MANILA, PHILIPPINES – There’s always a moment of trepidation whenever you’re waiting to meet someone like Emily Poon, President of Ogilvy Public Relations & Influence in Asia. A glance at her resume and accomplishments — punctuated by an impressive 16-year tenure at Ogilvy — can be fairly intimidating. But then she walks into the room and she is the picture of warmth, with a down-to-earth demeanor of someone you’d meet at a local pub.
Or in her case, the wine parties she likes to throw at home.
Emily sat down for a chat with adobo Magazine when she was in town for the first-ever Ogilvy Influencer BizCamp in Manila, a content creator outreach and enrichment program held in partnership with the Creator and Influencer Council of the Philippines (CICP) earlier this July. And, as conversations with a friend might go, this one started with talk of food, drink (she loves a good Rioja these days), and Dr. Seuss.
“I just realized this actually recently; children’s books — the right ones — are a treasure trove. You could learn a lot of good things, even for adults,” Emily shared, before joyfully quoting lines from Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
“It’s so profound, you know? But it’s so simple,” she said. “It goes through the ups and downs of our journey, and then encourages you to go through with it.”
And, incidentally, much of Emily’s own journey and insights on public relations reflects the rhyme:
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
Emily’s own journey started, in her own words, by stumbling into the comms industry. “I was a business graduate. And I went to a PR agency and I interviewed with them. And then I didn’t know what public relations was at the time. I didn’t really know what to expect. And to be brutally honest, I thought, it’s my first job anyway. If I didn’t like it, it’s okay to experiment.”
“And then I started falling in love with it. Because, it’s really about storytelling at its heart, and it gave me such great joy to be able to curate what brands, companies or individuals wanted to say in a way that lines up with the cultural trends and narrative that’s out there.”
After four years of working at her first job, Emily’s path would then take her to Ogilvy, where she would end up spending her entire career to date. She’d steadily rise through the ranks, joining them as an Account Manager in 2008, then eventually earning her current position as President in 2021. When asked how Ogilvy warranted such dedication — it’s getting rarer these days to see 16-year tenures, after all — Emily’s reason was quite simple: “It’s always about the people.”
“We’re not in the business of machinery. We’re not in the business of making a tangible product. We are in the business of ideas and storytelling, and to do that, you can’t do it alone. Ogilvy, to me, has always been a remarkable place of giants. Everyone’s so smart, you know? Everyone has something to give that’s unique. Everyone has something to rub off on you, in a good way,” she explained.
Emily added that the people-centric environment at Ogilvy PR is reflected in the APAC team’s telling leadership composition, wherein 72% of which are women — aligning closely with the industry-wide 75% female workforce — and how 91% of the company’s employees in an APAC-wide survey said they feel they work in an inclusive environment.
So be sure when you step,
Step with care and great tact,
And remember that life’s a great balancing act.
Among the lessons she’s learned during her tenure at Ogilvy is the need to slow down and be kind, regardless of how demanding the job is. She finds that people — especially those who work in fast-paced environments — have a certain sense of impatience, making them quicker to judge others.
“If I reflect back on the greatest leaders I’ve come across, that have left an impact on me, that have also shaped how I operate today, it’s that they’ve always been kind in the face of adversity,” she shared.
“Hopefully, we are living longer than we’re working, so it’s far better to be remembered as a kind human being,” she continued. “At the end of the day, we won’t work forever, but we will be humans our whole life, so be a good one.”
Finding that balance between contributing to business growth and being kind to others has helped Emily develop a more humanistic perspective towards co-workers; rather than viewing the output on a given task, she also tries to see the long-term potential of those working with her. In an industry built on relationships and communication, it’s this skill that’s proven invaluable to her success.
And will you succeed?
Yes, you will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed)
Kid, you’ll move mountains!
Emily’s achievements as the head of Ogilvy PR in Asia are, to say the least, bold new heights for the company. Under her leadership, Ogilvy PR has added key markets in New Zealand, Shanghai, and Pakistan to their footprint in the APAC region. They’ve won numerous awards, most recently the Best Large Agency of the Year at the Global Influencer Marketing Awards and was the Southeast Asia and Australasian PR Agencies of the Year at 2024 Asia-Pacific SABRE Awards. They were also the most awarded agency at this year’s Campaign Asia-Pacific’s PR Awards.
But success is meant to be shared, and one of Emily’s recent thrusts is to share Ogilvy’s expertise with influencers and creators. The aforementioned Influencer BizCamp is one such program aiming to uplift the skills and profiles of online creators, who Emily views as the future of communications.
