PR Warrior was established as a blog by veteran public relations strategist and advisor, Trevor Young, in 2007.
Trevor worked with some of Australia’s largest communications firms before founding several agencies himself.
One agency – Spark Communications – was acquired after eight years by Australia’s largest media planning company, Mitchell Communications Group; a second agency (parkyoung) merged with the Australian arm of Edelman, the world’s biggest PR firm. Trevor subsequently took on the role as Director of Strategy & Innovation.
A pioneer of Australia’s social media scene and strong advocate for content-led communications, Trevor today runs ‘recognition and reputation agency’ Digital Citizen, and is a keynote marketing speaker, podcaster and media commentator.
He is also the author of two books Content Marketing for PR, and microDOMINATION; he hosts the show Brand Builders on Ticker TV, and produces Reputation Revolution, a podcast about personal brand influence and impact.
Sydney Morning Herald has named Trevor as one of eight ‘heroes of Australian content marketing’, while Smart Company included Trevor on its list of Top Business Thinkers 2018.
A history of professional innovation …
Trevor’s professional roots are in traditional public relations, but since the mid-1990s, he has continued to push boundaries of what can be achieved within the discipline.
With a background in newspaper journalism, Trevor made the leap to public relations, working with Australia’s biggest independent PR firm at the time (PPR) before moving on to senior consulting roles with some of the country’s largest communications agencies, including Porter Novelli and The Rowland Company.
With a solid consulting track record working with brands such as Apple, Puma and TAG Heuer, along with a firm view on where PR and marketing was heading, Trevor co-founded Spark Communications with a former colleague, helping to build the company into one of the first specialist consumer brand PR agencies in Australia.
In what has been a consistent in Trevor’s professional life, Spark continued to evolve as the landscape changed.
Firstly, it started to dominate the consumer brand landscape, working with companies such as Ford, Foster’s, CUB, ANZ and NAB (at different times), Telstra and Optus (at different times), FlyBuys, Coles, Cadbury, Schweppes and Coca-Cola Amatil (at different times), Hard Yakka, Hugo Boss, Bolle and the Australian Made campaign.
Then it took things up a notch by launching an experiential arm – Ignition Marketing – which pioneered the ‘street marketing’ concept in Australia before moving on to large-scale experiential projects for brands such as Motorola and IKEA.
Spark took its ‘consumer chops’ and moved into different sectors such as social causes, B2B and sport, including F1 Grand Prix, Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, 2007 World Swimming Championships, NRL State of Origin, Victorian Racing Club, Athletics Australia, Hockey Australia, and the AFL Players’ Association (sometimes directly, sometimes via their key sponsor).
But the winds of communication were changing.
Trevor spotted this in the mid-2000s. By 2005, he was on LinkedIn, followed by Twitter two years later, soon after he established the PR Warrior blog.
From there, he has relentlessly forged ahead on a path that combined what we’d now call traditional PR, and seamlessly blended it with social media, influencer relations (expanded from just media relations) and content marketing.
It’s this heady strategic mix of activities within the PR discipline – along with the attitude required to pull it off – that has been Trevor’s focus for the past 12+ years.
Fast forward to today.
Trevor now coaches PR and marketing teams, entrepreneurs and emerging thought leaders, on how they can leverage the power of social media and online publishing platforms to build a brand that’s known, liked, trusted, front of mind with their audience, and talked about positively in the marketplace.