Team Waddington’s “Once Upon a Time in PR” Fairy Tale Turns Grim
Before the PRCA's CEO, Sarah Hall Waddington, started demonizing Sir Martin Sorrell, she advocated placing him on PR’s Mount Rushmore.
“Once Upon a Time in PR,” the PRCA liked and respected Sir Martin Sorrell…
But like so many fairy tales that begin with harmony only to devolve to a dark place, one could easily chalk up this PR tale as one of many twists, turns, and even tragedy.
Only this tale isn’t fiction. It’s reality.
At the risk of committing the mortal sin of “Flooding the Internet” with too much PR-industry truth for color TV, I’m going to attempt to explain my larger concerns with the U.K.’s Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) CEO, Sarah Waddington, in her multi-year patterns of flip-flops, celebrating certain bona fide public relations icons — only to trash them later for her own benefit.
Those who find themselves in the Waddington scrap heap generally appear to have somehow fallen out of favor with Mrs. Waddington, or with her U.K. PR industry husband, or her preferred PR industry clique, and / or her abundantly well-documented partisan preferences.
For months now, it seems all I’ve heard on the U.S. side of the PR pond since December 2025 is the prolonged, negative fallout from the BBC Radio 4 interview between Mrs. Waddington and Sir Martin Sorrell.
For those in the U.S. or elsewhere who are unfamiliar, Sir Martin is founder of WPP (an Omnicom competitor), founder of London’s S4 Capital, and one of the wealthiest individuals in the global advertising industry.
The facts of Sir Martin’s immense wealth and success were once celebrated by Mrs. Waddington… but that was “Once Upon a Time in PR,” in a bygone era, far, far away. (Like, 2018).
More on that twist, in a minute…
But first, to this issue of the recent Waddington / Sorrell row:
For my U.S. industry colleagues who might be unaware of this drama, Mrs. Waddington – wife of U.K. PR industry veteran Stephen Waddington (who himself was an Omnicom / Ketchum chief engagement officer during Ketchum’s Russian Government contracting heyday under the then-leadership of “quiet American” and past PRCA / ICCO Board Chair David Gallagher) – appeared on a prominent London radio program this past December, on which Sir Martin also appeared.
Mrs. Waddington’s and Sir Martin’s live chat about PR industry issues quickly turned a bit testy.
Sir Martin made inconvenient observations about the overwhelming trend in strategic communication of pay-for-play now ruling the roost, irrespective of PR’s struggles to manage brand reputation through robust “earned” means, coupled with c-suite / boardroom influence of sound policy / practice.
During the interview, both Sir Martin and Mrs. Waddington each made some insightful points over what essentially were (and always have been) PR nomenclature issues, which have dogged our industry since the dawn of PR Time.
Sir Martin’s and Mrs. Waddington’s point / counterpoint on Radio 4 wasn’t the problem, however.
What instead has been a subsequent trainwreck is the un-FREAKING-believable, nonstop, mass pile-on by Team Waddington and the PRCA brand, to demonize Sir Martin, over multiple months ever since.
Mrs. Waddington has heaped condemnation and ridicule on Sir Martin every chance she gets, it seems (to which the PR trade press have dutifully clicked their heels, to re-platform and co-pontificate).
I personally have observed from America a near-sycophantic brigade of anti-Sorrell PR flying-monkeys since December.
They’ve drummed up and literally flooded the Internet with waves of what appear to be crowdsourced / pre-organized faux-organic grievance toward Sir Martin, for his merely having expressed his viewpoints about where the PR industry stands today as arguably a victim of its own neglect.
I wish I could say I’ve never seen anything like it, but sadly, I have.
This hyped-up online bullying campaign against Sir Martin rings eerily familiar to me of a very similar mobbing campaign weaponized against another high-profile U.K. comms industry leader, drummed up in late 2022 and involving many of the same pro-Waddington folk. The impact was tragic — and in fact, deadly.
But that’s a story for another day.
Exhibit A:
This particular social media spokesperson for Mrs. Waddington (cited per his postings above and below), has his own history of 2022-PRCA-grievance, turned 2026-PRCA-fanboy-status, under Team Waddington.
Not disclosed: This individual also serves as a “teacher” for Mr. and Mrs. Waddington’s Socially Mobile PR training scheme — that is, on days when he’s not busy advising the Chinese Government, according to his posted Socially Mobile teacher bio.
But that’s also a story for another day.