“It’s really the way in which Gen Z and the population will be increasingly consuming content and engaging with,” she said. “So I think it’s the order of the day. It’s where communication is moving towards.”
“I think increasingly creators will continue to democratize information, drive commerce, and command influence. So we have to be there. And we have to be there in a commercial way. We have to be there to help brands and businesses bridge to creators,” she continued.
“But more importantly, we have to appreciate the creators for how they create, and have an empathy [for] that. And help brands and clients figure out a way to work with them. Because gone are the days where you can give a creator a script and expect them to follow 100%.”
And the key to enabling brands to work with creators, Emily shared, was to help them understand each individual creator and their respective communities better. What makes their content resonate so well with their audiences is their authenticity, and to approach brand talk in a heavy-handed manner makes the content incongruent with what the creator’s community expects.
This is because every community operates with its own set of social contracts. What can or can’t be said, what is or isn’t of value, and what tones can be taken are all determined by oft-unspoken agreements between creators and their audiences. These contracts differ from community to community, necessitating stronger, more meaningful relationships between brands and creators over “one size fits all” messaging.
“We have to understand creators more, get under their skin,” Emily said. “In order to do that, we need to co-create with them. We need to collaborate with them. We need to champion them.”
In being champions for creators, brands will engage with key communities in meaningful ways. This, in turn, creates a win-win situation for each party involved, making Ogilvy PR’s efforts to uplift influencers a way for everyone to succeed.
You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.
Business success, however, isn’t the only way forward in Emily’s eyes. In order for companies to be better agents for tomorrow, they need to aim for progress in DE&I.
“In my perspective, there is a temptation, because we’re all busy, to treat DE&I as a box-ticking exercise,” she opined. “And I think it’s going to be increasingly hard because there is [an] increasing strain on cost, an increasingly divisive environment in many places. That’s why companies will become at risk of deprioritizing some of these activities either due to cost or geopolitical pressures. I believe this is the challenge of the day.”
She noted that Ogilvy PR’s employee survey across APAC shows 82% of employees feel they can show up as their authentic selves, with 92% local leadership supporting “homegrown” talent across offices. “My opinion, and my hope, is that we treat DE&I as a business imperative. Because anything that is a business driver will not be neglected,” she added.
“The aim is progress, not perfection. If we aim for perfection, we’ll never get there. But if we aim for progression, we’ll get there someday.”
“I do hope that we will move away from the check-the-box exercises, to systemic issues. I think it’s far better to have even minor progress on these fronts than tick-the-checkbox events, tick-the-checkbox posts,” Emily continued. She went on to highlight how gender inequality at senior leadership levels, pay inequality, and equitable access for disadvantaged groups are all crucial points to address.
It is far more valuable to create impact that raises the floor for the communities brands serve. If more brands focus on lifting everyone up, true, holistic growth can be achieved.
“Even if we move the needle for one person, it would be progress,” she said. “Real progress. Real change.”
This humanistic view is also present in how Emily views what is constantly positioned as the next step forward for advertising and communications: generative AI. While WPP and Ogilvy continue to innovate with and integrate AI into their systems through WPP Open, she acknowledges that it’s no replacement for the human touch.
“There is no substitution for Relations in Public Relations and critical thinking, and original creativity will be more important differentiators than ever,” she asserted. “The truth is that we aren’t competing with AI; we’re competing with marketers and communicators who can use it best in the long run.”
“The question then becomes ‘How do we continue to be transparent with the audiences we’re communicating to?’ That’s why Ogilvy globally launched an AI Accountability Act,” Emily continued. “In a nutshell, regulation is still evolving in this nascent area, so we’re taking the ownership and onus on ourselves to say that whatever we do for and with our clients with AI, we will openly declare [it].”
This sense of cooperative transparency between Ogilvy PR and the brands they work with will, in turn, allow both parties to build trust with their audiences, effectively working within the boundaries of any new social contracts communities develop as AI evolves.
Again, it’s all about co-creation, collaboration, and championing between agencies, brands, creators, and communities. Working together in an empathetic way will, indeed, lift everyone up.
Oh! The places you’ll go!
As our conversation came to a close, it became clear why Emily was selected to serve as the President of Ogilvy Public Relations & Influence in Asia: her people-first nature, coupled with a mind she keeps constantly open to every shift and turn our ever-changing world takes, make her an excellent communicator. What makes her so exceptional, however, is that she’s an even better listener — half the time, our interview involved her asking this writer questions of her own.
With her at the helm, there’s little doubt that Ogilvy PR in Asia is at a great position to take their clients exactly where they need to be — in the hearts and minds of the communities they serve.
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