Chris Atkins is an author, speaker and communications consultant with 35 years of PR agency and in-house experience.
Chris was Managing Director for all internal and external communications for PricewaterhouseCoopers. With nearly nine billion in revenues and 30,000 employees, PwC (US) is the largest of the “Big Four” accounting firms. He joined PwC after five years at Standard & Poor’s, where he was responsible for all communications for credit ratings and indices such as the S&P 500. He was at the forefront of S&P’s crisis response regarding the role of credit ratings in the financial meltdown. Before joining S&P, he spent 26 years at several major public relations agencies. He was Managing Director of the Global Corporate Practices at Ogilvy Public Relations and Ketchum, counseling clients such as FedEx, the New York Stock Exchange and GE. While at Ketchum, Chris founded the Ketchum Reputation Lab, which used the 20+ year data set from Fortune Magazine’s “America’s Most Admired Corporations” survey to develop an analytical tool to inform communications strategy.
Chris also served as Chief Operating Officer of the New York office of Burson-Marsteller, and was a Vice President in the Corporate Group at Hill & Knowlton. A frequent speaker and guest lecturer at NYU and Columbia on the topic of crisis preparedness and response, Chris was named by PR Week as one of the “20 crisis counselors CEOs should have in their speed-dialer.”
Chris is a member of the Arthur W. Page Society, and a trustee of the Institute for Public Relations. He is the co-author of a book on corporate reputation called Image Wars: Protecting Your Company When There’s No Place to Hide, (1989, John Wiley & Sons) and “An Honest Day’s Work,” to be published in the fall of 2014. He lives with his wife, Lauren Letellier, in Manhattan and Hillsdale, NY.
Oddly enough, I was overlooked once again to serve as a commencement speaker this year. In fact, although I have been available most Spring weekends for the past few years, not one institution of higher learning (or lower, for that matter) has called upon me to make a […]
Historically, the advertising and editorial departments of news organizations are supposed to be walled off from each other. But that wall seems to be crumbling in a way we could not have imagined fifteen years ago. It may be unintentional, but it’s still a little weird. The other […]
There’s a post rocketing around Facebook from Ragan’s PR Daily (http://bit.ly/10ZgwEj) purporting to list the “ten signs you are an old-school PR pro.” As far as I can tell, it is being read and shared mainly by old-school PR pros. Anyway, I have reviewed the items on the list, […]
Thanks to the ups and downs of business cycles, most companies find themselves in the midst of constant change. Whether to meet or exceed the expectations of ravenous shareholders or just to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the enterprise (or both), companies are always looking for ways to […]
A PR agency I once worked for had a large chemical company as a client. One day, I was summoned to a meeting with one of the agency’s senior leaders, who asked if I would take over as the senior relationship manager for the client. The person who had been in that […]
For the last several years, I have had a white board in my office on which I have written a number of adages (currently 24) that have come to mean something to me over the years. The list changes now and then, with new entries supplanting older ones […]
Could you land this? A fellow communications practitioner once said to me, “I may be the PR guy, not the CEO, but in an emergency I could land the plane.” What did he mean by that? He meant that he understood enough about how his company worked — […]
If you have ever bought or received a diamond engagement ring, you have undoubtedly learned about the Four Cs. These are the four factors that determine the value of a gem. For the uninitiated and/or the unlucky, here are the Four Cs: Clarity, Color, Cut and Carat. And just because I’ve never […]
Right up front, let me say that Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is an intellectually bankrupt concept and a desecration of all that is good and right in the world. Wow! It felt good to say that out loud. AVE is a purported measurement tool that attempts to assign […]
The fun (or should I say unsettling) thing about paradigm shifts is that it’s hard to tell when they’re happening. But I spotted one recently, and it kind of rocked my world. If your company recruits recent college graduates, chances are your new employees barely think about email […]
Chris Atkins’ Random PR Thoughts