Christian Cerisola
Christian Cerisola on listening hard.
From the red carpets of Monaco to motor dealerships in Newcastle, Christian Cerisola’s career in PR has taken him far and wide, allowing him to meet people from all walks of life. Now settled comfortably in the North East, Christian is highly sought after by agencies seeking his PR prowess in the digital climate. He told us about his star-studded career in comms, why listening is such a vital skill to have, and the exciting possibility of setting up his own agency.
Photographs by Christopher Owens
Tell me about your background and career. What does a brief history of you look like?
I started my professional career in journalism, in regional news. For all sorts of reasons, it was an unbelievably brilliant training ground for me and the career in communications I’d eventually move into. To be honest, I’d never really heard of PR back then, and it was the approaches I’d get from some pretty amateurish operators that got me intrigued. So I suppose I should thank those people for being crap. They’re the ones who led me to investigating a path and a life in PR and communications.
My first job was in regional news in North Yorkshire and reporting on meetings at Wetherby Town Council. From there, I moved into my first PR role in London at Freud Communications, publicising the launch of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for ITV. It was an agency that attracted celebrity names and big brands. It took me to working on swanky events in Monaco, TV previews in the South China Seas and awkwardly asking A-listers to pause for interviews and photos on red carpets when doing media management at film premieres. There’s a fair few stories from that time that are probably best not published here (…but open to be bought over a cold beer).
My wife’s from the North East, so I moved to Newcastle and I went from that frankly crazy job to then doing the PR for motor dealers and carpet outlets. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Within a few years, I’d co-founded my first agency, Quay2 Media, with a wonderful colleague called Antonia Brindle. We did some great stuff together for almost nine years.
That came to a bit of a natural end, and I then went solo for a short while before the opportunity to reconnect with an old colleague from Freud cropped up. He’d asked me to head up his plans to open a northern arm of London-based W Communications. Almost 15 years after leaving the London life, I was back in that world again. Less celebs, but some wonderful brands. It was great to be able to make Unilever brands and big high street names more accessible to a lot of young, aspiring PR and communications professionals. While covid effectively put paid to W North, I remain enormously proud of the talent that’s now out there in the region doing amazing things at other agencies and in other comms roles, so many of whom had their first taste of agency life at W North.
Having been made redundant during the pandemic, it was enormously humbling to be approached by Mediaworks to help establish their PR division and also look at evolving the way they approached link-building activity for their SEO clients. Digital PR is only becoming more and more important in that world, and I enjoyed an unbelievably educational time there. That place has some of the sharpest young minds I know.
I suppose it’s fair to say there was an itch I needed to finish off scratching when I left Mediaworks in March to set up on my own again.
“I enjoy listening to people. I’m a big believer in listening hard to the quietest in the room because they usually have the most to say.”
Tell me about your agency. What do you attribute to your success?
It’s very new, so I don’t think there’s too much to say just yet. I’ve some clear plans on what a hybrid PR / Digital PR model - one that also considers quality communication practices - needs to look like. Digital PR focuses on what traditional PR practitioners might consider a ‘media relations’ approach in order to secure valuable backlinks for SEO purposes. That’s just one part of the PR person’s toolkit though, and the better operators are considering brand impact and reputation as well as SEO link value in the work they do.
While that remains the plan, there were a lot of enquiries I didn’t anticipate from other agencies once I’d announced my recent departure, keen for me to help them with consultancy, support on campaigns and training, and workshopping ideas and tactics. If that’s the market demand, I’m happy to pursue that and the new agency will launch when the time is right. Watch this space…
What do you love most about what you do every day?
Well no two days are the sa…. Sorry, that’s a load of bollocks, isn’t it? Name me one job where you do the same thing every day? Nobody does.
I enjoy listening to people. I’m a big believer in listening hard to the quietest in the room because they usually have the most to say. The problem is that loud speakers and dominant personalities become the go-to. Also ‘content’ forces us to become good broadcasters and not very good listeners. If you’re not listening to what your audience wants or needs, you may as well talk to the wall. Nobody’s listening.
