When Caragh Cook quit PR agency Rogers & Cown in 2011 to take a senior role at the newly beefed-up PR division of Organic Marketing, she never expect
When Caragh Cook quit PR agency Rogers & Cown in 2011 to take a senior role at the newly beefed-up PR division of Organic Marketing, she never expected to witness the evolutionary path the company has subsequently taken.
What she joined was a compact marketing company founded in 2006 by Nick Leese, and part of Target Media and Communications Group (TMCG) owned by Rob Wilkerson. Cook now serves as the managing director of Organic, the Havas-owned global communications agency for entertainment, with more than 90 staff, and offices in London, Los Angeles and Sydney. The London team is 80 with a further nine in long-term freelance roles.
And growth is only part of the story. The past 20 years have also seen seismic shifts in film promotion, as barriers have eroded between publicity and marketing functions and between online and offline, and teams have fused to create signature events and sticky viral moments to drive consumer engagement. Work for streamers – which expanded significantly in the pandemic era – has naturally led to teams working across both films and series.
In the early days of Organic, film publicity was dominated in the UK by agencies such as Premier PR (which had absorbed McDonald & Rutter in 2006), DDA and Freud Communications. Premier’s Becky Palmer and DDA’s Kirsty Langsdale quickly joined the Organic team, alongside Cook and her fellow Rogers & Cowan colleague Emma McCorkell, who was named managing director in 2013 and left in 2015.
“We’d all come from very established agencies or in-house,” says Cook of the early team. “And we all loved this vibe at Organic that was just scrappy and underdogs, and we were all really hungry.”
Organic in its infancy won PR team of the year at the Screen Awards in 2012. “I think everyone else was a bit taken by surprise because we had definitely been underestimated,” reflects Cook. “It was an incredible vote of confidence.” (Organic went on to win the same category at the Screen Awards in 2015, 2017 and 2018.)
Tristan Woods-Scawen, with a marketing background, joined Organic in 2014, and now serves as general manager. The four-person executive leadership team comprises Cook, Woods-Scawen, managing partner Palmer and LA-based executive vice president Langsdale (all pictured in the main image above).
Woods-Scawen cites Organic’s growth in the fields of influence, events, production (with the recruitment of ITV Studios’ Nick Rylance in 2023), scripted and unscripted television, and its recent awards division as examples of the company staying true to its original ethos. “It’s listening to clients. It’s being disruptive, and keeping that underdog startup mentality. Of course, it’s hard when you are a legacy PR business, and you’re part of a global media network – trying to stick it to the man is not easy.”
This comment from Woods-Scawen is underscored by the fact he and Cook are speaking to Screen in a meeting room at Havas’s stylish HQ in King’s Cross Central – rubbing shoulders with the Google campus, and emanating a different vibe from the company’s Soho origins. And Organic was able to celebrate its 20th year with a buzzy party last week at Kettner’s in Soho, attended by clients, alumni and staff, including the LA team who had flown in.
For Cook, the acquisition of TMCG (and by extension Organic) by Havas in 2016 “brought so many brilliant things, like having an amazing office, being able to have great benefits for our team. It was quite limited what we could offer before. Now the team get fantastic parental leave, and a huge amount of support coming back.”
In expanding to a head count approaching 100 worldwide, Organic has followed an necessary “recruitment tick list”, explains Woods-Scawen. “You’ve got to be expert, creative and nice. It’s very simple. If you hire someone that has those three things, you rarely go wrong. And the ‘nice’ thing is probably the most important of the three. It seems like such a soft word, but it makes such a difference.”
Adds Cook: “It’s why we have such longstanding relationships with our clients. Some of them are very long, and a lot of our former colleagues from Organic are now our clients. They get us.”
Organic Origins
Many of Organic’s illustrious alumni return each year to teach on Organic’s Origins programme – an annual paid six-month internship scheme that particularly welcomes under-represented minorities in the industry.
“We’re not anti-nepotism,” begins Cook. “It’s fine to have people who have maybe come through connections – if they work challenging and they show that they’ve got talent and passion.
“But more doors need to be opened to more people. We had a few moments where we’d go to meetings, and just look around the table and think, ‘How are we talking about this film by this filmmaker?’ and it’s this homogenous group of people making decisions. It just doesn’t feel right.”
The programme for five recruits each year combines practical experience (“giving as much exposure to red carpets and junkets and stuff like that”) with classroom sessions led by Organic team members and industry colleagues.
“A lot of the people who started their careers during Covid missed huge chunks as to why they were doing what they were doing,” adds Cook. “They didn’t have their teams around them, so it’s difficult to learn. The classroom sessions are about giving context to why they’re doing this.”
Eight current staffers went through the Origins programme, which launches its fourth season in January. Three more were identified through the Origins application process, but considered too experienced for the scheme and later recruited.
Awards division
Campaigning for film awards has become an increasingly critical function for film publicity companies, but Organic has been out of the game since the departure of team member Bethan Dixon in 2014.
“When Bethan left, we kind of left awards alone,” explains Cook. “I think we felt you need somebody to be that figurehead. If we’re going to compete with the Premier or DDA awards teams now, we have to have somebody who knows their stuff, or certainly that can learn it very quickly. And we had other things to focus on.”
Organic’s recent awards division is headed up by cinephile existing team member Will Taylor, with support from Anika Greblo, who joins from Premier. The team is working on titles for streamers, indie distributors and one studio.
“It’s been something we’ve been talking about since 2020,” explains Cook. “But then Covid happened, and we were like, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right time to launch an awards division. And do we really want to bring a whole other reason for people to have to work behind schedule?’ Our team works so incredibly challenging during London Film Festival and this whole period from Venice through to Christmas and beyond.
“Will has been close to awards campaigning in his work with a particular client, so he knows what a good campaign looks like. We got the go-ahead [from Havas] to invest. They’ve got trust in us, and I think we’ve proved that we’ve made things work and paid off. Part of the reason people stick around so long at Organic is there are opportunities for them to evolve and grow.”
For contractual reasons, Organic does not talk about individual clients but Cook confirms that “we work with pretty much every studio, every distributor, whether it’s PR or events”.
Adds Woods-Scawen, “Since we’ve launched the productions team, companies we haven’t traditionally worked with from a PR point of view have knocked on our door, going, ‘We’d like to use your junket production.’”
Growing pains
With growth comes challenge. “We never set out to grow to the scale we are now,” explains Cook. “In fact, someone said to us a few years ago, ‘You’re going to have 80 people in a few years if you keep going the way you are’, and we were like, ‘No way, we don’t want to be that big.’”
But the growth has brought fresh opportunity. “It’s been exciting for us to see a client say, ‘Okay, we’ll put you on everything’” – meaning every aspect of a film campaign, from social to customary media, talent handling, premiere and junket build.
Cook and Woods-Scawen remain mindful of not losing the ethos that drove the early success.
“It’s rolling sleeves up and getting involved and making sure that everyone knows that if there’s a mail drop to be done, I might be stuffing envelopes,” says Woods-Scawen.
“We’ve all come from doing the work,” adds Cook. “We’ve not parachuted into this role as a senior person. We’ve done the work, we’ve done the jobs, and we love it.”
