PRCA Invites Lobbying Code Input Amid Prior Ethics Code Concerns
Ketchum's (Omnicom's) troubling transatlantic influence in PR trade groups raises dire ethics concerns, as PRCA-UK ponders its "Lobbying" code.
Over recent months, the London-based Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) has repeatedly invited its members and those within the PR industry – I suppose more specifically, those who work in a lobbying / public affairs / governmental relations capacity in the United Kingdom – to comment on current provisions of the PRCA Public Affairs / Lobbying Code.
I saw the PRCA’s first invitation for public input, back in December 2024:
My blog post — here and now — is a full response on my own behalf to the PRCA’s ongoing invitation for input, although my prior efforts to lend separate input last year was not received as I had hoped.
The new / revised PRCA Lobbying Code is wholly differentiated from the more foundational and generalized “PRCA Code of Conduct” applicable to all members. A revised version of this separate code already was passed as PRCA law last year, without public invitation for member input.
This distinction is important.
For contextual background, the PRCA underwent a governance review in 2022-23, which was codified by member vote in September 2023 with a fully new set of bylaws (or “bye-laws,” as written in the UK) and new structure of the PRCA board (with newly elected board officers / members), standing committees, etc.
The following year, on July 1, 2024, the PRCA rolled out its new Code of Conduct, without opportunity for prior member review / input as to the new rules with which all members are expected to comply in their daily PR work and client / employer representations.
I found out about this new Code roll-out suddenly last year, along with everyone else, when this alert was posted in social media:
When this foundational Code and procedures were published online last summer, I apparently was one of the rather oddball individuals who actually read it, word-for-word.
As was just recently confirmed in a newly recorded webinar posted publicly in April 2025, I apparently haven’t been the only person who has voiced concerns to the PRCA since then.
Here are some highlights / excerpts I pulled from the above-mentioned webinar about the new Public Affairs / Lobbying Code:
I embrace the comments on this above clip about the PRCA “not marking its own homework.”
It’s a solid message and one that’s intended to inspire confidence — all good.
I also appreciated the comments about a desire to be “pragmatic” and having “the right people involved.” Mr. Iain Christie — chair of the PRCA Standards Committee (and a barrister who is independent / not a PRCA member) — also mentioned during this webinar that, “the devil is always in the detail.” Given that truer words about “codes” were never spoken, I agree that avoiding unintentional evils should top the list of priorities when codes are constructed.
While the separate PRCA “Code of Conduct” was — strangely — written, ratified, and posted in 2024 with seemingly no opportunity for member input in advance to root out inadvertent “devils” therein, the PRCA Standards Committee is now taking a different tack in 2025 with its Public Affairs / Lobbying code revision — having invited member input repeatedly for half a year now.
By all means, this invitation to members and the industry is welcome news. In fact, I applaud it.
However, there’s an underlying problem.
The already-passed PRCA “Code of Conduct” and its associated written procedures undergirding it – and which undergird whatever new PRCA Public Affairs / Lobbying Code is ultimately adopted – are rife with major issues.
And these problems create a scenario wherein the Lobbying Code can be fit as a fiddle and best-in-class on every criteria point… but because the separate default “Code of Conduct” — which governs things like ethics-violation investigations and adjudications — continues to create inherent problems, the Lobbying Code’s fitness can easily be rendered moot in real-life scenarios, at least in terms of actual consequences to PRCA members.
Also a problem: I voiced urgent issues regarding the PRCA “Code of Conduct,” in detail, in writing, on July 3, 2024, to the PRCA’s then-CEO (who since has left the PRCA organization, having been replaced with a currently serving “Interim CEO”).
I received a brief response back from the prior CEO on August 19, 2024 — more than six weeks later. He essentially communicated to me that 1) nothing was going to change about the core Code of Conduct or any of its procedural issues regardless of the concerns I raised and 2) no further dialogue on this matter was deemed necessary or was invited.
I was given no opportunity for direct dialogue with the PRCA Standards Committee chair, as I had specifically requested July 3 in my letter. This response was stated in polite and professional language, of course, but these messages were perfectly clear.
In light of the content of my memorandum and this disappointing response, follow-on events in the PRCA became all-the-more concerning, in only a matter of months.
On November 4, 2024, a PRCA Global Advisory Board meeting was held (I was then a member of it), which I attended.
At no time during that meeting was it announced that the PRCA’s CEO, who had declined my offer for Code input, had essentially departed from the organization and that a new “Interim CEO” had been appointed either formally or informally, nor was it even suggested in the slightest that such a situation might be pending.
Instead, the membership was only informed two months later, on January 2, 2025, of this fact.
An article in PRovoke revealed this delayed announcement, as per this excerpt:
What’s more, the new “Interim CEO” – who I presume is now being paid commensurate salary as the prior CEO who was reported to have essentially vacated post as of Nov. 1, 2024 – has since opted NOT to stand down from her concurrent commercial posts / roles / activities in running / co-running her own (and her prominent PR husband‘s) for-profit PR consultancy as well as a separate nonprofit organization, Socially Mobile.