It saddens me a bit that when having conversations with people about how I can help them, they tell me they’re not used to someone willing to just listen first.
“I need little messages around my desk that remind me to stay focused and not dwell. The one that’s lasting well at the moment just says ‘go and make it happen’”
Have you had to make sacrifices in your chosen career, and have they been worth it?
I imagine the question here is about what you’ve lost out on to pursue ‘career’. I don’t believe it has ever, or will be, my priority. There are other things far more important than that. Of course, there have been endless late nights, long weekends of work and other things that temporarily mean family priorities need to go on the back burner.
I simply don’t buy this forced idea that your career is what defines your legacy as an individual. The bosses that mean the most to me, whose opinions count the most, are my two teenage daughters. When the time comes for me to be removed from this earth, then ‘you’ve been a great dad’ becomes far more important than ‘well done on that late night pitch deck.’ Theirs is the view that most matters to me.
What are some of your daily rituals and why are they part of your routine?
I obsess over news. The news agenda, what’s going on in the world of media, who’s reporting, doing and saying what, and what brands and individuals seem to have a good handle on that.
I also look at people who communicate well (and poorly, for that matter). That’s less about having heroes you place on a pedestal, but everyday people. People running businesses, organisations, political parties, charities, sports teams. Any walk of life really, but they understand the value of clear, concise communication to the people that matter to them; their customers, their staff, their team. I think it’s one trait that gets massively underlooked and undervalued when some leaders worry about what’s not working.
It’s an obvious thing for me to say, but the communications profession has long attempted to have itself taken as seriously in the boardroom as the accountants and the lawyers. If more did that, I’m convinced far more CEOs would encounter far fewer issues. When companies have bad profiles because of mistakes they’ve made, it’s so rarely down to bad PR. It’s bad business decisions that then result in negative PR outcomes.
“When the time comes for me to be removed from this earth, then ‘you’ve been a great dad’ becomes far more important than ‘well done on that late night pitch deck.”
What does work/life balance look like for you?
Fluidity. That sounds like a cheat’s way of slacking off. It’s not.
People have lives to lead, they have kids in school plays, they have teeth to take care of, they have dependents who might get ill. How can they be engaged and loyal if they’re denied these opportunities? Of the very few things that positively took place during the pandemic, it was to see that millions of workers could remain productive from wherever they parked themselves. I say this as an enormous advocate of being together as much as possible - I enjoy it way more than being alone, but it doesn’t destroy businesses if your team can’t always be together.
This comes down to trust and respect. If a business leader does not trust their teams to be working, even when they can't be ‘seen’, then my presumption is that they’re yet to have won the respect of that team.
How do you stay focused and productive in a world of distractions?
If you find an answer to that, then please let me know! I’ve learned to stop procrastinating. I need little messages around my desk that remind me to stay focused and not dwell. The one that’s lasting well at the moment just says ‘go and make it happen’. That tends to jolt me from a TikTok rabbit hole if I threaten to go down it. Playlists or news channels help (Radio or TV) and there’s usually one or the other playing on the second screen.
“If a business leader does not trust their teams to be working, even when they can’t be ‘seen’, then my presumption is that they’re yet to have won the respect of that team.”
If you had the power to change the world, what would you change?
Christ, that’s a big question.
I really struggle to get my head around how a first-world nation like the UK has such a vast number of the population reliant on food banks. They were accessed three million times last year. That blows my mind on how even well respected jobs in the NHS or teaching aren’t enough for a family to just get by.
I remember my mum taking me to her office cleaning job some evenings. I doubt even the pride she had for her family would have stopped her having to access such a facility if they were so readily available back then. My children will tell you any sense of privilege or spoiled behaviour from them, or anyone - especially political figures who pride themselves on opening more in their regions - tends to make my blood boil the most.
Connect on social Christian Cerisola