Will Ockenden is the co-owner of Prohibition PR, an award-winning Leeds-based PR and social media agency he runs alongside founder Chris Norton.
Last year, Prohibition was voted into the Worldcom Public Relations Group, a global partnership of independently owned PR agencies spanning around 110 offices in 45 countries.
Here, Will shares a slightly different week in agency life, swapping the Leeds office for Worldcom’s recent AGM in Paris as Prohibition continues to build new partnerships across Europe and the US.
Monday
In early to our office in central Leeds, phone off, head down – clearing the decks on client work and briefing the team on what needs to keep moving while I’m away. That briefing takes less time than it should and somehow I’m able to leave early: we’ve got a genuinely fantastic team who work with real autonomy. Then passports, flights, and sorting out the nightmare of school pickup. Less glamorous than Paris, but just as essential.
Tuesday
Chris, my business partner, and I drive up to Newcastle to fly out – as great as it is, Leeds Bradford still won’t get you to Paris without a change until midsummer. We landed at Charles de Gaulle, then endured the trip’s low point: a metro ride across the city that felt as long as the flight. We quickly learned that Worldcom knows how to pick a hotel, and ours was no exception: fifteen minutes from the Eiffel Tower, which softened the blow slightly.
Once checked in, the reconnecting started with a walking tour arranged by our local hosts, Caroline Prince of Yucatan and Cyrille Arcamone of MAARC – the two Paris agencies behind the brilliant itinerary. First Paris lesson quickly learned: check the menu before sitting down near a landmark – eighteen euros for a beer that didn’t reach half a pint.
We then spent the evening with the Northern European crowd – Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands – the group we’d clicked with at our first Worldcom intro event in Stockholm. There’s a genuine bond there and we’re learning to trust each other; we’re already referring client work back and forth with live projects already in place.
Wednesday
The AGM opened with new partner introductions – eleven agencies presenting for the first time (us included) – alongside PR firms from Mexico, Hong Kong, India, Austria and Tennessee. Three to five minutes each: rapid-fire, but a genuinely good way to take the temperature of the whole network in one sitting. During break times, football turns out to be the one universal conversation starter – remarkably, agency owners from Mexico City to Thailand all seemed to have heard of Leeds United.
The afternoon was sales training – a two-hour Sandler workshop called “Qualify Harder to Close Easier,” entirely about pipeline discipline, despite the name. We also presented on B2B podcasting, a real growth area for us, to more interest than I’d expected.
The evening was a rooftop cruise along the Seine, champagne in hand, coinciding with a mini heatwave — the Parisians were out on the riverbanks as we passed. One of those moments mid-week where you actually take stock and think: this is really quite good fun and I should do more of this. I got talking to Magnus Brøyn, founder of Coxit PR in Oslo, who’s also a TV personality back home and apparently gets upgraded on every flight and hotel without fail.
Thursday
Thursday’s sessions were dominated by AI – the conversation has moved on noticeably from a year ago, when most people were still experimenting. American agencies are the ones to watch here and, like Prohibition, are now building bespoke tools rather than using off-the-shelf ones. Chris presented on the platform we’ve built at Prohibition, sparking one of the week’s more useful conversations – plenty of scepticism about AI that’s overhyped purely to sell subscriptions, and not enough honesty about what actually works.
Later came our peer review – Worldcom’s accreditation process, where another member agency assesses yours against your own business plan and targets, and vice versa. We were paired with an agency in Chicago and, while the businesses are thousands of miles apart, the conversations were very familiar: people, structure, growth and all the usual challenges of running an agency.
Dinner was at Madame Brasserie, halfway up the Eiffel Tower – the kind of evening you wish for when you first start out in this industry. Candid conversations with other owners about shared problems: the French worried about the pension deficit, the Germans about a shrinking economy. Somewhere between courses I ended up next to Diego, from an Italian member agency, who’s just bought a summer house in Tunisia and spends six months a year there. I can dream…
My social battery is rapidly draining.
Friday
Friday wrapped with sessions on trust, AI and “war stories” before the closing lunch. One of the last items was Worldcom Junior – a programme sending under-30s from member agencies to a dedicated event, this year in Budapest, run by Andras Nagy of Probako. The young’uns in the Prohibition team were of course thrilled when we arrived home to tell them the good news.
One perk of the AGM landing on a Friday: our other halves flew out to join us for the weekend, stretching the trip into a couple of days of sightseeing and – not that either of us needed it -considerably more wine and outrageously good food.
Flying home tired but fired up – mostly by what’s already moving. We’re working with HBI in Germany to support our client Burgess Pet Care’s European expansion; two US agencies are collaborating with us on AI; and we’re part of a live, pan-European tender discussion for a spirits brand we simply couldn’t have pitched for without this network. That’s the real value of the week.
None of that’s incidental. Growing beyond our domestic market is a deliberate part of our strategy, and Worldcom is the biggest lever we have for it – a UK agency plugged into so many countries can now go after work that was never on the table before. The story that did the rounds in Paris makes the point better than I can: one US member agency pulled together sixteen separate Worldcom partners into a single working team, to win a major tech pitch in Seattle, against the big global networks that would ordinarily have that business sewn up. We’re already seeing that kind of potential open up for us specifically in the US.
Credit to Todd Lynch, Worldcom’s managing director, who chairs the whole thing brilliantly – no small feat with so many attendees. And credit to Chris, too, for pushing us both past the people we already know each time, which is rewarding – even if I’m ready to sit in silence by the end of the week. A year in, though, some of these people aren’t contacts anymore – they’re becoming real friends.
Normal service resumes on Monday: back to Leeds, back to the inbox, back to being just another PR agency having its own version of the same conversation everyone else in Paris was having.
