The Reputation Room

Brian Besanceney has been Chief Communications Officer at two Fortune 50 companies — Walmart and Boeing — after thirteen years in government, four of them in the White House as Deputy Communications Director, and a long run at Disney. He is now Principal Advisor at Alethea, Senior Advisor at Golin, and a Partner at CommsCollectiv.He learned the trade early. His father ran a marketing and PR agency in Cincinnati, and Brian's first job was printing press releases, putting on a collared shirt and running them into newsrooms while his father circled the block. Four decades on, he describes a profession that has been reinvented by technology roughly every three to five years — and one that is being reinvented again.The conversation moves through three iconic American brands, each caught at an inflection point. At Walmart he became the company's first-ever CCO, inheriting a team assembled from seven different corners of a 2.2-million-employee organisation. He describes tearing down what he calls the Berlin Wall between internal and external communications, and a team that grew from 130 to 216 — not through budget, but because the business kept handing over its own shadow comms groups. He contrasts Disney taking two years to approve a Facebook page with Walmart launching a podcast overnight, and what that says about risk appetite.At Boeing he became the sixth CCO in five years. That led him to the questions he asked before accepting: is the role structurally set up to succeed, and does the organisation still believe in what he calls the magic wand theory of public relations — the idea that the right words can make a broken business problem disappear. They cannot. If a thing is broken in the business, it is broken in the business.From there: how CEOs who genuinely get it treat reputation as cake rather than icing; why you can emphasise a different syllable across markets but never tell a different story; how disinformation has shifted from state actors to financially motivated ones, and what prediction markets and AI will do to that; the rise of the fractional CCO and where it fits between in-house and consulting; and why earned media is having a renaissance now that LLMs treat third-party validation as a trusted source.His closing argument is that our value was never in producing widgets. It is in the fork in the road.Visit https://thereputationroom.com for this an all other episodes.

Reputation is built in small waves, not viral spikes.That is the idea I keep coming back to from this conversation with Adib Sisani, Chief Communications Officer at On, where his scope covers communications and public affairs.Adib's route into the profession was not a straight line. He was born in Germany to Iranian parents who had left Iran to study in Europe and then could not go back after the Islamic Revolution. He was raised in New York, returned to Germany for university in Heidelberg, and studied political science, English linguistics and public law — not communications, not business. He started in the strategy department of a German political party, got pulled into its press office almost by accident, and found the job he has done ever since. From there: Goldman Sachs, more than a decade in financial services, then Axel Springer during its push into the U.S. market, and now On in Zurich.Four categories. Politics, finance, media, consumer. His argument is that the underlying craft does not change when the sector does.We talk about what politics taught him that corporate life could not — speed, breadth, and losing any fear of talking truth to power early enough for it to stick. We talk about the fax machine in the back of a campaign car and the roll of thermal paper that would not stop coming.Then we get into the substance.Adib draws a hard line between brand and reputation, and it is a line worth arguing with. Positioning a sportswear brand with consumers and positioning an asset manager with a narrow set of clients are different problems. Reputation, in his view, is the same problem everywhere: the perception of an institution with the audiences that matter to it.He explains the philosophies he has carried across every job. One voice, which he defines not as one spokesperson but as everyone telling the same story. And no such thing as redundancy in communications — the corporate equivalent of a politician's stump speech, held in a messaging house that executives should be able to deliver if you woke them at three in the morning. I put him on the spot and asked him to do exactly that for On. He does it, then explains why getting to ninety percent is enough.We talk about storytelling as execution rather than decoration. On had a genuine viral moment at the Paris Olympics with light spray, the robotic process that builds a shoe upper in minutes instead of hours. His question is what comes next. A company only has a handful of natural corporate moments in a year, so the rest has to be built — a proactive calendar of stories that are proof points of the narrative. Some are spikes. Most are small waves. Skip the waves and the reputation never accumulates.We also cover:— Merging marketing and communications into a single function at DWS, and building public affairs alongside it— What changes when your CEO is himself a public figure, and why media companies are harder to communicate for than most— Reporting to founders who built the company from nothing, and what that demands that a conventional reporting line does not— Why the real risk in communications is not boldness but blandness, and what happens to your narrative when you are not in the room where decisions get made— Roger Federer, the dinner that led to him investing rather than being paid, and whether On still needs that association todayThere is a moment near the end where he talks about executives who are willing to be wrong six months later. He treats that as an asset rather than a flaw, and makes a case for why communications functions rarely get anywhere without it.This one ran an hour and could easily have run two. We agreed on a part two.If you find this conversation valuable, follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and share it with your network. If you have feedback, I would like to hear it.https://thereputationroom.com

