Partner, Chief Engagement Officer,
Ketchum Europe
As Ketchum Europe's Chief Engagement Officer, Stephen Waddington - or Wadds as he's better known - has been responsible for developing and rolling out more than 20 real-time communication war-rooms across the Ketchum global network.
Called "Story Works" these war-rooms are designed to create original content stories for brands driven by social listening, creative insights and planning across paid, earned, shared and owned channels. In making this high tech, multi-channel integrated approach a reality, he has effectively created a new standard for modern PR team workflow. He has pushed forward, not just for one of the world’s biggest PR agencies, but for what the communication industry overall does in terms of bringing its skills together to deliver a modern integrated PR campaigns.
Among his numerous industry initiatives are:
- #FutereProof, a crowd-sourced exercise that explains how the industry can evolve through a series of detailed essays.
- #PRStack, a project that brought together 250 people to characterize an online tools to modernize communications workflow.
- A joint project with BledCom, the international research symposium for PR, that encourages academics and PR professionals to work together in a new community practice.
- He has also marshaled a large community of global social experts within Ketchum to compile their social review of 2015 and 2016 and is responsible for driving the integration of digital and social capabilities in client engagements across the agency's international network.
Wadds is responsible for driving the integration of digital and social capabilities in client engagements across our agency’s international network where he has made a huge impact as we seek to forge ahead as the most social public relations agency. He’s helped characterize the future of public relations, develop competencies, and build teams to match our clients and media in each of our markets and offices worldwide.
In fact, he has the word “disruption” written into his job description, partly because Ketchum wants him to keep coming up with radical alternatives, advocate new ideas, and invent new things. And partly because that’s just the nature of how he thinks – he’s someone who really does embody the quest for innovation.
As a Visiting Professor in Practice at Newcastle University and as one of the country's foremost experts on the new media landscape, Stephen champions the adoption of social technology to the industry as a writer, conference speaker and award-winning blogger.
Born in Preston, England, Stephen has worked in almost all of the Ketchum markets across the EU, Asia and the US. Today he leads a community of about 500 global practitioners as they seek to understand how the firm can adapt new technologies to better engage their audiences.