Running social for a US PR agency, remotely, from Cardiff

McKell Media is a boutique PR agency based in the United States, founded by Justine McKell. A publicist with over twenty-five years in the industry, who gets her clients onto podcasts, into press and in front of network television.

Justine’s job is making other people visible. She’s good at it. Her clients land the interviews, the features and the bookings that build a public profile. But like most people who do this for a living, she’d never turned the camera on herself.

On the surface, a PR agency doesn’t look like it needs help being seen.

But there’s a difference between knowing how visibility works and having the time to produce it. McKell Media’s own social presence didn’t reflect the quality of work the agency was doing for clients. The material was there: results, relationships, a founder with a point of view on an industry most people don’t understand. None of it was on the feed. And the website, the first thing a prospective client checks, didn’t match the calibre of what the agency actually delivered.

She was building everyone’s profile except her own.

A PR agency’s social media is a portfolio. Every prospective client looks at it and asks: if they can’t do this for themselves, how will they do it for me? That question was going unanswered.

To grow, McKell Media didn’t need a new service. It needed to look as credible online as it already was in the room.

We built the system so the agency could be its own best case study.

The insight was simple: McKell Media’s proof was sitting in its inbox.

Every placement, every podcast booking, every client who went from unknown to on-air was a story the agency wasn’t telling. PR agencies are terrible at doing their own PR, because the work is always for someone else. The content didn’t need to be invented. It needed to be noticed, structured and put in front of the people who hire publicists.

“Justine knows exactly how to make someone look credible. She does it for clients every week. What she didn’t have was a system for doing it for herself, consistently, while running an agency. That’s not a skills gap. It’s a capacity gap.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital

“The best advert for a PR agency is proof it can do for itself what it charges clients for. Everything else is a brochure.”

The second insight was about positioning. McKell Media is boutique and premium. It doesn’t compete on volume, it competes on access and judgement. So the content couldn’t look like a generic agency account posting tips. It had to look like a founder with twenty-five years of opinions, results and a specific way of working. Premium positioning: weighted towards authority and perception, with activation kept deliberate and rare.

The third was about distance. Justine is in the United States. Proteus is in Cardiff. The model had to work without anyone in the same room, which meant scripts, shot lists and briefs tight enough that Justine could film herself and the content would still land.