Letter from Montieth Illingworth

Montieth SPRG was founded for one very compelling reason: to provide a new and more effective set of public relations services and solutions for global organizations with ambitious, multi-market growth strategies in APAC. 

We’ve created a communications agency that is singularly focused on helping support our clients penetrate new markets throughout Asia and expand in their existing ones. We achieve that with an integrated, flexible, and budget efficient offering that produces high-value results, advances the brand, and protects the corporate reputation. 

Asserting that there is something new about how public relations functions for global organizations needs explanation. PR started globalizing decades ago via bulge bracket multi-national firms that planted their flags in key markets. Then the independent agency networks combined to string together global coverage. Our approach, what we call “PR 2.0”, is a next generation approach and aligns directly with what has changed about globalization, and both the opportunities and the challenges that has presented. 

Central to those opportunities is working with the news media. The biggest impact of globalization on the way news and opinion is reported on and written about is what we call atomization.  This is where media beats have become more specialized and thus the topics they cover increasingly have broad, global impact. Cybersecurity, for example, is a truly global topic, relevant to every audience across borders. The job of PR is to develop deep domain knowledge and then move nimbly across media markets to highlight the global relevance of the story. 

Today’s globalization is also posing new challenges. Emerging technologies, like AI, can be marketed and sold into dozens of countries and the “language” of this tech is common everywhere. But managing multi-market marketing communications strategies and programs for early-stage companies puts a premium on targeted and efficient execution. 

Similarly, at the enterprise level, a major corporation needs to improve its ESG performance to meet new demands from institutional investors from around the world. How does it globalize its ESG positioning so that it speaks to every investors’ cultural priorities around climate change? 

Those are precisely the questions we’re helping our clients tackle. Between us – founders Montieth Illingworth and Richard Tsang – we have a combined 50 years of global PR experience. We both founded independent agencies which through entrepreneurial drive and a commitment to achieving excellence for our clients we’ve grown, respectively, into market leading consultancies. 

Together, we know that with Montieth & Company’s proven experience managing multiple cross-border global strategies from our hubs in New York and London, and SPRG’s many years of experience helping its clients throughout the APAC region, we’ve forged the optimal offering and precisely the right time.