Michela Ratti has built products, built brands, and rebuilt reputations — as an engineer turned communicator across P&G, eBay, Swarovski, and Ferragamo (and including a stint on the advisory side). In this episode, she joins Javier Boix to unpack what actually changes, and what stays the same, when you move a career between detergent plants, luxury fashion houses, and hypergrowth tech.Michela is half Italian, half Welsh, and speaks four languages. She trained as an engineer, graduated with honors, and spent years in R&D before crossing into communications — a path she says gave her a lasting instinct for cause and effect, systems thinking, and the gap between what a company says and what people actually experience.That gap, she argues, is the real definition of reputation, in any industry. Whether the product is a diaper, a piece of jewelry, or a handbag, the business is the same: building trust at scale. What differs is visibility and stakes — in luxury, she explains, reputation is turned up louder, because people aren't just buying a product, they're buying status, self-worth, and a piece of a dream. When that dream doesn't hold up, the fallout moves faster and hits harder.Javier and Michela trace how the job itself has changed since she started at Procter & Gamble in the early 2000s. Back then, communications was largely about controlling a narrative through a small number of press gatekeepers. Today, she says, it's about shaping a conversation that's already happening across dozens of channels you don't own, faster than any single company can fully control. That shift, she argues, is why understanding systems — how information moves, who trusts whom, and why — matters more than ever.The conversation moves through some of the biggest transformations of her career: relaunching Procter & Gamble into prestige beauty against decades-old luxury incumbents, merging three separate businesses into one at Swarovski while repositioning its price point five times higher, and returning to Ferragamo for a second stint to lead a brand turnaround. Across all three, she says, the discipline was the same — build trust with your own team first, be explicit about what communications can and cannot do, and give people a clear, honest timeline instead of promising overnight change.They also get hands-on about AI: how agentic tools are leveling the playing field for challenger brands, how propensity modeling and omni-channel data are reshaping audience targeting, and why visibility inside AI-powered search is becoming as important as traditional media coverage. Michela is candid about the limits too — the lag between what AI models surface and what's actually happening in the market, and the very real concerns around bias and trust that make some leaders cautious to fully embrace it.Underneath the career story is a broader argument about the profession itself. Michela pushes back on the idea that communications is the "firefighter function," brought in only after something has gone wrong. The real value, she says, comes from having a seat at the table before the mess happens — helping define what a company is trying to achieve and why, not just cleaning up when it doesn't land. She also reflects candidly on a hard-earned lesson: that great work doesn't speak for itself, and that being an advocate for your own impact is not the same as playing politics.It's a conversation about translation — of complex ideas into stories people embrace, of engineering logic into human trust, of a life lived across cultures and industries into a single, consistent instinct for what makes people believe. As Michela puts it, communicators are ultimately in "the science of being believed."If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and share it with your network.https://thereputationroom.com