To prove the point, the Interim CEO’s own current bio as posted on the PRCA website mentions all of her separate for-profit and non-profit roles in the present tense:
Socially Mobile is listed with a record of prior documentation at the UK Government’s Companies House, as of 22 Dec 2023. After I happened upon this documentation online more than a year ago, I was later told by one of the (obviously still living) directors as listed, that documentation as filed for 2023 was incorrect.
I do not purport to know or understand all the nuances of UK law or cultural standards of what precisely constitute the notion of “conflict of interest” in the land of British custom and the PRCA’s public pronouncements of such terms as “best practice” and “fit for purpose.”
I remain tremendously concerned that the now-Interim CEO has not opted to stand down from her competing roles or necessarily disclosed all her affiliations and client identities to the extent that the PRCA community of competitors can have any rightful concerns addressed about potential conflicts of interest tied to monetary self-gain or other forms of potential inurement, such as leveraging PRCA platforms in repeated self-promotion of precisely the third-party entities in which the Interim CEO / her husband hold a financial stake / reputational interest while the Interim CEO also collects a PRCA member-funded paycheck.
For example, the Interim CEO and her husband together have been featured on the PRCA’s in-house podcast, with this particular episode just posted about a year ago:
Also, in just recent days (May 28, 2025), the PRCA posted yet another promotional announcement — among numerous ones since January 2025 after the “Interim CEO” announcement — spotlighting and celebrating work of the Interim CEO’s (and her husband’s) separate non-profit organization, Socially Mobile, from which she has opted not even temporarily to stand down while serving as head of the PRCA.
This below posting did not make any disclaimer that — “Oh, by the way, Socially Mobile is owned / overseen by our Interim CEO personally and her PR consultant husband.”
After all, the current Interim CEO is controlling day-to-day decisions and operations of a PR trade org – composed of her (and his) own PR agency / consultancy competitors… and not just friendly competitors, but fierce competitors – while she herself is also being allowed to operate her own concurrent for-profit and non-profit PR industry business interests.
As noted, her husband is a well-known alumnus and ongoing supporter / enthusiast of a specific multinational PR agency (Ketchum, owned by Omnicom). Ketchum has been wooed back to PRCA membership by the Interim CEO in recent months, with great fanfare I might add, despite Ketchum’s storied history of past long-term client work with the Russian Federation.
Many industry association stakeholders take grave issue with that particular history, myself included.
I should not need to remind anyone about our Ukrainian PR industry colleagues and their families / co-workers, who have suffered unspeakable violence, death, and destruction for years now, at the hands of Russia.
I also should not have to remind our colleagues that Ketchum’s work on behalf of Russia for nearly a decade (approximately 2006-2015) arguably helped render much of the world asleep at the wheel, as to the threat Putin posed. This attitudinal malaise included the most powerful leaders of the free world, such as U.S. President Barack Obama, who issued this debate “zinger” to his Republican opponent in 2012, while Ketchum’s Russia client engagement was still going $trong:
In my own prior industry naïveté, I did not know or recognize the existence or scope of Ketchum’s Russia work until fairly recently.
In fact, when I first joined the PRCA in 2019, I was — embarrassingly — so clueless as to the “family tree” of various multi-national agency conglomerates that I did not even know of Omnicom’s controlling ownership over Ketchum. Boy, do I now wish I had! (I’ll explain more of that, in a minute.)
To wit, only in the past month did I stumble upon documentation on a public-domain U.S. Department of Justice government website, providing stunning detail about Ketchum’s prior Russian Federation work scope and subcontractors, for purposes of both media and government relations.
This NBC News network exposé from March 2014 on Ketchum’s work for Russia includes significant information as to Ketchum’s prior web of subcontractors who helped Ketchum advance its Russian government agenda in Washington, D.C., and across the United States mainstream media landscape during that time:
A partial U.S. government posting of publicly accessible documents include:
And this documentation is only partial, mind you.
Among the shocking facts handed over by Ketchum for the U.S. Government to post publicly is a listing of Ketchum staff members’ names who were working on Ketchum’s Russian Federation account.
It’s unclear to me if this list included names of Ketchum executives then serving at the top of the company food chain in either the U.S. or the U.K. — the guys who were making the big bucks — or, if it only included names of lower-level employees (worker bees) with far less power in the organization.
Most disturbing — whatever their position — these Ketchum employees’ names were listed WITH THEIR HOME RESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES also cited…
…as in, street names and numbers, apartment numbers, etc. Talk about doxxing! (I’m not going to re-publish that list, although it’s about 11 years old, due to many of these employees — nearly a dozen of them — potentially still living at those same addresses).
Think of the implications.
I also just discovered this month (May 2025) that Ketchum subcontracted apparent Russian Federation lobbying work for years to U.S.-based law firm Venable, LLP, the same long-time law firm of record for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). I’m led to believe that Venable’s own PRSA client engagement is tied to Ketchum, due to certain senior U.S. Ketchum officials’ roles in PRSA for some decades now. This situation should finally be addressed by U.S. Government investigators, since both PRSA members and the larger industry have been operating blind about this highly troubling PRSA / Ketchum / Venable conflict of interest, for all these years.
