garrett is a B2B PR consultant, writer, and community builder whose consistent, honest practitioner commentary makes her one of the most genuinely useful voices for working PR professionals. Her #FreelanceChat LinkedIn group, which she founded and continues to facilitate, is one of the most active peer learning spaces for independent PR professionals globally. Garrett's content is characterised by the kind of practical specificity that comes from working with real clients every day rather than advising from a distance, and her commentary on freelance business development, B2B media relations strategy, and the business of running an independent PR practice reaches an audience that rarely sees their professional context reflected in industry publishing.

Garrett's contribution to the Cision PR Trends 2025 webinar, where she challenged the assumption that all PR needs to move toward data-driven measurement at the expense of relationship-based media engagement, sparked one of the more productive debates in the practitioner community about what modern PR actually means for small and mid-sized operations. Her willingness to push back on received wisdom, including wisdom endorsed by organisations much larger and better-resourced than her own consultancy, reflects the intellectual independence that distinguishes the best practitioner voices.

25. Amith Prabhu, SCoRe

Amith Prabhu is a co-founder of the School of Communications and Reputation, known as SCoRe, in Mumbai, India, and one of the most influential figures in the development of the PR profession in South Asia. SCoRe has graduated thousands of communications professionals who have gone on to lead PR functions across India's corporate, government, and NGO sectors. Prabhu's advocacy for professionalisation, ethical standards, and evidence-based practice in the Indian communications industry has been both persistent and productive. He serves on advisory boards of multiple industry bodies and is a regular speaker at global PR conferences.

Prabhu's research on the state of public relations education in Asia, published through SCoRe and presented at ICCO forums, documented the significant gap between what communications programmes teach and what agencies and in-house teams actually need from entry-level practitioners. That research generated a reform agenda that has influenced curricula across the region and sparked a broader conversation about whether the PR profession globally is training the people it actually needs.

Category 6: The Global Connectors

These practitioners operate at the intersection of communications and international influence, either connecting the profession across geographic boundaries or representing markets and perspectives that are underrepresented in most global PR conversations. Their contribution is as much infrastructural as intellectual.

26. Deeptie Sethi, PRCAI

Deeptie Sethi is the CEO of the Public Relations Consultants Association of India and one of the most influential advocates for the professionalisation of public relations in South Asia. Her work to establish industry standards, professional ethics frameworks, and advocacy for the PR profession in a market of over one billion people represents a contribution to the global field that is frequently overlooked by Western-centric thought leader lists. Sethi has led initiatives including the PRCAI PRana campaign, which won a SABRE Award at the Asia-Pacific level, demonstrating that industry advocacy and sectoral reputation management can itself be done with the same creativity and strategic rigour that agencies bring to client work.

Sethi's public commentary on the specific communications challenges facing Indian organisations navigating global reputation management, including the tension between domestic audience expectations and international stakeholder norms that multinational companies must navigate in both directions, offers perspectives that are genuinely distinct from what practitioners in the US or UK encounter in their daily professional conversations.

27. Agung S. Ongko, RICE Communications

Agung S. Ongko is a principal strategist at RICE, an award-winning strategic communications consultancy operating across Asia-Pacific, and one of the most substantive voices on corporate reputation, crisis response, and executive thought leadership in Southeast Asia. He has served as a trusted adviser to Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 companies including Google, Hilton, Audi, and International Workplace Group on communications strategy across the region. His particular expertise in multi-stakeholder issues management, including M&A communications, data privacy crises, and the intersection of regulatory affairs and reputation, gives him a depth of practical experience that translates into consistently useful commentary.

Ongko's analysis of how communications strategy needs to evolve across Southeast Asia as governments move at dramatically different speeds toward AI governance frameworks has been valuable for regional practitioners navigating markets where the regulatory and social media landscapes vary as much as the cultural and linguistic contexts. His perspective on the pan-APAC communications audit process, including stakeholder mapping and landscape analysis across multiple markets simultaneously, fills a gap in most global communications writing.

28. Nadia Drobny, Weber Shandwick

Nadia Drobny is a senior leader at Weber Shandwick with deep expertise in corporate communications, executive positioning, and public affairs across European markets. Her commentary on the evolving role of communications in organisations navigating ESG expectations, political volatility in European markets, and the specific demands of communicating credibly with sceptical, media-literate European publics has been consistent and rigorous. Practitioners working across European markets frequently struggle with the different regulatory environments, media cultures, and audience trust dynamics that make pan-European campaigns genuinely complex.

