When he set up his namesake firm in 1985, Matthew Freud didn’t know he was breaking a family tradition precluding family members from following the same career as anyone in the previous three generations. He later found that Edward L Bernays, considered the founder of public relations, was his great-uncle. One could argue that it was a tradition well worth interrupting – today freuds is one of the country’s leading communication agencies, counting Mars, Toyota and Public Health England among its clients. But Freud, who serves as executive chairman, is still ‘very involved’ with key clients, managing partner Ed Amory tells Spear’s, as the business fuses its corporate and consumer practices (‘audiences can no longer be pigeon-holed’) and brings together eight sister businesses under the brand umbrella of ‘The Brewery’. PR firms are also increasingly aware that their own reputations are at stake when working with new clients, Amory adds, but freuds encourages clients ‘to tell their stories’: ‘We believe that businesses need to have a purpose beyond profit… That’s the direction of travel across all communications – the requirement to be about a bit more than making money.’
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