Here’s one of the reasons why:
With Ketchum’s direct involvement, PRSA paid Venable, LLP to project-manage a PRSA membership expulsion action against me in Q1 2021, on baseless, contrived and false allegations that PRSA leadership knew were baseless, contrived and false. Ketchum’s U.S.-based senior official who was directly involved — John Paluszek — and another one in the U.S. who indirectly was at least knowledgeable — Ray Kotcher — also had no rationale or reasonable basis for Ketchum’s brand to be involved in this unethical action. Yet it happened.
PRSA’s U.S. Internal Revenue Service 2021 IRS 990 filing documents PRSA’s compensation to Venable, LLP, presumably inclusive of these unethical expulsion-management services rendered. It also documents that Venable, LLP apparently was PRSA’s highest-paid “independent contractor” of 2021, if PRSA’s report here to the U.S. federal government is to be believed:
At the time that I was being targeted by PRSA in this manner, I thought that the Ketchum “senior counsel” executive, Mr. Paluszek, was participating in PRSA’s sham by acting on his own and that the larger firm was not involved.
In fact, I originally thought Mr. Paluszek may have been hoodwinked himself by other “complainant” co-conspirators and tricked into agreeing to affix his name to the complainants’ sham “grievance” against me.
I no longer believe that’s the case. I think Mr. Paluszek knew exactly what he was doing, and I fully believe — now that I know much more about Ketchum’s modus operandi than I did in 2021 — that he may have been a ringleader.
A full investigation is merited.
John Paluszek utilized a @ketchum.com e-mail address and volunteered to be personally involved in this attack against me but with no disclosures to PRSA members at-large about his and his compadres’ secretive action to attack me. (I’m the one who had to disclose it publicly, because if I didn’t, it could potentially be a source of threat / blackmail attempts against me by PRSA’s culprits of misconduct, who were keen to cast shame and disgrace on me, in retaliation for my numerous prior years of reports about PRSA’s ethics violations and financial discrepancies).
Mr. Paluszek’s and his co-conspirators’ official PRSA “Complainant Information” form doxxed me, too, by listing my home residential address and cell phone number (which I’ve redacted below) but listed fake information for themselves as “complainants.”
This fake info included 1) no office address whatsoever except for repeated, improper e-mail address placeholders in what clearly had been electronic data fields in PRSA’s online “grievance” form intended for proper entry of an actual office mailing address; 2) a “dummy” gmail e-mail address that could not be identified to one single “complainant,” and — worse yet — 3) a completely falsified telephone number on the complainants’ behalf composed of the sequential numerals 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0.
Clearly, all of this false information submitted by Ketchum’s Mr. Paluszek, et al., was premeditated to allow for “plausible deniability.”
No single complainant as listed who was attacking me could thus be legally tracked as having filled out the falsified “Complainant Information” form themselves. Each of them therefore could always blame it later on someone else.
This tactic appears to be a Ketchum “black ops”-type calling card, judging by other dealings.
When I protested to PRSA the complainants’ obviously false / baseless accusations and fake information — as well as literally scores of conflicts of interest inherent to well-documented “complainant” issues with PRSA’s designated adjudicators (and mind you… I didn’t even know then about Venable LLP having been one of the complainant’s employer’s past or ongoing for-profit subcontractors for the Russian Federation) — my concerns were dismissed out of hand by the attorney at Venable LLP.
It didn’t take long to see clearly that Venable, LLP was hired by PRSA to serve essentially as judge / referee of the complainants’ and PRSA leadership’s own kangaroo court. And PRSA was paying the bill, with member dollars.
Interestingly, all of my valid concerns of PRSA’s sham process were 100% dismissed out of hand by Venable LLP as “baseless.”
Simultaneously, complainants and PRSA executive staff and executive board members received from Venable every favor and advantage, running roughshod over PRSA’s Code of Ethics with their disclosure violations, conflicts of interest, dishonesty, and patently inaccurate and misleading information.
For example, the 2021 PRSA “Grievance Committee” Chair, John Deveney, had been documented as having attended the then-recent wedding of one of the complainants (Del Galloway) in 2019, which multiple other complainants also had attended (Kathy Lewton, Judy Phair, and Ketchum alumna Rosanna Fiske), according to publicly posted social media photos on Facebook posted by Ms. Fiske:
In another public-facing social media posting with photo taken at Mr. Galloway’s wedding, PRSA Grievance Committee Chair Deveney referred to Complainant Fiske’s appearance as “The classy lady was smokin’.”
Another public-facing social media photo posted by Ms. Fiske herself documented Mr. Deveney, Ms. Fiske, and the 2021 PRSA National Board officer who was designated as the 2021 “Grievance Panel Chair” to oversee prosecution of the “complaint” targeting me, Joseph Abreu, clearly out socializing together at the 2019 PRSA International Conference site in San Diego:
Mr. Abreu later signed an e-mail accepting his appointed as “Grievance Panel Chair” to PRSA’s 2021 National Chair, Michelle Olson, as “Sacrificial Lamb (j/k)”, in an e-mail legally obtained through a FOIA request. He was quickly elevated to National Chair of PRSA for 2024, despite lackluster credentials — suggesting a quid pro quo, in which the only thing he “sacrificed” was his integrity, presuming he ever had any.