Drobny's contribution to research on the changing expectations of Chief Communications Officers in European corporations, specifically the growing pressure to demonstrate that communications directly influences business outcomes rather than simply managing relationships, reflects one of the profession's most important ongoing internal debates. Her European perspective on what strategic communications leadership looks like in practice distinguishes her commentary from the predominantly US and UK voices that dominate most global PR discourse.

29. Aanchal Singh, Independent

A Singapore-based communications professional with deep expertise across Southeast Asia and India, Aanchal Singh has built her profile through strategic work spanning healthcare, technology, and social innovation communications across the region. Her perspective on multi-market communications in Southeast Asia, including the specific challenges of cultural localisation, language differences, and platform preferences that make generic global messaging fail in markets from Vietnam to the Philippines, fills a genuine gap in most global PR thinking. Her experience moderating communications strategy across markets with vastly different media landscapes and institutional trust environments makes her perspective genuinely distinctive.

Singh's commentary on the healthcare communications landscape in Southeast Asia, including the rapid development of sophisticated patient advocacy and regulatory affairs communications in markets previously dominated by simple media relations, has influenced how major organisations structure their regional communications teams when moving from a broadcast to a genuinely stakeholder-centred model.

30. Sabrina Horn, HORN Strategy

Sabrina Horn is the founder and CEO of HORN Strategy and the author of Make It, Don't Fake It, a book on authentic leadership that has been adopted by executive education programmes at multiple business schools. Horn's particular contribution is bridging the gap between communications strategy and executive leadership development. Her argument that authenticity in leadership communications is not a soft concept but a measurable and achievable operational standard has influenced how many Chief Communications Officers and Chief People Officers approach executive coaching and spokesperson preparation. Her background includes building one of the first technology PR agencies in Silicon Valley and advising technology companies through periods of intense public scrutiny.

Horn's framework for distinguishing between authentic communication and comfortable communication, arguing that authentic communication is frequently uncomfortable precisely because it requires leaders to say true things that create short-term friction, has been influential in how communications coaches work with executives on spokesperson preparation. Make It, Don't Fake It argues that the organisations with the most credible external communications are those that have genuinely done the internal work of aligning values, behaviour, and narrative.

Category 7: The Communicators Who Model the Craft

These practitioners demonstrate through their own communications output what genuinely excellent PR looks like. They are the living proof of concept for the strategies and frameworks the profession advocates, and their example is as instructive as their explicit writing and teaching.

31. Frank Strong, Sword and the Script

Already profiled in Category 3, Frank Strong deserves specific recognition in this category for the way his own communications practice embodies the research-led, evidence-grounded approach he advocates. His monthly research synthesis is itself a demonstration that a communications professional can build genuine authority and a loyal professional audience without promotional content, paid distribution, or institutional backing. Strong's approach to his own professional brand demonstrates that the most durable PR practice is built on consistent, generous sharing of genuinely useful insight.

Strong's essay on the difference between content marketing that reaches audiences and content marketing that changes their thinking has influenced how many PR practitioners approach their own professional content, distinguishing between the appearance of thought leadership and the substance of it. His willingness to share research findings that challenge his own prior conclusions is a model of intellectual honesty that the profession would benefit from emulating more broadly.

32. Neville Hobson, Independent

Already profiled in Category 3, Neville Hobson's nearly two-decade commitment to the FIR podcast as a free, independent resource for communications practitioners deserves specific recognition in this category as an example of professional community service sustained at a level that most practitioners, who must balance client commitments with contribution, find genuinely inspiring and difficult to match. His consistent, unhurried, genuinely curious engagement with each week's developments in the communications technology landscape models a kind of professional learning that is increasingly rare.

Hobson's ability to maintain intellectual independence while covering technology companies whose tools shape the profession he analyses, acknowledging limitations and uncertainty in AI tools that many practitioners are eager to champion uncritically, represents a model of journalistic integrity applied to practitioner commentary that is as valuable as any specific insight he shares.