Pro-Waddington / anti-Sorrell social media posts — nearly all following rather prescriptive talking points — have flooded the Internet ever since the Radio 4 appearance back in December.
I will venture to guess that there have easily been hundreds of subsequent, crowdsourced (?) anti-Sir Martin / pro-Waddington online posts ever since.
This campaign has had all the calling cards of a highly orchestrated smear-fest (also known in workplace bullying parlance as “mobbing”), for little other purpose than to denigrate and “take down” reputationally (or how-ever) yet another prominent white male colleague.
Even three months after the Radio 4 discussion, Mrs. Waddington ratcheted things up again to keep the campaign stirred up and amplified… even requisitioning from her staff a PRCA-sponsored event a few months ago, entitled:
“Don’t Flood the Internet.”
Its aim: to clap-back at Sir Martin’s off-handed comment using those words during their Radio 4 chat.
Mrs. Waddington even requisitioned event hoodies that the PRCA then placed on sale, emblazoned with, confusingly, the words “Flood the Internet” (???) to help promote her “Don’t Flood the Internet” event. This mixed messaging begged the question for me…
Which is it, Mrs. Waddington?
Are we flooding or not flooding? Mrs. Waddington’s own photo below (modeling her new hoodie on the PRCA website) strongly suggests that even she is confused about what she really means.
Talk about message-confusion! Are secret-decoder rings included with the hoodie order?
Sorry-not-sorry for the snark, but it’s a valid question.
And if only that example were the half of it…
At this point, Mrs. Waddington’s initially abrupt but now long-running Sir Martin feud deserves far greater scrutiny, due to the potential of veiled corporate interests puppet-stringing this bizarre discourse.
It seems clear that with certain personal Waddington / Omnicom / Ketchum allegiances that go waaaaayyyyy back more than a decade or two, Sir Martin may have inadvertently painted a target upon himself with the House of Waddington earlier in 2024-25, given his many recent criticisms of the Waddington’s beloved Omnicom.
As mentioned, according to the googles and any basic online search of the PR trade media record, Mr. and Mrs. Waddington both have long-time and complex histories with Omnicom, a WPP competitor.
Thanks to its merger last year with IPG, Omnicom is now the largest PR / advertising / media-buying agency conglomerate in the world, despite Omnicom and IPG and even WPP, for that matter, getting caught up in a U.S. Congressional inquiry in 2024-25 over allegedly running an anti-conservative advertising “cartel” in non-compliance with U.S. antitrust law.
Speaking of so-called “brand safety” under Mrs. Waddington’s PRCA control…
It appears the former GARM alleged anti-conservative cartel and Mrs. Waddington’s version of the PRCA now have a lot in common.
They’re both trying to demonetize (destroy) the Elon Musk-owned X platform, in their own way — with the PRCA waving the laughably lame flag of “brand safety” as its anti-Musk tool of choice.
The PRCA announced months ago it “has taken the decision to stop posting on X.”
Meanwhile, as the U.K. Government has inflicted historic free-speech-suppression and censorship violations under the Starmer Regime, the PRCA has happily remained mute to it all, even though the industry Mrs. Waddington represents is 100% reliant on the ability to communicate openly across robust media.
As I say, the pro-Labour partisanship is obvious:
But that’s a story for another day.
As noted, Mr. Waddington’s separate (and even far more complex) Omnicom / Ketchum prior employment affiliations are well-known in the U.K. PR market, due in part to his large, multi-decade social media following, including his many posts over some decades on Twitter / X itself, ironically.
Following former Omnicom client Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it seems Omnicom wishes to clamp down on anyone bringing up their Russia history at all. And clamp down, they have. (Mr. Waddington’s @wadds feed documents he has posted to Twitter / X some 91,500 times, while @Mrs_Wadds deleted her own X account right before she was named PRCA CEO, for obvious reasons.)
I’ve pondered in recent years that it’s likely the case that not everyone knows or understands the full Waddington-Omnicom context (or, as some might call it, a “blind spot” if not full-on conflict of interest, as it pertains to Mrs. Waddington’s responsibilities to the larger industry now, in the PRCA trade group).
That blind spot becomes especially relevant, when PRCA CEO Mrs. Waddington goes about her anti-Sir Martin campaign in 2026, given Sir Martin’s prior outspokenness against the Omnicom / IPG merger, for entirely valid reasons… but I’m sure not to Omnicom’s liking.
From the get-go of the 2025 U.S. Federal Trade Commission approval process of the Omnicom / IPG merger last year, Sir Martin made his negative feelings and criticisms about it abundantly well-known, starting when it was first announced in December 2024.
