Michela Ratti has built products, built brands, and rebuilt reputations — as an engineer turned communicator across P&G, eBay, Swarovski, and Ferragamo (and including a stint on the advisory side).

In this episode, she joins Javier Boix to unpack what actually changes, and what stays the same, when you move a career between detergent plants, luxury fashion houses, and hypergrowth tech.

Michela is half Italian, half Welsh, and speaks four languages. She trained as an engineer, graduated with honors, and spent years in R&D before crossing into communications — a path she says gave her a lasting instinct for cause and effect, systems thinking, and the gap between what a company says and what people actually experience.

That gap, she argues, is the real definition of reputation, in any industry. Whether the product is a diaper, a piece of jewelry, or a handbag, the business is the same: building trust at scale.

What differs is visibility and stakes — in luxury, she explains, reputation is turned up louder, because people aren't just buying a product, they're buying status, self-worth, and a piece of a dream. When that dream doesn't hold up, the fallout moves faster and hits harder.

Javier and Michela trace how the job itself has changed since she started at Procter & Gamble in the early 2000s. Back then, communications was largely about controlling a narrative through a small number of press gatekeepers. Today, she says, it's about shaping a conversation that's already happening across dozens of channels you don't own, faster than any single company can fully control. That shift, she argues, is why understanding systems — how information moves, who trusts whom, and why — matters more than ever.

The conversation moves through some of the biggest transformations of her career: relaunching Procter & Gamble into prestige beauty against decades-old luxury incumbents, merging three separate businesses into one at Swarovski while repositioning its price point five times higher, and returning to Ferragamo for a second stint to lead a brand turnaround.

Across all three, she says, the discipline was the same — build trust with your own team first, be explicit about what communications can and cannot do, and give people a clear, honest timeline instead of promising overnight change.

They also get hands-on about AI: how agentic tools are leveling the playing field for challenger brands, how propensity modeling and omni-channel data are reshaping audience targeting, and why visibility inside AI-powered search is becoming as important as traditional media coverage.

Michela is candid about the limits too — the lag between what AI models surface and what's actually happening in the market, and the very real concerns around bias and trust that make some leaders cautious to fully embrace it.

Underneath the career story is a broader argument about the profession itself. Michela pushes back on the idea that communications is the "firefighter function," brought in only after something has gone wrong. The real value, she says, comes from having a seat at the table before the mess happens — helping define what a company is trying to achieve and why, not just cleaning up when it doesn't land.

She also reflects candidly on a hard-earned lesson: that great work doesn't speak for itself, and that being an advocate for your own impact is not the same as playing politics.

It's a conversation about translation — of complex ideas into stories people embrace, of engineering logic into human trust, of a life lived across cultures and industries into a single, consistent instinct for what makes people believe. As Michela puts it, communicators are ultimately in "the science of being believed."

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https://thereputationroom.com

Reputation Intelligence at Machine Scale: David Benigson on Signal AI, LLMs, and the New Rules of Corporate Reputation

What happens when the tools built to measure reputation start feeding the large language models that increasingly define it?

In this episode of The Reputation Room, Javier Boix sits down with David Benigson, founder and CEO of Signal AI — the company he started in 2013 in his parents' garage in North London, built out of a simple, unglamorous problem: hand-curating email newsletters was slow, repetitive, and ripe for automation.

More than a decade later, Signal AI serves over 650 enterprises and sits at the center of how many of the world's largest organizations read risk and reputation in real time.

David isn't an engineer. He's a law graduate who built Signal alongside co-founder Dr. Miguel Martinez, an academic with deep roots in natural language processing. That pairing — a founder obsessed with the customer problem, and a scientist obsessed with the technology — is the throughline of this conversation.

Inside the episode, David and Javier get into:

• How the AI underneath Signal has evolved from early classification models that detected risk events and narrative clusters, to today's generative layer that synthesizes and interprets that data conversationally — and why David sees it as an "and," not an "or"
• What it means that Signal is now directly integrated into Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude via MCP — and why David argues this expands rather than cannibalizes his market by putting reputation intelligence in front of hundreds of users inside an organization, not just a handful of power users
• How the conversation with clients has shifted from "help me see what's being said about us" five years ago to "help me decide" today — and what that shift says about who now owns reputation risk inside the C-suite
• David's pointed response to a previous guest's advice that companies should build their own proprietary intelligence engines rather than rely on external providers — and where he thinks that advice gets the value chain backwards
• The renaissance of earned media and why LLMs are trained overwhelmingly on independent, third-party content rather than anything a marketing budget can buy — meaning what journalists, analysts, and the open web say about you now matters more than ever
• Javier's provocative thesis that reputation will soon depend entirely on what LLMs say about a company, and David's more nuanced pushback: LLMs are downstream, not upstream, of reputation — they compress and summarize perception, they don't originate it
• Why organizational silos, not technology, are now the bigger constraint on companies acting on reputation intelligence — and how risk and comms functions that barely spoke a decade ago are becoming close collaborators, co-owning parts of the enterprise risk register
• The distinction between showing executives only "trusted source" content versus surfacing low-quality, high-virality content that can blindside a company from an account with no track record and no followers

David also shares who he'd like to see next in The Reputation Room: tune in to find out!