33. Scott Monty, Scott Monty Strategies

Already profiled in Category 3. Monty's newsletter and professional content operation demonstrates in practice that the most enduring communications practitioner brands are built not on credentials or institutional affiliation but on a distinctive and consistent voice applied to genuinely interesting ideas. His willingness to draw on Victorian literary references, classical rhetoric, and the history of advertising to illuminate current digital communications challenges produces a kind of commentary that is genuinely difficult to replicate, which is precisely the point he makes about authentic professional communication.

Monty's decision to walk away from corporate employment at the peak of his institutional visibility to pursue independent consulting that reflects his actual values and intellectual interests is itself a communications story, a demonstration that the authentic leadership communication he advocates is possible even in situations where the easier and more lucrative path is available.

34. Michelle Garrett, Independent PR Consultant

Already profiled in Category 5. Garrett's community-building work, particularly the #FreelanceChat LinkedIn group, deserves specific recognition in this category as an example of how individual practitioners can create genuine professional infrastructure for thousands of peers through consistent, generous engagement rather than broadcast publishing. The group she founded has become one of the most active peer learning spaces for independent PR professionals globally, demonstrating that the communications skills the profession teaches about community-building apply just as powerfully to professional communities as to consumer audiences.

Garrett's own professional communications, consistently honest about the challenges of running an independent consultancy, the realities of client acquisition and retention, and the specific pressures faced by practitioners who do not have agency infrastructure behind them, make her content useful in a way that the agency-centric majority of PR commentary simply cannot match for a large segment of the profession.

35. Jonno White, Clarity Group Global

The communication challenges at the heart of public relations, including how leaders build trust, how teams have difficult conversations, how organisations align around values under pressure, and how communication culture either enables or undermines strategic capability, are not purely technical problems. They are leadership and team dynamics problems. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000 copies sold globally, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230 episodes reaching listeners in 150 countries, works with leadership teams around the world to build the communication culture that makes every other communications strategy more effective.

The people on this list are the thinkers shaping how public relations is practised globally. Jonno White is the practitioner you bring in when you are ready to act on what they say, to build the team culture, have the difficult conversations, and lead the kind of change that makes external communications credible because the internal reality it reflects actually matches the narrative. His book Step Up or Step Out, available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD, provides the foundational framework for organisations ready to have the conversations that most avoid.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or executive team offsite, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several practitioners were seriously considered for the final 35 but were not included for specific reasons. Shonali Burke is a genuinely distinguished PR professional who founded the #measurePR movement, taught at Johns Hopkins, and built a long career in social PR strategy. In early 2025, Burke transitioned from PR consulting into arts administration as Managing Director of People's Light theatre, and her current professional focus has shifted significantly from the PR and communications field. Brian Solis was for many years one of the most cited voices on digital communications and the intersection of technology and PR, and his co-authored work with Deirdre Breakenridge remains a landmark in the field, but his current primary focus on broader digital transformation and futures work has moved substantially beyond PR-specific content. Mark Schaefer is a widely-read voice on marketing strategy who frequently addresses PR-adjacent topics, but his work has become substantially broader than PR specifically. Maja Pawinska Sims and Paul Holmes were profiled in their primary categories but deserve mention here as voices who could easily have occupied multiple positions on this list given the breadth of their contributions. The PRovoke Media editorial team as a whole represents one of the most valuable intellectual resources available to communications professionals globally.

Common Mistakes When Engaging with PR Thought Leadership

The most common mistake is treating thought leadership as a substitute for practice. The frameworks and insights that practitioners like Gini Dietrich, Mark Weiner, and Johna Burke have developed are genuinely valuable, but reading about the PESO Model or the Barcelona Principles does not substitute for applying them. The communicators who get the most from following thought leaders are those who immediately translate what they read into something they are trying. Following without doing is one of the most expensive professional habits in PR.

A second common mistake is consuming thought leadership from only one disciplinary corner of the profession. PR is genuinely cross-disciplinary. The measurement researchers, the crisis specialists, the digital strategists, the agency business analysts, and the educators all have something to contribute, and teams that follow only voices from their own specialty regularly miss insights from adjacent disciplines that would genuinely help them. A media relations practitioner who has never read Mark Weiner on measurement, or a measurement specialist who has never engaged with Dini von Mueffling on crisis reputation strategy, is operating with an unnecessarily narrow intellectual toolkit.