(Note: Concurrently, in Dec. 2024 at the onset of Omnicom’s announcement about its pending merger, Mrs. Waddington had only just then been seated as “Interim CEO” of the PRCA… only no one was allowed to know it yet – in a major two-month transparency void from November to December 2024 of the PRCA’s so-called “fit for purpose” post-Ingham-death governance scheme.)
Over years, Team Waddington’s allyship and close coordination with Omnicom’s Ketchum and its now-former global markets CEO Jo-ann Robertson proved immensely veiled and – here’s that word again – “complex.”
It’s a story for another day – particularly now that Omnicom’s entire Ketchum legacy brand is being sunset by Omnicom post-merger and post-FTC anti-cartel compliance order and post-blog post exposing Omnicom’s long multi-agency histories of performing lucrative metaphorical PR lap dances for Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation for years and years and years.
In February 2025, Omnicom’s Ketchum rejoined the PRCA with great fanfare, as soon as Mrs. Waddington swept in as “Interim CEO.”
Two years earlier, Ketchum’s Jo-ann Robertson had publicly and infamously resigned from her PRCA governance Board position in October 2022 — taking her then-some £35,000 / year in Ketchum’s membership dues to the PRCA with her. On the heels of her bad-mouthing the PRCA, Ms. Robertson immediately poached Francis Ingham’s PRCA chief comms staffer in February 2023 to come work for (and be loyal to) her. (That maneuver violated written PRCA policy, but no one was ever held accountable. Instead, they were rewarded.)
Again — a story for another day.
In the grand scheme of things (emphasis on “scheme”), I can’t help but ponder out-loud why else such organized hate-mobbing by Team Waddington has occurred against Sir Martin.
Is it payback, for Sir Martin’s many anti-Omnicom remarks over the past 18 months or so during the Omnicom merger, not to certain people’s liking?
I also must openly question the very uncomfortable conflict-of-interest problem with the Waddington’s “Socially Mobile” outfit that they operate out of London, which features a current website listing of two Omnicom firms (Porter Novelli and FleishmanHillard) listed as the Waddingtons’ “sponsors.”
The Waddington’s Socially Mobile website – which also lists now-defunct firm Don’t Cry Wolf as both a “sponsor” and its founder John Brown as a “teacher”… also cites that the Waddingtons are (or were) “incredibly fortunate to be partnered by CIPR and PRCA, who provide a year’s membership for our fully funded graduates.”
Seems that conflicts of self-interest and other compromised history run amok here:
(After closing his PR firm and after Sarah Waddington became PRCA CEO, John Brown was restored to the PRCA’s Fellows page in 2025 after he had quite famously “resigned” from PRCA and the PRCA Fellows in an ugly protest in late 2022, in lock-step with Ketchum, and while Mr. Waddington was Don’t Cry Wolf’s non-executive director — apparently advising play-calls to Mr. Brown from the sidelines in Q4 2022.)
Another issue: Ironically, the late Francis Ingham served on the Waddington’s Socially Mobile board himself from its point of inception — but for how long is something of a mystery.
When I stumbled upon that fact a few years ago, I considered it not just an eye-opener, but also a jaw-dropper, given certain history that played out in late 2022. (More on this particular point, in a minute.)
This persistent pattern of Waddington “friends” abruptly becoming Waddington “foes” (but without former “friends” finding out about it until they see it splashed across social media and the PR trade rags) brings me to a prior PRCA / Sir Martin connection with the Waddingtons…
And it also blew my mind when I similarly stumbled upon it.
A certain someone in 2018 wrote that Sir Martin held bona-fide credentials as being the industry’s “hero” and “juggernaut” who belongs on the “PR version of Mount Rushmore.”
Who, precisely, ever made those grandiose claims about Sir Martin?
Well, turns out, “Once upon a time in PR,” it was the PRCA’s own Mrs. Waddington who made precisely those claims about Sir Martin’s greatness.
Or, to clarify… the former Sarah Hall made them.
Alas, in these more recent months of Team Waddington’s Sir Martin war, it seems Mrs. Waddington and the larger U.K. PR sector may be suffering from amnesia about a certain “book” published by Sarah Hall Waddington in 2018…
I found the digital footprint of Mrs. Waddington’s 2018 book, “Once Upon a Time in PR,” recently.
Here’s how it happened…
Having heard through a colleague about yet another PR trade-rag story hitting in late April re-drumming up the Sir Martin / Waddington controversy again – four months and counting after the Radio 4 interview, mind you – I went about trying to look up the latest story myself through an online search.