Reputation Intelligence at Machine Scale: David Benigson on Signal AI, LLMs, and the New Rules of Corporate ReputationWhat happens when the tools built to measure reputation start feeding the large language models that increasingly define it? In this episode of The Reputation Room, Javier Boix sits down with David Benigson, founder and CEO of Signal AI — the company he started in 2013 in his parents' garage in North London, built out of a simple, unglamorous problem: hand-curating email newsletters was slow, repetitive, and ripe for automation. More than a decade later, Signal AI serves over 650 enterprises and sits at the center of how many of the world's largest organizations read risk and reputation in real time.David isn't an engineer. He's a law graduate who built Signal alongside co-founder Dr. Miguel Martinez, an academic with deep roots in natural language processing. That pairing — a founder obsessed with the customer problem, and a scientist obsessed with the technology — is the throughline of this conversation.Inside the episode, David and Javier get into:How the AI underneath Signal has evolved from early classification models that detected risk events and narrative clusters, to today's generative layer that synthesizes and interprets that data conversationally — and why David sees it as an "and," not an "or"What it means that Signal is now directly integrated into Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude via MCP — and why David argues this expands rather than cannibalizes his market by putting reputation intelligence in front of hundreds of users inside an organization, not just a handful of power usersHow the conversation with clients has shifted from "help me see what's being said about us" five years ago to "help me decide" today — and what that shift says about who now owns reputation risk inside the C-suiteDavid's pointed response to a previous guest's advice that companies should build their own proprietary intelligence engines rather than rely on external providers — and where he thinks that advice gets the value chain backwardsThe renaissance of earned media and why LLMs are trained overwhelmingly on independent, third-party content rather than anything a marketing budget can buy — meaning what journalists, analysts, and the open web say about you now matters more than everJavier's provocative thesis that reputation will soon depend entirely on what LLMs say about a company, and David's more nuanced pushback: LLMs are downstream, not upstream, of reputation — they compress and summarize perception, they don't originate itWhy organizational silos, not technology, are now the bigger constraint on companies acting on reputation intelligence — and how risk and comms functions that barely spoke a decade ago are becoming close collaborators, co-owning parts of the enterprise risk registerThe distinction between showing executives only "trusted source" content versus surfacing low-quality, high-virality content that can blindside a company from an account with no track record and no followersDavid also shares who he'd like to see next in The Reputation Room: tune in to find out! This is a conversation about where reputation measurement is headed — and why the practitioners who win won't be the ones who avoid the machines, but the ones who build unique judgment and IP on top of them.Find David Benigson on LinkedIn and on X/Twitter (@DavidSignalAI).If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and share it with your network. For all episodes and more info on the project, please visit https://thereputationroom.com.

Joanna Price grew up on a farm in Australia and now runs one of the broadest corporate affairs mandates in global business. As Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Heineken, she oversees government affairs, public policy, sustainable development and global communications under one roof, a structure she insisted on before she'd even accept the job. Before Heineken, she spent twenty years at Coca-Cola, where a stint in strategy and research turned into a corporate affairs career.In this conversation, Joanna traces the arc from Kellogg to Coca-Cola to Heineken, and from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Atlanta to Amsterdam, and explains why she never went back to a pure strategy role once she saw how much closer to the business corporate affairs actually sits. We talk about the paper she wrote over a Christmas break, titled simply "Plastic is the Next Sugar," which became the seed of Coca-Cola's World Without Waste commitment, the industry's first public pledge to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one sold by 2030. She walks through why she was willing to make that commitment public despite the risk of being held to it, and what it taught her about mobilizing an entire industry rather than trying to solve a systemic problem alone.For Joanna, having government affairs, sustainability and communications together isn't an org chart preference, it's what allows a company to connect narrative, policy and action into something coherent, rather than a set of disconnected functions saying different things to different audiences. That coherence, she argues, is what actually builds credibility, inside the boardroom and outside it.Joanna is candid about parts of the job that rarely get discussed: what it costs to walk into a new company without the network you spent twenty years building, and how she rebuilt credibility from zero within months of joining Heineken. She talks about leading through what she calls "the grey," the fact that corporate affairs rarely gets the clean feedback loops that sales or marketing get, and why she believes the function's real job is not just making problems disappear but shaping a company's direction before problems arise. Her phrase for it: building the fire department before the fire.We also spend time on Heineken's approach to responsible drinking and the deliberate normalization of zero-alcohol beer, and on why a strategy that works in one country can collapse the moment you try to copy and paste it into another. Joanna is direct about the tension of representing an alcohol company: rather than avoiding the conversation, she argues the job is to be part of it, transparently, and to earn the right to operate in every community Heineken serves.On artificial intelligence, Joanna gives a refreshingly specific answer: her function's actual AI capability sits around a three out of ten, but curiosity and experimentation are closer to a nine. Toward the end, we talk about board service, mentorship, why she considers curiosity a discipline rather than a personality trait, and a leadership lesson she took from watching a manager rewrite her work line by line rather than teach her to improve it herself. Her advice for people earlier in their careers: stretch yourself toward whatever scares you, because that is where the growth happens.This episode moves from an Australian farm to global boardrooms, from a memo written over a holiday break to an industry-wide sustainability pledge, and from questions of judgment and grey zones to the concrete choices behind how a global brand talks about alcohol, moderation and trust.If you enjoyed this conversation, follow https://thereputationroom.com/ on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and share it with your network. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it.