In yet another example, Mr. Deveney was photographed in public-facing social media as having then recently received an award by another “complainant” targeting me, 2018 PRSA National Chair Anthony (Tony) D’Angelo of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School — thus wholly compromising Mr. Deveney’s objectivity in the matter.
In fact, there were now appearances of quid pro quo, there, too:
All of these conflict-of-interest examples (and many others) inherent to both PRSA’s process and personnel that I immediately reported to PRSA in writing were dismissed by PRSA’s attorney at Venable LLP as “baseless” or other descriptors like “without merit.”
In fact, earlier, in December 2020, when one of 2021 PRSA National Chair Michelle Olson’s supporters in the PRSA College of Fellows threatened me with a phone call in the night with rampant cursing and demanding that I “work with” PRSA in its ongoing corrupt practices — followed by a blast of hostile texts — I immediately reported this alarming incident in writing to Venable / PRSA to make the harassment stop.
But Venable / PRSA dismissed that report, too, despite the fact I had proof of it, which I had provided to them:
Very (Russian?) mafia-like.
The clear focus of PRSA’s / Ketchum’s / Venable’s, et. al’s gang-up on me was to frighten, intimidate, dehumanize, humiliate, and psychologically torture me.
And that’s not hyperbole.
After all, if an association member calls you up in the night and threatens to “end it” at your “peril,” — but then you’re the one who’s attacked and punished the following month for reporting the behavior — I think most human resources handbooks would qualify that misconduct as legally actionable against the association.
PRSA / Ketchum / Venable also aimed to destroy everything important to me professionally with their false claims and accusations: my hard-earned reputation within PRSA for nearly three decades, my relationships with colleagues, my standing not only in PRSA but also in other organizations, any prospect of future employment… in short, everything.
Mr. Paluszek / Ketchum and PRSA’s hired-gun law firm, Venable, LLP, also didn’t disclose their (Ketchum’s and Venable’s) ongoing collaborations during more recent years of the pandemic, like this joint Venable / Ketchum COVID webinar in 2020 on “What Employers Should (and Should Not) Say to Employees” about COVID:
This interaction proved that Ketchum’s / Venable’s extracurricular activities outside of PRSA or their joint Russia PR account were hardly isolated or ancient history.
The U.S. Department of Justice also documents this correspondence from 2010, among others, which shows more precise dollars that changed hands from Russia to Ketchum to Venable (Gazprom was majority-owned by the Russian Federation):
Venable, LLP had an alumnus attorney with a blazing trail during the Biden Administration that led straight to The White House.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband‘s (Doug Emhoff’s) prior employment affiliation with the Venable law firm was not without alleged controversy itself.
Below, I recently documented correspondence from my own open-government records searches of taxpayer-funded e-mail servers in the U.S., in PRSA’s / Mr. Paluszek’s / Ketchum’s / Venable’s, et al.’s, matter that had unethically and illegally targeted me.
It also should be noted that Ketchum’s former senior official, Barri Rafferty, was recruited to lead communications for Wells Fargo about eight months before Wells Fargo PR VP Del Galloway sent his e-mail below via the Wells Fargo server (below).
In this e-mail via @wellsfargo.com, Mr. Galloway told Venable LLP attorney for PRSA, Andrew Steinberg, that all 13 complainants would likely be “observers” of their online, carefully scripted “grievance panel” degradation ceremony that they had planned for me on March 4, 2021. Another then-Wells Fargo employee, Rosanna Fiske (a Ketchum alumna), is also listed here, via her wellsfargo.com e-mail address.
Per above, I was to be banned from recording my own “hearing.”
But clearly, those rules didn’t apply to judge-and-jury PRSA, which was recording the entire proceeding for benefit of everyone else attacking me, like those in the ZOOM courtroom from Ketchum, Wells Fargo, Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, University of Florida, etc. Plus, the recording gave Venable / PRSA a potential method to re-distribute the (edited) recording to others surreptitiously if they might so choose. The kangaroos in the court were fully unleashed.
This was evil.
When I reported Mr. Galloway and Ms. Fiske to Wells Fargo’s Corporate Compliance for their roles in attacking me within PRSA’s overarching misconduct and interest conflicts, nothing was done about it. (Wells Fargo was a past investment portfolio management contactor for PRSA, and Mr. Galloway himself had represented his employer — Wells Fargo — during at least one past PRSA Board meeting to discuss the portfolio management contract; I had a copy of the board minutes). I never heard back from Wells Fargo with any form of inquiry, much less any contact about how or if my complaint was resolved in any way.
For the record — and of note to PRCA-UK — John Paluszek of Ketchum holds apparent transatlantic “legendary” status in the firm, according to Ketchum-affiliated past executives well known in the PRCA:
The “legend” himself, Mr. Paluszek, has operated for many years what appears to be a front-group type of “program” for Ketchum, known as “Business in Society,” including a Twitter / X handle under the same moniker that appears to be controlled solely by Mr. Paluszek:
It also should be noted that PRSA appointed “complainant” / Wells Fargo retiree Del Galloway to the powerful university accrediting body, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), which has closely involved Mr. Paluszek and other PRSA “complainants,” for decades.