What popped up in my search results instead of the recent article was Sarah (Hall) Waddington’s 2018 book.
I immediately found her prior book included praise for Sir Martin (among other people also profiled, such as her future husband Stephen Waddington, as well as Alex Aiken, Francis Ingham, and others).
The book, entitled “Once Upon a Time in PR,” was published by the former Ms. Hall back in 2018, under her seemingly (?) now defunct #FutureProof brand, as also co-platformed by her now-husband, Mr. Waddington, on his separate for-profit PR consulting website for Wadds Inc.
Mr. Waddington lauded the book (of course) – which, as noted, also featured himself – among its “21 fairy stories about professionalism”:
Shocked, I surmised that Mrs. Waddington not only had published this book back in 2018 to “celebrate” her hand-selected club of noteworthy PR industry figures, but also, Sir Martin Sorrell himself was included in her book.
REPEAT:
Before Mrs. Waddington invested months demonizing Sir Martin (2025-26), she suggested placing him on PR’s Mount Rushmore (2018). Let that sink in.
Mrs. Waddington also referred to Sir Martin in 2018 “as a hero whose legend goes before him for single handedly turning a cottage industry into a global money making machine.”
I suppose this was prior to the societal demarcation point of 2020, back when it was still OK even by Mrs. Waddington’s liberal standards to celebrate a white man in the now-ultra-woke U.K. PR industry, on the sole rationale of said white man having made boatloads of £££££.
To boot, Mr. Waddington’s own promotional tweets and blog post from 2018 gave a spotlight to his then-future wife’s book, featuring himself rubbing elbows with Sir Martin as presumably a Rushmore-worthy co-titan.
Mr. Waddington did express his public disappointment that Sir Martin wasn’t able to attend the House of Waddington’s book launch party at the PRCA, hosted by one Francis Ingham — another book co-honoree.
In her book, the former Ms. Hall referred to Mr. Waddington as an “agency alchemist, author and master of the crowdsourced project and blog post, who always shares the wealth” and that “whatever (Mr. Waddington)… touches seems to turn to gold.”
Apart from Mrs. Waddington stopping just short in her 2018 book of referring to Sir Martin as the second coming of Jesus Christ (before reversing course during the Christmas holidays of 2025 to imply that Sir Martin is now somehow the PR Antichrist), it was further interesting for me to take a gander at the other luminaries on her “fairytale” list.
See below screen shot, as outlined by Mr. Waddington on his 2018 Wadds blog post. (Apologies for any difficulty with readability, but Mr. Waddington has a clear affinity for 6 pt. type.)
Granted, many superlative honorees in Mrs. Waddington’s 2018 book are folks I do not know and have never met. I’m sure all of them are nice.
Well… almost all of them…
Several others whom I’ve indeed met are, without question, wonderful people and very fine professionals. So, my remarks here of utter astonishment about Mrs. Waddington’s Sir Martin flip-flop are not meant to sully the entire list as somehow bad or wrong.
However, as I thumbed through the available screen shots of various “Once Upon a Time” profiles and further obtained other postings from the social media public domain, I couldn’t help but shake my head in confoundment, more than once.
For example, another eye-popper for me – after seeing a few of the publicly posted features – was this one below, of a gentleman well-known and respected in U.K. government comms.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of then-Ms. Hall’s line in the lede of this profile, reading, “…in real life, UK Government communications people are actually shit hot.”
Now, to recap: The foreword of Mrs. Waddington’s famed book literally promised that the compilation would “celebrate best practice” and “professionalism.”
So… how, precisely, does “shit hot” fit the rubric?
I mean… not to clutch my pearls as if I’m some teetotaler myself on the select use of a well-placed swearword…
And, perhaps, shame on me for always having erroneously presumed that British properness and steadfast decorum were among England’s more reliable exports.
But even so, isn’t that descriptor not just a smidge rough, at least for a “PR fairy tale”?
I sure hope Mrs. Waddington canned it on the profanity that day she collected her CBE from Her Majesty the Queen, apparently with the PRCA’s Francis Ingham providing to her his generous endorsement (prior to his being thrown under the bus later, of course, made more interesting by the fact that Mrs. Waddington now collects the late Francis Ingham’s paycheck).
It sort of reminds me of the power of the public-facing online record, punctuated by the power of the online screenshot.
As but one relevant example, I consider another “Sarah” of the PRCA a case in point.