This is a conversation about where reputation measurement is headed — and why the practitioners who win won't be the ones who avoid the machines, but the ones who build unique judgment and IP on top of them.

Find David Benigson on LinkedIn and on X/Twitter (@DavidSignalAI).

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and share it with your network.

For all episodes and more info on the project, please visit https://thereputationroom.com.

Joanna Price grew up on a farm in Australia and now runs one of the broadest corporate affairs mandates in global business.

As Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Heineken, she oversees government affairs, public policy, sustainable development and global communications under one roof, a structure she insisted on before she'd even accept the job.

Before Heineken, she spent twenty years at Coca-Cola, where a stint in strategy and research turned into a corporate affairs career.

In this conversation, Joanna traces the arc from Kellogg to Coca-Cola to Heineken, and from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Atlanta to Amsterdam, and explains why she never went back to a pure strategy role once she saw how much closer to the business corporate affairs actually sits.

We talk about the paper she wrote over a Christmas break, titled simply "Plastic is the Next Sugar," which became the seed of Coca-Cola's World Without Waste commitment, the industry's first public pledge to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one sold by 2030.

She walks through why she was willing to make that commitment public despite the risk of being held to it, and what it taught her about mobilizing an entire industry rather than trying to solve a systemic problem alone.

For Joanna, having government affairs, sustainability and communications together isn't an org chart preference, it's what allows a company to connect narrative, policy and action into something coherent, rather than a set of disconnected functions saying different things to different audiences.

That coherence, she argues, is what actually builds credibility, inside the boardroom and outside it.

Joanna is candid about parts of the job that rarely get discussed: what it costs to walk into a new company without the network you spent twenty years building, and how she rebuilt credibility from zero within months of joining Heineken. She talks about leading through what she calls "the grey," the fact that corporate affairs rarely gets the clean feedback loops that sales or marketing get, and why she believes the function's real job is not just making problems disappear but shaping a company's direction before problems arise. Her phrase for it: building the fire department before the fire.

We also spend time on Heineken's approach to responsible drinking and the deliberate normalization of zero-alcohol beer, and on why a strategy that works in one country can collapse the moment you try to copy and paste it into another.

Joanna is direct about the tension of representing an alcohol company: rather than avoiding the conversation, she argues the job is to be part of it, transparently, and to earn the right to operate in every community Heineken serves.

On artificial intelligence, Joanna gives a refreshingly specific answer: her function's actual AI capability sits around a three out of ten, but curiosity and experimentation are closer to a nine.

Toward the end, we talk about board service, mentorship, why she considers curiosity a discipline rather than a personality trait, and a leadership lesson she took from watching a manager rewrite her work line by line rather than teach her to improve it herself. Her advice for people earlier in their careers: stretch yourself toward whatever scares you, because that is where the growth happens.

This episode moves from an Australian farm to global boardrooms, from a memo written over a holiday break to an industry-wide sustainability pledge, and from questions of judgment and grey zones to the concrete choices behind how a global brand talks about alcohol, moderation and trust.

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow https://thereputationroom.com/ on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and share it with your network. If you have feedback, we would love to hear it.

What separates a company that's respected from one that still matters? For Gary Grates, it comes down to a single distinction that has defined his career: relevance is the new reputation.

In this episode of The Reputation Room, Javier Boix sits down with Gary Grates — one of the most recognizable voices in corporate communications, an adjunct professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, and a former senior communications leader at General Motors and Edelman. Gary has spent decades inside the rooms where reputation is won and lost, and he brings a provocative, business-first perspective to the conversation.

Reputation, he argues, is about what an organization has been. Relevance is about what it is now — and what it intends to become. In a world moving faster than most institutions can adapt, that distinction is no longer academic. As Gary puts it, if you're not relevant, you don't exist.

Across the conversation, Javier and Gary explore:

• Why "relevance is the new reputation," and what it means for how companies and communicators operate
• The difference between being a communicator who does communications and a business leader whose most important tool is communications
• Why CEOs tend to think about reputation only when a crisis hits — and how to change that
• A story from General Motors about a "resource problem" that turned out to be a priority problem
• How brands get caught up in societal and political moments, and why being in the right conversation matters more than being in every conversation
• What AI is doing to the communications function, and Gary's warning that our writing, thinking and strategic "muscles" risk atrophying if we simply keep prompting
• Why he tells his students to let AI complement how they think, never replace it
• The mindset shift that keeps practitioners in the room: you're there because of how you think

Whether you work in corporate affairs, communications, or simply care about why some organizations stay essential while others fade, this is a conversation about staying relevant in an era that rewards it above almost everything else.

Listen and follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. If this episode resonated, share it with your network.