A third mistake is defaulting to the most famous names and ignoring the genuinely useful voices who have smaller but more engaged audiences. Some of the most practically actionable content in the PR space comes from practitioners like Michelle Garrett, Frank Strong, and David Waddington, whose audiences are smaller than the global agency CEOs but whose content is more directly applicable for the majority of practitioners who work in independent consultancies, boutique agencies, or in-house teams. Fame and useful are not the same quality, and in practitioner education they rarely overlap as much as they should.

A fourth mistake is treating the US and UK as the default global conversation. Public relations operates in different contexts, regulatory environments, and cultural traditions in India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and continental Europe. Practitioners like Nitin Mantri, Amith Prabhu, Deeptie Sethi, and Agung S. Ongko offer perspectives unavailable from Western-centric sources, and teams operating internationally ignore these voices at genuine professional cost. The most effective global communications strategies are built on the kind of market-specific intelligence that only practitioners working in those markets can provide.

A fifth mistake is engaging with thought leadership reactively, only when a crisis or challenge prompts it, rather than proactively as a continuous professional development practice. The communicators who consistently outperform their peers are those who build regular reading and reflection into their professional routine rather than turning to industry voices only when they are already in the middle of a problem they could have anticipated.

Implementation Guide: Building Your PR Thought Leadership Practice

The first step is identifying which corners of the PR field are most relevant to your current role and challenges, then deliberately adding at least one voice from an adjacent discipline you would not normally encounter. A practitioner in agency media relations might make it a habit to follow one measurement-focused voice and one crisis specialist alongside the media relations commentary they naturally gravitate toward. The cross-disciplinary exposure is where most practitioners find the unexpected insights that change how they work.

The second step is engaging actively rather than passively. LinkedIn is the primary platform where most of the thought leaders on this list share their content. Following them is useful. Commenting with genuine substance, sharing their work with a real perspective rather than a generic endorsement, and occasionally sending a direct message when a piece of content has genuinely influenced how you think or work, is how practitioners build the professional relationships that create real career and business opportunities over time. The PR professionals who have built the strongest professional networks are almost universally those who gave generously before asking for anything.

The third step is creating a sustainable reading routine rather than attempting comprehensive coverage. Following all 35 people on this list at the same intensity is unsustainable. Select five to seven voices whose current focus most directly overlaps with your professional challenges. Follow them consistently. Set a quarterly reminder to revisit your list and update it as your own focus and theirs evolves. Quality of attention to a smaller number of genuinely relevant voices consistently outperforms the attempt to cover everything.

The fourth step is translating insights into conversations. The most valuable thing a practitioner can do with thought leadership is bring it to their team. A research finding about journalist response rates, a new measurement framework, or a crisis case study that illustrates a principle practitioners had only read about abstractly becomes genuinely educational when discussed with colleagues and applied to real situations. The PR teams that generate the most learning from following thought leaders are those that have created space for those conversations to happen regularly.

The fifth step is contributing. Following thought leaders eventually creates the conditions to become one. Every practitioner who comments regularly with genuine insights, shares original observations from their own work, and builds a body of professional writing over time is doing what the best thought leaders on this list have done, just at an earlier stage of the process. The PR profession genuinely benefits from more practitioners sharing what they know, and the thought leaders on this list would almost universally encourage the people who follow them to begin contributing their own perspectives to the professional conversation.

For leadership teams and organisations who want expert support building the communication culture that underpins all of this, Jonno White works with leadership teams globally to build the team dynamics, leadership clarity, and communication culture that make external communications credible. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect, and virtual delivery is available across all time zones.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes someone a genuine PR thought leader rather than just a well-known practitioner? The distinction lies in the quality and originality of intellectual contribution. A thought leader in public relations is someone whose ideas have genuinely changed how other practitioners think or work, not simply someone who is visible, successful, or widely connected. The clearest indicators are whether they have produced frameworks, research, or arguments that are cited by others without prompting; whether their content helps practitioners solve problems they could not solve before encountering it; and whether they engage with the complexity and uncertainty of the field honestly rather than offering oversimplified or self-promotional commentary.

How was this list compiled, and what criteria were applied? The list was developed through comprehensive research across Thinkers360 PR leaderboards, ICCO Hall of Fame records, PRCA Global Advisory Board membership, academic institution faculty lists at leading communications programmes, PRovoke Media coverage, and extensive review of LinkedIn and podcast activity across the PR profession in 2025 and 2026. Selection prioritised formal credentials or deep demonstrated expertise in the communications field, geographic and disciplinary diversity spanning ten countries and five continents, genuine contribution to how the field has evolved rather than simply occupying a visible role, and active participation in professional conversations in 2025 and 2026.

