‘Agency World’ Looks in the Mirror: Reflections from ICCO in Mumbai

15 November 2025 Reading Time: 5 minutes

Mike Klein:

I’ve attended practitioner conferences where in-house teams compare notes, internal communications gatherings focused solely on employee-side issues, and countless mixed events where consultants and clients maintain careful professional distance. 

But I’d never attended an agency-focused conference—where top global consultancy professionals talk amongst themselves about the business of being in the business.

The ICCO Global Summit in Mumbai changed that. Attending the full range of sessions – and being the person who asked the most questions in the event’s Q&A sessions, I watched the consultancy world have conversations about its own future that are more sophisticated, more candid, and more reflective than outsiders typically credit it for..

Three cross-cutting themes kept surfacing—themes that together paint a picture of an industry trying to figure out whether it’s prepared to embrace its transformation or would prefer to rage to defend its status quo position.

Theme One: Everything Is an Intermediary Now

Day Two opened with Ruder Finn CEO Kathy Bloomgarden—newly inducted into the ICCO Hall of Fame—stating what changed the room’s temperature: “Machines are stakeholders.”

Not tools. Not channels. Stakeholders.

Seventy-five percent of online content is now machine-influenced. 

When fake Nvidia CEO livestreams attract five times more viewers than real ones, when AI-generated activists accumulate tens of thousands of followers in weeks, the machine isn’t mediating your message—it’s deciding what reaches audiences and how they respond.

Bloomgarden’s prescription was radical: deprioritize traditional media placements because machines don’t care about masthead prestige. Prioritize Reddit because LLMs do. “Optimizing the human algorithm” was her take on where to move in this space..

But it was also clear when Bloomgarden was saying this is that it’s not just machines that are intermediaries. 

Employees are intermediaries between companies and publics—though this went seriously underdiscussed. Consultancies are intermediaries between clients and stakeholders—and Rod Cartwright’s crisis presentation made clear that in “permacrisis” conditions, that role is becoming exponentially harder. Even founders are becoming intermediaries—”founder PR” emerging not as ego but as strategy.

When Jim O’Leary argued we’re in a “5X era” where the next five years will transform communications more than the previous five decades, the intermediary theme explained why. Every layer between intent and impact is being disrupted simultaneously.

Theme Two: The Reversal

I kept noticing inversions—things working opposite to conventional wisdom.

Strategic silence as strength. Only 21 percent of CCOs now expect their companies to comment on societal issues. Eighty percent are dialing down DEI communications. The consensus was pragmatic: everything can be weaponized. Dial down the megaphone, dial up precision engagement.

India leading, not following. When one Indian panelist described cervical cancer awareness challenges navigating complexity around intimate health exams in culturally constrained contexts, it illustrated environments requiring sophistication that would paralyze decision-making elsewhere. Indian firms are going global. 

The discussion of the jugaad philosophy sparked some heat and controversy. Jugaad, the Indian term roughly translated as “just get it done” was dismissed by some as corner-cutting and a derogatory description of Indian comms activity. But it was also defended as design thinking adapted to constraint—revealing Indian communicators solving for multiple audiences across radically different contexts simultaneously.

Trust through constraint. The “coconut tree” metaphor: trust grows slowly, falls instantly. Stay true to your niche even when environments turn hostile rather than expanding beyond core competence.

These weren’t contradictions—they were adaptations. In an environment moving at “terminal velocity,” survival requires abandoning intuitions built for different conditions.

Theme Three: The Confidence Gap as Structural Problem

CEO confidence that communications teams are “very well equipped” sits at 17 percent. Eighty-three percent of CEOs don’t believe their communications teams can handle current complexity.

This wasn’t a skills problem—it’s structural mismatch. Organizations move at the speed of quarters and committees. Culture moves at terminal velocity. Approval processes can’t keep up with the speed of machines and culture shifts.

When I asked Weber Shandwick CEO Jim O’Leary in the plenary what talent the industry needs and why that talent should choose it, the answer pointed to the challenge: we know what we need—the “humanist data scientist” who interprets big data and translates it into strategy. We’re unclear on why that talent should choose this industry or how we’ll develop it.

The ethics panel—”Can PR be a force for good?”—laid out the case against us: Volkswagen emissions, Big Tobacco, Big Oil’s climate denial, Cambridge Analytica, Boeing cover-ups, Purdue Pharma and opioids.

Panelists got personal. One described working for the Catholic Church during child sexual abuse inquiries, questioning whether this was work worth doing. Another discussed financial services communications built on encouraging spending regardless of affordability.

What made the session valuable was acknowledging that most practitioners operate where good/bad distinctions matter less than profit and market share. The confidence gap isn’t just operational. It’s ethical.

The Gaps That Didn’t Close

Two conversations went missing.

The employee dimension. In sessions repeatedly invoking “organizational resilience,” internal communication got minimal attention. When employees were mentioned, they appeared defensively—avoiding mutiny, and “keeping people informed”, seemingly in a tick-box way..

Missing was recognition that employees are the primary external communication channel in most organizations. Every employee is a media outlet and conversation starter shaping reputation in their networks. And when companies retreat to strategic silence externally but continue work internally on climate or DEI, who carries that story forward?

The business model question. Extensive discussion about what consultancies need to do differently, almost no discussion about how they make money doing it.

AI integration requires investment. Humanist data scientists command premium salaries and compelling employee value propositions of the type the industry has historically and structurally resisted. Machine optimization demands new capabilities. Geographic expansion costs money. M&A requires capital.

But revenue model discussion stayed surface-level. Kate from the Middle East PR Association noted that the PR/marketing line is “just not as distinguished as it used to be.” Rio described treating his firm like a VC portfolio with 250 investments. These are business model shifts, not operational adjustments.

Confidence gaps and capability gaps often reflect business model gaps. If consultancies can’t fund transformation required to meet client needs, the confidence problem becomes structural.

What Being in this Room Taught Me

The industry knows exactly what’s not working, or is likely to go away soon. The diagnosis is sophisticated. The urgency is real.

What’s less clear is whether knowing what’s wrong translates into doing what’s necessary.

Transformation requires capital, courage, and conviction. It requires abandoning comfortable orthodoxies—traditional media placements, engagement metrics, message cascade models, the belief that external communication alone drives reputation.

My takeaway from my first agency-focused conference: agency leaders aren’t in denial in the way that many practitioners are..

Instead, they’re in that uncomfortable space between knowing what needs to happen and committing to making it happen. The idea of massive change and turmoil in an 6-18 month window isn’t theoretical, and these leaders do recognize that the clock is ticking,

Mumbai wasn’t about getting to some kind of consensus. It was about testing some major hypotheses in real time with industry leaders willing to acknowledge when answers don’t exist yet.

But it’s only a starting point. The hard part—closing the gaps rather than cataloging them—remains ahead.

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Mike Klein is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic, founder of #WeLeadComms, and is currently on a study tour of India exploring the convergence of major market, technology and demographic trends.

Written by: Editor