Mr. Galloway became President of the ACEJMC and thus has been empowered for the past three years with ACEJMC agenda-setting — and, essentially, lording over U.S. journalism / PR / advertising / digital media academia:
Mr. Paluszek served under Mr. Galloway on the ACEJMC “strategic planning” committee, as noted in ACEJMC newsletter documentation:
Through his online postings, Mr. Paluszek has had the audacity to parrot known disinformation that President Donald Trump is a Russia-colluder, when it was Mr. Paluszek’s own PR firm — Ketchum — that made a cash bonanza to the tune of tens upon tens upon tens of millions of dollars for services rendered, via its Russian Federation hyping and showboating, primarily during the Obama Administration and during which time Hillary “Russia Reset Button” Clinton was Secretary of State.
Mr. Paluszek’s “senior counsel” status at Ketchum extended for decades… at least up until 2021 when he still was sending / receiving e-mail from his @ketchum.com e-mail address.
Mr. Paluszek has never opted to openly disclose and discuss — at least within PRSA circles that I’ve been watching — Ketchum’s own Russia for-profit associations and dealings. He nonetheless has been tweeting this claptrap (below) like a bird, even in recent days / months, as if his own PR firm affiliation had no prior for-profit history with Russia at all:
Ketchum reportedly collected $60 million off their Russia work — and that’s only the money the U.S. Department of Justice knew about, as to have it reflected in public documents so that NBC News in the States could report it. (Omnicom is currently under U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation before their proposed mega-merger with fellow conglomerate InterPublic Group, which portends a media-control behemoth with even more tentacles and fangs to disserve the public good.)
Mr. Paluszek is not the only American Ketchum / Omnicom senior official whose fast-and-loose tweets have demonized and falsely associated President Donald Trump himself as a Russia colluder, a widespread accusation parroted for years across the liberal left. (The widely respected Columbia Journalism Review soon thereafter found that the Trump/Russia collusion hoax was a journalism-malpractice incident of epic impact, contributing to declining public trust in journalism writ large).
This American expatriate, Mr. Gallagher, was a 1) Ketchum London CEO (2006-11), 2) Ketchum Europe CEO (2011-2016) and 3) Omnicom PR Group President (2016-2022) during the years of Ketchum’s Russian Federation work.
Venable, LLP secretively sent correspondence to New York State’s highest law-enforcement office (New York Attorney General Letitia James) on June 17, 2021, after I reported PRSA’s misconduct to the New York AG.
The verbatim report filed to the New York AG reporting PRSA’s millions in financial discrepancies can be located, here.
Venable’s response letter (brief excerpt below, legally obtained in a government open records request) sought to deflect for PRSA, in the process protecting all PRSA implicated parties in the matters of misconduct I had reported, including culprits’ employer organizations with major operations in New York State like Ketchum / Omnicom and Wells Fargo and Syracuse University, to name some.
Venable’s multi-page letter was rife with misleading statements of both commission and omission, that failed to address one single PRSA financial discrepancy I relayed in intricate detail to NY AG Letitia James.
And there’s a reason for that: everything I reported to the New York AG clearly was accurate, truthful, and disturbing, as to PRSA’s (and culprits’) egregious misconduct.
The last thing Venable wanted to do was address or even acknowledge any of it. Instead, thanks to AG James’ fixation (the Associated Press’ word) with a particular then-former U.S. President, Venable LLP apparently didn’t need to answer for anything on behalf of their rotten client(s).
I only discovered this above Venable letter in 2024 — less than a year ago — following a government open-records request, since Venable sent the letter secretively on PRSA’s behalf.
PRSA’s then-CEO, Linda Thomas Brooks, knew plenty about the letter. She approved it. The letter was made known to the 2021 PRSA Executive Board, including PRSA’s current feckless 2025 Past National Chair with a government-employer / taxpayer-funded e-mail server, Joseph Abreu.
In January 2024, PRSA then-CEO Linda Thomas Brooks participated in a legally recorded conference call, falsely claiming she was “not involved” in PRSA’s 2021 retaliatory actions targeting and attacking me, even though she herself served on the “Grievance Panel” specifically appointed to manage that attack, which Ketchum’s Mr. Paluszek was helping spearhead:
And here’s yet another receipt on that one, to prove Ms. Thomas Brooks’ “no involvement” verbal claim was a 10,000 Pinocchios, stupendous lie (this e-mail also was legally obtained through a government open-records request):
Documentation shows Ketchum’s clear involvement in PRSA’s secretive efforts using Venable, LLP — Ketchum’s Russia PR-client subcontractor for Washington, D.C. “lobbying” — to target me, via timestamped, written correspondences.
So clearly, for me, Ketchum’s / Omnicom’s web of misconduct extends from here to eternity in the arena of repeated, multi-year patterns of PR association corruption.
Is it any wonder that Omnicom — keen to get its IPG merger deal ramrodded through U.S. Federal Trade Commission scrutiny — just announced in recent days (as reported by ADWEEK) that it is shoring up all PR / ad agency e-mails and rolling them up into one, universal URL?