How do I decide which thought leaders to actually follow given there are 35 on this list? Start with the discipline closest to your current professional focus and identify two or three voices from that area. Then deliberately add one voice from a discipline you find genuinely challenging or unfamiliar. If you work in crisis communications, that might mean adding a measurement-focused voice. If you work in digital PR, that might mean adding an academic researcher or an emerging market specialist. Revisit your list every quarter and update it as your focus and theirs evolves. Quality of attention consistently beats quantity of follows.

How should I engage with thought leader content to get the most from it? Active engagement is consistently more valuable than passive consumption. Comment with a genuine perspective, not just affirmation. Share pieces that have influenced your thinking, and say specifically how. Connect the ideas you are reading about to real situations and challenges in your own work. And bring what you learn into conversations with your colleagues, because the ideas that get discussed and applied in team contexts become embedded in practice in a way that ideas that stay in your reading list generally do not.

Can I hire someone to facilitate communications culture and leadership workshops for my team? Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with 10,000 copies sold globally, works with leadership teams and organisations globally to build the communication culture, team alignment, and leadership capability that makes communications strategy credible and effective. Whether your team needs a keynote on leadership communication, a workshop on team dynamics and communication styles using DISC or Working Genius frameworks, or a facilitated executive offsite on strategic alignment, Jonno brings practical frameworks directly applicable to the challenges communications leaders face. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What is the single most important thing I can do to build my professional profile in PR? Begin contributing publicly and consistently to the professional conversation in your area of expertise. The thought leaders on this list all started by sharing what they knew in accessible, genuine, and regular ways before they had large audiences to share it with. The platform, the audience, and the professional recognition followed the contribution, not the other way around. Start a newsletter. Write one LinkedIn post per week that genuinely helps someone solve a problem. Comment with actual substance on the posts of practitioners you respect. The professional credibility that thought leaders in this field have built is not a function of their role or their agency's size. It is a function of sustained, generous intellectual contribution to a community that recognises and rewards genuine value.

Final Thoughts

Public relations is the discipline responsible for one of the most fundamental challenges facing organisations in 2026: earning and maintaining trust in an environment where trust is the scarcest resource. The 35 thought leaders on this list represent the full range of intellectual contributions shaping how the profession addresses that challenge, from measurement frameworks and crisis protocols to digital strategy, education, and leadership communication culture.

The most important takeaway from this list is not any specific name or framework. It is the recognition that the PR profession is served by a genuinely diverse ecosystem of thinkers, researchers, educators, and practitioners who are actively working to make communications better. Following the right voices is not about completing a reading list. It is about building a professional learning practice that keeps pace with a field that is genuinely, rapidly, and consequentially changing.

For more on building effective leadership teams and the culture that makes great communication possible, check out my article on 50 Best Thought Leaders on Leadership in Nonprofits at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leadership-nonprofits, and 50 Essential Thought Leaders on Personal Branding in the UK at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-personal-branding-uk. Both provide related frameworks for understanding how the best communicators build genuine professional authority over time.

For leadership teams who want to build the internal communication culture that makes all external communications more effective, the work starts inside the organisation. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with leadership teams around the world to build the team dynamics, communication culture, and leadership clarity that organisations need to communicate credibly with the world outside.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore what that work looks like for your team. International travel is often far more affordable than expected.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 50 Essential Thought Leaders on Personal Branding in the UK

The global public relations conversation overlaps significantly with personal branding, which is how individual communicators build the professional reputation and authority that thought leadership requires. The field of personal branding has moved from a nice-to-have to a strategic necessity for leaders, founders, and executives. Research shows that 82 percent of consumers are more likely to trust a company when its senior leaders are active on social media, and the same logic applies to communications professionals building their own professional credibility.

My article on the 50 Essential Thought Leaders on Personal Branding in the UK provides a deep dive into the practitioners shaping how executives, consultants, and communications professionals build their own professional credibility. The thought leaders in that article, from LinkedIn positioning specialists to executive brand strategists, represent the discipline sitting at the intersection of PR and personal credibility in a way directly relevant to anyone working in the communications profession.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-personal-branding-uk