ABOUT
Jackdaw was founded by three comms and marketing professionals who have been friends and colleagues for twenty years, through separate careers in B2B PR, marketing, communications and journalism. We each bring different skill-sets to Jackdaw, but with the same aim in mind – to help our clients gain the right kind of exposure and express their stories authentically.
Our two decades of experience led us to want to create something different than the traditional bolt-on PR agency. We’d all seen agency relationships founder after the six-month honeymoon period when the client stopped prioritising getting information to the agency and the agency felt disconnected from the client. We realised that the key was to integrate an agency into the client directly and act as an embedded marketing department.
In these straitened times, where companies are time-poor and story-rich but without the means of getting the information out there, no-one needs another layer of admin. Inserting our streamlined process into the client directly means the content can be generated without adding to anyone else’s over-long ‘to do’ list.
WHAT WE'RE NOT...
An agency that is going to parcel up traditional PR methods in buzzwords and sell them back to you at twice the price
An agency that is going to work with you if we don’t believe in your product
An agency that is going to farm your work out to someone less skilled. If you use Jackdaw, you get the three of us.
An agency that is going to shy away from asking you the awkward questions that may be stopping you reaching your goals.
MEET THE TEAM
Phil Dwyer
Phil has over 25 years’ experience in B2B communications. He has worked with and advised
many high-profile companies in the networking, security and enterprise software sectors
such as BT, Cloudflare, Red Hat and Mozilla, in addition to working directly with VCs and PE
investors in the tech and industrial space, particularly those focused on climate solutions.
His expertise spans both pan-European and UK-specific roles, and he has held multiple
senior positions, both on the client-side, and in-agency, most recently as UK Managing
Director for Pan-European PR consultancy, Ballou.
Phil also previously co-founded Brand X PR, a specialist B2B PR agency, which worked with some of the world's biggest tech and telco brands.
Chris Holder
Chris has more than 20 years of experience in developing and delivering communications programmes for clients from start-ups through to international blue-chip companies, including CA, Hitachi, Orange, and Xerox. In addition, he has written for a range of trade titles.
Chris is also highly experienced in-house, having headed up PR for BT's Business & Public Sector division in the UK, as well as leading global PR for Colt Technology Services and EMEA PR for Western Digital and a major US telco.
He previously co-founded Brand X PR, alongside Phil, which worked with some of the world's biggest tech and telco brands for more than a decade.
​
Outside of the office, Chris is an ambassador for Butterwick Hospice Care.
Lucy Freeman
Lucy has been a freelance writer for over twenty years. Specialising in translating specialist subject matter for a lay audience and spotting the human interest angle within tech complexity, her clients have included Shell, Network Rail, Cable & Wireless, Just Eat Takeaway, PetPlan, Mars, BT and Waterstones.
​
Lucy is also a journalist and has written for The Times, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4 and
the World Service, and has appeared on various TV news and radio shows. She is the
presenter and producer of a popular podcast on The Archers, ‘Ambridge on the Couch’,
and a presentation trainer.
She numbers former Prime Minister Gordon Brown amongst her clients, along with the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and a wide range of agencies across EMEA.
WHY JACKDAW?
One of our founders lives next to Europe’s biggest jackdaw colony so has plenty of opportunity to observe them - they work as a collective, they’re brilliantly resourceful, inquisitive, hardworking and clever. Like us!