They have a massive compliance problem on their hands, with Ketchum’s own history of noncompliance well-documented on that agency’s servers alone. And they know it, given that I began reporting this mess with Ketchum / Venable weeks ago and the PRSA ethics / legal violations years ago. They would be fools if they weren’t sweating bullets over it.
Ketchum needs to answer for this chicanery, regardless of how many years have now passed.
And regardless of how many PRSA / PRCA awards they’ve collected. After all, they’ve benefited — and continue to benefit — excessively:
All these industry awards and accolades and trophies have helped bolster Ketchum’s claims to the U.S. Federal Government procurement community that Ketchum is on the up-and-up and worthy of taxpayer-funded PR contracts…
…Like this one from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and this one also with DHHS, to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars.
The U.S. General Services Administration publicly lists Ketchum’s current prices “effective July 8, 2024” as being charged to the long-suffering U.S. taxpayer, in part, as follows:
I consider certain Ketchum officials to have engaged in unethical, veiled, sleight-of-hand maneuverings, many of which I only learned about far more recently — and continue to learn new things with each passing month, it seems.
These actions have personally impacted me with great personal and professional harm, not to mention devastating emotional distress that, frankly, I still live with every single day.
To me, it’s beyond the pale.
And there’s even more that the PRCA-UK should consider as it explores its new “Lobbying Code” and its newly rediscovered entrenchment of Ketchum in PRCA goings-on.
For her part, Ketchum’s current UK / “Global Markets” CEO in London is a woman who has claimed on public-facing social media to reject and disavow “bullying, harassment, silencing” behaviors.
She has decried the horrors of “people getting hurt” from ineffective “governance and safeguarding,” via her X / Twitter handle — which, incidentally, she’s now entirely deleted / scrapped.
Yet Ketchum — her own “Global Market” firm — has been at the epicenter of causing precisely such misery and abuse to me dating back at least to late 2020 and early 2021, and I have the receipts to prove it.
I presume @RedRobertino should have no problem with my calling out her formerly-public-facing-but-now-deleted Twitter / X communication, since she has demonstrated no problem whatsoever publicly calling out others and being an advocate to “openly share” “questionable behaviour.”
What about her lot’s questionable behavior? …The secrecy, the lies, the abuses of power … all for self-gain?
I never realized the degree of Ketchum’s behind-the-scenes manipulation until more recent months, after far more research, such as the herculean efforts I have had to invest to locate the above-mentioned public-domain documents of Ketchum officials’ rotten dealings.
(Disclaimer: I recognize that among the thousands of individuals employed with Ketchum / Omnicom, there are many nice people who I’m sure are upstanding people and very fine professionals, and who have had no knowledge of these past and ongoing events.)
Irrespective, however, of who-knew-what-when, the Ketchum brand has also overwhelmingly misled the PR industry and harmed the world.
Any PR firm falls into this category of infamy that purposely chose Vladimir Putin as its “PR” client for at least NINE CONSECUTIVE YEARS, reflecting poor judgment of the highest magnitude.
Ketchum, among other Omnicom-owned firms, reportedly continued operating offices in Moscow until shortly after the early 2022 Ukraine invasion. So someone was making even more money post-2015 through those offices somehow, somewhere.
We must also flag the inconvenient fact for Omnicom that their separately owned firm, Fleishman Hillard, is currently employing the sitting chair of the PRSA Foundation.
We must also flag that Omnicom’s “Chief Diversity Officer” is currently chairing the former PRSA front group (propped up at its start-up with $125,000 in PRSA member dollars), the Diversity Action Alliance, which promulgates a non-stop firehose of racial and partisan scapegoating rhetoric.
The DAA’s core tactical deliverable as an organization is to collect proprietary data from PR firms on how many non-white versus white people are hired and promoted; same thing for white men versus everyone else.
The DAA’s data-collection methodology was clearly explained by the DAA’s data-collection partner at the Institute for Public Relations during a publicly posted webinar a few years ago, instructing DAA participants on how to upload their PR firm’s highly sensitive and private staff member race / gender employee statistics into a database that Omnicom (and, presumably, Omnicom’s own firms, like Ketchum and FleishmanHillard and Porter Novelli) now have full access to:
As it pertains to the PRCA and Ketchum’s rekindled joint affiliation as announced in recent months, it’s been a bit much for me to stomach.
Now knowing so much more about Ketchum’s role in harming me directly than I ever understood in 2021 due to Ketchum’s and PRSA’s and Venable’s and Wells Fargo’s and others’ secrecy, I’ve had to stand by and watch recent social media feeds in 2025 awash with the PRCA Interim CEO in her mutual-admiration-society, platitudinous lovefest with her husband’s former employer.
It all seems predicated on a membership-dues value exchange intended to make the PRCA’s Interim CEO look like a miracle-worker, to help tee her up for the permanent CEO role.
Meanwhile, it’s been implied by the Interim CEO to the whole of the PR industry that a Ketchum endorsement is the alpha-and-omega of the PR world… even after all the questionable and shady things some of their top brass have done and/or have at least known about for years.
I also must note for the record that, like @RedRobertino, the Twitter / X accounts for @Mrs_Wadds and @SparklyPinchy were deleted entirely from X, sometime prior to the January 2 PRCA “Interim CEO” announcement.
How interesting.
The reason all of them opted to wipe away their prior social media posting histories on X — and, in the process, sacrifice all their own thousands of followers that they each had curated for years in service to their personal brands — would normally puzzle me.
But frankly, I’m concerned by appearances that this decision may have been coordinated (?) for reasons that have little if anything to do with postured political boycotts of Elon Musk.
Maybe certain people feel the need to sanitize their feeds but due to the overwhelming volume of their past self-generated muck, the only way to do so is to eliminate said feeds entirely.
Like here: literally the day before the now-Interim CEO was elected herself to the PRCA Board of Management on September 28, 2023, she posted this (below) publicly on Twitter / X, calling out a British news media outlet, which apparently — in her judgment — was due a full-scale, public dressing-down and cursing-out, replete with multiple f-bombs, for good measure:
These various posts by the now-Interim CEO and Ketchum’s UK-based “Global Markets” CEO were made this year (2025), on LinkedIn. The language: much more flowery.
The PRCA Interim CEO’s now current and ongoing choice not to stand down from her other for-profit and non-profit business interests appears to violate the PRCA’s own “conflict of interest” clause, perfunctory as it is.
In no uncertain terms, this situation seems exceptionally problematic.
What’s particularly unnerving is that she was serving in this Interim CEO role at the PRCA, as reported by PRovoke, for two full months (Nov.-Dec. 2024) before anyone was allowed to know about it.
Think about that.
Think about the data implications.
At a minimum, a statement should have been issued by the PRCA board within the week of Nov. 1, whenever it was clear that the prior CEO was no longer continuing in his role and that there essentially was a new sheriff in town. But no such logical disclosure was rendered.
Consequently, the PRCA’s current “Interim CEO” was allowed throughout November and December 2024 — during holidays and presumably with PRCA staff and board members supervising things less, due to that timing — to enjoy her full access to PRCA association member databases, records, survey result archives, e-mail and other digital archives, social media feed administrative access privileges, proprietary contracts past and present, past and present staff records / performance reviews, other IT data / archives, previous PRCA Professional Standards Committee ethics-breach review documentation from years past — you name it… and the list goes on and on — without the association’s membership being allowed to know in real time that one of their own competitors had been given carte blanche with their data (and others’ data) for such an extended time period.
Where is all that data now?
What was preserved?
Is it now gone? What may have been double-deleted?
What potentially may have been transferred onto a separate, privately owned hard drive or off-site server before being deleted off the PRCA server?
Have there been any violations committed tied to U.K. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
Why was the Interim CEO in January 2025 sending out e-mails via her new @prca.global e-mail address to PRCA members but copied to her wadds.co.uk private e-mail server, as I myself received?
What are these appearances supposed to communicate to an industry of communicators who also are competitors… including some fierce competitors with long histories?
Thanks to how the past six months have been handled, these inconvenient questions are entirely valid.
I hardly believe I’m the only person with a brain falling out of their chair over this scenario. If the PRCA Board is sitting around, scratching their heads, asking the universe why their stakeholders are skittish and timid these days about PRCA membership affiliation, well then — you now have your answer. Case solved! You’re welcome.
In January 2025, the Interim CEO was quoted in PRWeek as saying (my bold added, for emphasis), “…we’re very keen to make sure that we continue to champion the code of conduct,” and “I think it’s fair to say there’s been a period of upheaval at the PRCA. That’s now behind us…”
Oh, really?
These issues bring me back to that memo I sent to the PRCA’s then-serving CEO last July, before he sort of mysteriously evaporated from staff sometime in October ’24. (And for the record, I thought he was a very nice, professional, and knowledgeable man, and I still do. I was truly caught off-guard by the January 2 announcement that he was already long-gone. He wasn’t even in post for 12 months.)
I’m choosing to share my July 2024 memo to the former CEO publicly now, because, if nothing else, the current discussion of the PRCA Public Affairs / Lobbying Code cannot be properly informed or dealt with until obvious flaws in the core PRCA Code of Conduct and supporting procedures are dealt with first.
That’s my opinion, anyway, although I recognize my input will likely continue to be dismissed.
To be clear, I tried earlier to voice these concerns privately, in July 2024. In response, the door was closed in my face, with no further opportunity for dialogue.
When the new Interim CEO was abruptly announced in January 2025 after already having essentially been given the job and the keys to the kingdom months prior without announcement, I also reached out to her via private, direct e-mail in January, to ask specific questions about documented issues.
In written response, the Interim CEO punted to her husband and told me I needed to speak with him about the matters I raised, even though the matters were specific to the PRCA and to her newly assumed role … the organization she herself was now leading.
Let me tell you something.
If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s when any woman in leadership demonstrates that she is very happy to take the title and the pay of a top job but refuses to take the responsibility… and proceeds to complain publicly that women aren’t getting elevated to top jobs enough (“Missing Women!“) and that women in “perimenopause” are the unsung heroines of the industry.
Such women do no favors to any women, in my view.
Weeks after the Interim CEO informed me she would not be answering my questions, I discovered in March 2025 that my name and photo had been wiped off of the PRCA Fellows website, without prior notice to me or due process.