Some people build expertise by going deep in a single industry for thirty years. Jennifer George built hers by refusing to stand still.

In this episode of The Reputation Room, I sit down with Jennifer George — until recently Senior Vice President of Communications at the Aspen Group, and the author of the CCO Dispatch, a daily newsletter now read by more than 8,000 senior communications leaders around the world.

Jennifer's career has run across agency and in-house, through agriculture and water rights, beauty at Unilever, technology, wellness at Headspace, Shutterfly, and healthcare. That constant movement, she argues, is the source of her edge: a kind of pattern recognition you can't develop staying in one place.

Walk into enough rooms you've never been in before and you learn to read them fast — who the real stakeholders are, where the reputation risk actually lives, and what a leadership team is afraid of but won't say out loud. The industries change. The gap between what an organization says it is and what it actually does is everywhere.

We talk about how the CCO Dispatch began — in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi, two weeks into a move, with her family displaced and the news getting worse by the hour. If you advise leadership, you can't wait a week to know what you think. You have to be ready for the meeting today.

From there, the conversation gets into the substance of the job as it stands in 2026:

— Why communications is so often asked to manufacture credibility an organization hasn't earned — and why you can't write your way out of a values gap.

— Why reputation is a lagging indicator of operational decisions made six to twenty-four months earlier, which means by the time it's a crisis, the real decision already happened upstream.

— The tension between control and credibility: why earned media is suddenly having a moment as leaders realize that what an AI says about them is built on what credible third parties have written, not on what they can buy — and why the organizations that deprioritized earned media for a decade are discovering they've been building on sand.

— The two things Jennifer won't compromise on when she takes a role: genuine access to the CEO, and resources that match the ambition of the business.

— Where she sees the profession heading — a moment when the cost of inauthenticity has never been higher, and the reward for genuine trust has never been greater, because reputation and trust now make up the majority of enterprise value.

Along the way: business archaeology, an eleven-year-old selling spark plugs to bikers, and the line that became my headline for the episode — "curiosity is a professional discipline, not just a personality trait."

This is a conversation with one of the sharpest voices writing about reputation today.

Follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and subscribe to Jennifer's CCO Dispatch on LinkedIn.

Carlota Gomez has always had the heart of an activist. An activist now leading corporate affairs for HIPRA, a Spanish biotechnology company.

After a long tenure at Bayer — where she was part of the communications work around one of the most scrutinised acquisitions in recent corporate history, Bayer's takeover of Monsanto — she went back home. Back to Spain, to build and lead the corporate affairs function for a family-owned company that had decided it could no longer operate without one.

For Carlota, reputation is simple in definition and hard in practice: it is the coherence between what a company says and how it is perceived. Closing that gap is her everyday mandate — and she pursues it by bringing the political, societal and employee dimension into decision-making as early as possible, not as an afterthought.

The transition from the complexity of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a smaller, founder-led company with equally large ambitions has only sharpened her instincts.

This is a conversation about intangible assets, activist leadership, and what it really means to read the room — in a world that is anything but consistent.

What does success look like for a Chief Corporate Affairs Officer? According to Dennis Larsen, it's when reputation stops being owned by one function — and becomes a shared accountability across the entire company.

In this episode, Javier Boix sits down with Dennis Larsen, Managing Director at Linq Advisors and board member of the European Association of Communication Directors, for a conversation that is as structured as it is candid.

Dennis brings a distinctly governance-driven perspective to reputation: the argument that cultural change alone isn't enough. Real shared accountability requires architecture — reputation committees, regular exec agenda visibility, board-level oversight. The kind of structure that ensures reputation isn't just discussed in a crisis, but woven into the fabric of how a company operates day to day.

The conversation also tackles the question that rarely gets asked openly in the boardroom: to what extent is a company willing to accept reputational cost for a business benefit? Sometimes the answer is yes — but only when everyone understands the trade-off before the decision is made, not after.

They also explore how AI and data intelligence are reshaping the corporate affairs function, and why the leaders who thrive will be those who own their own technology rather than depend on it.

A conversation about what it really takes to make reputation everyone's business.

In this first episode of this newly created podcast, I sit down with Joao Belo, Chief Communications Officer at Danaher Corporation, for a candid conversation at the intersection of corporate affairs, business and leadership. During the conversation we touch upon multiple topics. How did he get where he is (spoiler: nothing was planned!), what a CEO or a board responds well to when it comes to reputation management, what does the title not capture about the work we do, how transparency is non-negotiable in a crisis (with caveats!), the shift in corporate affairs from art to science, AI changing everything (obvious, I know!), and how you develop the most important intangible in our profession (judgment), among many other things. About The Reputation Room The Reputation Room podcast convenes senior corporate affairs leaders for candid, peer level conversations at the intersection of corporate affairs, business and leadership. Each episode goes beyond surface to explore judgment calls, trade offs, and leadership moments that rarely make it into public forums. The aim is to create a lasting body of insight that strengthens the credibility, influence, and strategic impact of the corporate affairs profession.