The PRCA’s 2022-23 Board Chair, Sarah Scholefield of Grayling / Accordience, who announced to the PR trade media in October 2022 that Francis Ingham was under “investigation” weeks before ever giving Francis Ingham the courtesy of any such written notice, had her firm Grayling publish on its website via an October 5, 2023, timestamp — six-and-a-half months after Francis Ingham’s death — a VERY outdated PRCA news release about Ms. Scholefield, quoting the now-deceased Francis Ingham as singing Mrs. Scholefield’s praises, from back when they were on far better working terms.
Naturally, Francis Ingham had nothing to say about Grayling’s retroactive, happy-quote claw-back to Ms. Scholefield’s own reputational benefit, since he was, by then … you know, dead.
To that point, it more than caught my eye when I saw that the late Francis Ingham was featured in 2018, when he certainly wasn’t deceased yet, on Mrs. Waddington’s “Once Upon A Time in PR” list, too, as a profile subject himself, emblematic of “professionalism.”
Yet the descriptor Mrs. Waddington assigned to Francis Ingham also seemed strange:
“…skilled, sarcastic and complex PRCA boss, the public relations industry’s Severus Snape, committed to standing up for the industry.”
Not having read or watched J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (again, shame on me!) – I actually had to look up the literary reference.
But, wow.
I don’t find the “Severus Snape” remark to be exactly complimentary of a PR association leader. With full benefit of eight years of hindsight, I now don’t believe that it was intended by Mrs. Waddington to be complimentary, as much as a warning to others, i.e., “Don’t mess with F.O.F.s!” (Friends of Francis).
It was my understanding when Francis Ingham was alive, that he tried to help the Waddingtons in every way he could.
I believe now that he was deceived into thinking the Waddingtons were his friends.
He platformed their voluminous pet projects, availed every PRCA communications channel to them for their very left-wing brand of advocacy (even though Francis Ingham — @ingers1975 on Twitter until his entire Twitter account was deleted weeks after his death by someone — was well-known to be a conservative), gave effusive quotes to trade press lauding the Waddingtons… and the list of favors went on and on.
Francis Ingham even served — as I mentioned — on the board for their start-up for Socially Mobile, with the Waddingtons keeping Francis Ingham’s name on their reports to Companies House many months after Francis was already deceased and even years after they registered his “termination” with their nonprofit.
While much of that story may be for another day, let’s unpack at least a little bit of that troubling history…
Once Upon a Time in PR… On 16 November 2021, a “Notice of ceasing to be a person with significant control” for “FRANCIS INGHAM” was filed by the Waddington’s Socially Mobile, to U.K. Companies House.
Per below, however, on 8 December 2022 (one year later), P F Ingham’s name still appeared on the Waddington’s Socially Mobile “Directors’ Report period ended 30 September 2022,” even though the prior filing of 16 November 2021 to U.K. Companies House claimed Francis Ingham had been “terminated” from this role.
Most awkwardly, on 22 December 2023 — even one year after that — U.K. Companies House posted the Waddingtons’ submitted report, “Total exemption full accounts made up to 30 September 2023,” and their ridiculous filing STILL listed “P F Ingham” as a director, six months after Francis Ingham had already been deceased for more than six months, and, nearly two years after the Waddingtons earlier claimed he had been “terminated.”
Apart from their messy paperwork — falsely filing to the U.K. Government that the Waddington’s Socially Mobile “report was approved” on 8 December 2023 by a dead man — the PRCA’s “fit for purpose” governance lip service now appears wholly suspect, particularly when you overlay the Grayling / Scholefield timestamped news release also quoting a dead man.
The whole “fit for purpose” PRCA governance shake-up originally was launched by the PRCA brass at the same time that Francis Ingham was kneecapped in the online smear campaign (noted above in this blog only in small part).
It ultimately resulted in Mrs. Waddington receiving Francis Ingham’s old job.
Most curious if not blatantly concerning, Stephen Waddington famously wrote on March 20, 2023, four days after his former flatmate Francis Ingham’s death, that “I’ve been a foe, friend, and most recently foe” of Francis Ingham’s.
Only days after Francis Ingham died, the PRCA Twitter handle (by then under control of a man who was waiting in the wings to go to work at Ketchum) was back at it, tweeting happy promos for the Waddingtons’ Socially Mobile, yet without disclosure of Francis Ingham’s past and/or lingering status on their own “board”:
Mr. Waddington’s own claims of Ingham “foe” status from Q4 2022-Q1 2023 feel deeply unsettling, at least to me.