This stunning action — which translated to me that I was no longer considered by the PRCA to be a Fellow — seemed a clear violation of the PRCA’s spanking-new “bye-laws” (or, shall I say, “Bye-bye! laws”) since I was never made aware of anything I did wrong to merit being kicked out of the group:
For just how many days I had been summarily deleted / cancelled, I could not tell, but I know for certain my name / photo had been there earlier, prior to my note to the Interim CEO asking reasonable questions.
When I inquired in writing as to why this deletion had been made of my name and photo, I was informed it must have occurred in error.
My name and photo were then restored — quickly — at the bottom of the PRCA Fellows site (out of alphabetical order from everyone else’s listing and without “FPRCA” after my name), alongside three other individuals who, in 2022, had quite famously protested the PRCA and publicly / voluntarily resigned from PRCA membership and Fellows… but also were now “restored.”
This development implied to me a few likely scenarios, but I’ll keep that speculation to myself.
The only good news of this development is that, clearly, a PRCA-Fellow / past-resignee like John Brown of the now-defunct Don’t Cry Wolf PR firm (for which a certain Interim CEO’s husband was a past director) is given wide latitude to speak their mind and complain publicly of the PRCA leadership — including calling out people by name however they wish — and not fear any reprisal or retaliation, such as having their name / photo wiped off the Fellows site for any reason tied to their speaking the truth… or, in the case of Mr. Brown, his version of the truth.
Whew! In light of my blog post here, what a relief that this precedent — we’ll call it “The @BrownBare Standard” — is now set and codified for the record!
When I considered the option in recent months of registering a formal “grievance” with the PRCA through its new “whistleblow” procedure due to the Interim CEO essentially refusing to answer my questions and my being removed from the Fellows site soon thereafter in such a suspicious manner, I discovered yet another shocker.
One of the individuals / “officers” listed as having been placed in power to receive such PRCA “whistleblow” reports is none other than the very individual who told me in September 2023 to “destroy” my prior report of July 31, 2023, as referenced on Page 10 of my July 3, 2024, memo to the now-evaporated-ex-CEO.
This same “whistleblow” officer publicly had preached to the PRCA membership for months and months in 2022 and 2023 that, under her leadership, the PRCA would become transparent for “ethical communication,” and, “fit for purpose,” as also rallied in concurrent lockstep by John Brown supporters:
Well.
As far as “fit for purpose” goes, I suppose the next-logical question is, for precisely whose “purpose” is the PRCA’s “complaints procedure” supposed to be “fit”? The answer seems clear as day, @sschole.
Talk about “checking your own homework”!
I mean, fit-for-purposely putting someone in charge of receiving complaints to determine how — or even if — specific complaints are even acted upon, when that person is documented already to have told a member to “destroy” hers, is a bit like, as we say in the States, “the fox guarding the henhouse.”
I’ve been to this rodeo before, PRCA… and it was in the U.S. PR trade association, PRSA.
Irony of ironies, the “PRCA” as known in the United States is literally this. Maybe that’s God’s way of having a laugh. I only wish I could laugh, but this situation is too serious.
The separate PRCA “whistleblow” component of the PRCA Code was not posted online or at least viewable / searchable in 2024, when I registered my memo in July 2024 to the then-CEO.
Nor was I even alerted to the “whistleblow” procedure’s existence in the August 2024 correspondence back to me, after I had urgently flagged the then-CEO that the PRCA lacked any whistleblower protections and anti-retaliation provisions at all in its newly unveiled “Code,” for which no member input was invited or desired.
This message was therefore received, loud and clear:
Why should I even bother trying to report or flag via private, internal channels any additional concern in good faith, when the “process” appears to be steeped in something else entirely?… as in, C.Y.A.
It has already been demonstrated to me — repeatedly — how my concerns would be received: Deflect-Dismiss-Ignore-Repeat. Anything to avoid rocking the perceived holy-trinity boat of Team Waddington / Ketchum / Omnicom, it would seem. And of that’s the case, then this question must be begged: Why do these jokers have this much power?
All this unfortunate history and present situation aside, the only thing I’m left with here is to hope that the PRCA can reconcile these issues while on its continued ethics journey. And I do mean that.
It is my hope that Mr. Christie will help lead the PRCA board of management to conduct internal discussions about issues of conflicts of interest (real and perceived) and how to better engage the “clean slate” of “fit for purpose” governance that originally was touted and sold to the industry over and over and over again, starting back in Q4 2022… more than two-and-a-half years ago.
The pursuit of ethics and “doing the right thing,” as our industry loves to opine, is precisely that: a journey. We all make errors sometimes – myself very much included. In any industry association, acting in good faith to our community of competitor-colleagues is essential.
The deck should never be unfairly stacked against those with less power. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
When it comes to how the PRCA is interacting with UK lawmakers or instructing our community of global competitor-colleagues to do the same via the new / pending PRCA Lobbying Code, I hope we challenge ourselves to reach beyond a window-dressing and lip-service standard, whether we’re PRCA members or not.
These matters wield massive influence on government and thus on entire societies, given the nature and client-rosters of many PR firms’ work.