When I first read Mr. Waddington’s “tribute” to Francis Ingham in March 2023, there was a great deal I didn’t know, including Mr. Waddington’s Ketchum history in Moscow.
After all, Francis Ingham delivered countless favors to the Waddingtons and to Omnicom / Ketchum when he was at the height of his power in the PRCA.
I had thought all these folks were friends, until much later information proved the opposite.
It begs the question of why Francis Ingham was treated so appallingly at the end of his life by certain individuals in the industry, who later very much seemed to have benefited as a result of what I and many others perceive as gross mistreatment.
Looping back now to the gang-up these recent months against Sir Martin, I wish to call for the PRCA to please stop it with the pile-on against this man, too.
It’s one thing if Mrs. Waddington wants to express her independent opinion on anything she wishes. It’s quite another for the whole gang-up / bullying / mobbing scene to be rallied, organized and executed. AGAIN.
It’s a bad look for any industry association — but in PR, far more so.
Whatever the PR industry points Mrs. Waddington intended to score back in December or even in January, I think that ship has now sailed. This ongoing, nonsensical anti-Sir Martin drumbeat is now beating a dead horse. Or, maybe other dead things, come to think of it.
If nothing else, I ask the PRCA to please reconsider all their mixed messaging, parading around as if their anti-Sir Martin crusade is merely an innocuous PR-advocacy campaign.
After all, Mrs. Waddington has directed her PRCA team now for some five solid months to “flood the Internet” with relentless anti-Sir Martin posts, events, hoodie sales, and do / don’t flip-flops on “flood the Internet” directives.
Just some days ago, Mrs. Waddington had her team post “a rallying call” and “ethical standards” message on the PRCA’s LinkedIn page, stating – and I cannot make this stuff up:
“Organizations must be encouraged not to flood the internet with content in their favour.”
Uhhh…. Come again?
That’s precisely what the PRCA has been doing non-stop, under the directives of none other than CEO Waddington.
Why is it perfectly acceptable for the PRCA to hype Mrs. Waddington and flood the Internet with content “in (her) favour” — including content castigating a major industry colleague / icon (Sir Martin) — but everyone else is at risk of getting slapped with a PRCA ethics code breach if they dare communicate as they rightfully see fit?
This seeming hypocrisy is called “organizational gaslighting.”
It’s patently wrong to do something suspect, then claim you don’t or didn’t do it, then traffick in condemnations of others for doing precisely what you just did.
Very Severus Snape-ish, if you ask me – only in this case, clumsey and ham-handed.
Anyway…
I think it’s rather clear at this point that I do not understand what on earth is going on with the PRCA under Mrs. Waddington’s leadership.
Or maybe I do, and that’s precisely the problem.
Believe me, I’ve tried to ask questions of Mrs. Waddington (and of her CEO predecessor who abruptly left post on 1 November 2024 without explanation, and of the PRCA’s former comms chief poached by Ketchum, and of the PRCA’s current board chair, and of the PRCA’s 2022-23 board chair + not-so-veiled AKOS Russian PR association enthusiast), in writing, over past years.
I’ve asked for investigations by credible and disinterested third parties. I’ve even asked for police involvement and reporting to be engaged.
I’ve given more than ample opportunity for individuals to explain what they were doing or what in the world they were thinking — to little avail.
For her part, Mrs. Waddington hasn’t exactly flooded my email box with credible or acceptable explanations, on the occasion she’s bothered to respond at all.
Since voicing my additional concerns to the PRCA in December 2025, I’ve been flooded instead with countless bot attacks from China and Singapore, and in just recent days, I’ve experienced hundreds of separate hacking log-in attempts.
Again, many of my larger concerns here are a story for another day.
Until that day comes, my unsolicited advice is this:
Let’s reconsider the wisdom of our industry’s false PR fairy tales, shall we?
Our industry needs leaders who operate in reality, with transparency and good faith, and with not quite so much self-interest, unabashed collusion, and finger-pointing diversions of contrived demonization toward the Sir Martins of the world, on little other basis than to distract from what’s really going on here.
Like Hansel and Gretel of the Brothers Grimm, a veritable platoon of implicated individuals have left discoverable breadcrumbs all over the place in the public domain, with not nearly enough buzzards to even begin scavenging the rather indicting evidence from the online record.
Mary Beth West is a U.S.-based PR strategist and founder of The #PRethics Community on LinkedIn.
Also on this week’s blog: