Andrew Bleeker and the trouble with being heard

Andrew Bleeker would rather be behind the camera. He said so while announcing a podcast, which is a slightly inconvenient moment to discover a preference for remaining out of shot. His new series, Actionable Impact, puts the founder of Bully Pulpit International in front of other communications leaders to ask what artificial intelligence is actually changing about their work. The premise is practical. Organizations have people to manage, decisions to make, and reputations to protect while everyone else argues about the future.

There is a familiar pattern here. Bleeker has spent much of his career working where a new communications technology meets an old human problem: persuading someone to do something. In presidential politics, that might mean registering to vote. In a company, it might mean staying in a job, understanding a change in leadership, or believing an explanation when an accusation arrives first.

The channels keep changing. The difficulty of earning a response persists. Bleeker's career follows that difficulty from campaign advertising to corporate affairs, and now across the Atlantic. It also supplies a useful question for an industry that can count almost everything: which of those numbers describes something that mattered?

A campaign with an appointment to keep

Before there was BPI, there was campaign work. Bleeker worked on John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign and graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007. In the general election of 2008, he became director of Internet advertising for Obama for America. His responsibilities included acquiring donors, building lists, registering voters, encouraging early voting, and getting supporters to the polls. Online advertising belonged to the machinery of the election, with jobs beyond making the candidate visible.

The distinction matters because an election supplies an unforgiving deadline. A message can be admired indefinitely; a ballot must arrive on time. A campaign's advertising has to connect the encounter on a screen with a sequence of actions elsewhere. Someone must give, volunteer, register, or vote. The work sits between the invitation and the response, where an appealing idea has to become a manageable next step.

During the 2008 general election, Bleeker took over the online advertising role previously held by Michael Organ. The campaign used demographic and geographic targeting to reach likely supporters. Advertising choices were connected to field priorities in battleground states. The internet was part of a larger operation, alongside people knocking on doors and teams deciding where effort could make a difference.

This is a less cinematic account of digital politics than the usual story about a brilliant gadget changing everything. It involves coordination. An ad can find an audience, but someone still has to decide which audience needs reaching and why. The political judgment precedes the media purchase. The technology makes the choice executable; it does not relieve anyone of making it.

After the election, Bleeker helped build Change.gov and served as new media director for the presidential inaugural committee. He founded Bully Pulpit Interactive in 2009. The campaign experience had become the basis for a business, and the business would carry its lessons into work beyond candidates.

The numbers need a job

In January 2011, Hill & Knowlton appointed Bleeker global digital practice director, reporting to chairman and CEO Jack Martin. The assignment was to bring online and interactive technologies together with traditional public relations. It placed an Obama campaign veteran inside a communications network serving companies across industries. His later work included a leading digital marketing role on Obama's 2012 reelection campaign.

By 2014, Bleeker was openly questioning how campaigns used their increasingly sophisticated tools. They had improved targeting inside particular channels, he argued, while decisions between channels remained much less grounded in data. More information could also delay decisions. A campaign could become so intent on choosing precisely that it chose too late.

“Technology is not enough. The content really still matters.”

Andrew Bleeker, 2014

It is a useful warning from someone whose professional history might otherwise be mistaken for an advertisement for more technology. There is a temptation to treat access to a tool as evidence of competence. Bleeker's criticism puts the burden back on the user. A model needs a purpose. A message needs substance. A decision needs to happen while it can still affect the result.

He also argued, in 2015, for a competitive Democratic presidential primary. His case included the value of experimentation under real election deadlines. Contested races gave teams reasons to try ideas, learn from one another, and arrive at the general election with methods already tested. Comfortable circumstances, in that account, could carry their own cost.

Years later, the same concern appears in his corporate work. In 2023, he pressed the communications industry to connect its measurements to business results. Sales, retention, and reputation were outcomes worth tracking. Engagement alone was insufficient. A crowded dashboard can become a very handsome way of avoiding the difficult question of whether anything changed.

His examples included treating recruitment and retention as efforts to win support, borrowing the campaign habit of speaking to people whose agreement cannot be assumed. Employees have choices, just as voters do. The comparison asks employers to consider what they are offering, how they explain it, and whether the people they hope to keep find the account credible.

Washington acquires a longer itinerary

Bleeker is based in Washington, where he lives with his family. His work has increasingly demanded a wider map. In December 2023, BPI acquired European consultancy BOLDT and changed its name from Bully Pulpit Interactive to Bully Pulpit International. More than 50 European professionals joined the offering, spanning Brussels, Berlin, London, Oslo, and Zürich.

The change in the last word of the name described a change in the business. Issues including privacy, artificial intelligence, antitrust, and the energy transition cross borders. A company can face related questions in several capitals, each with its own politics and people to persuade. A Washington explanation may need considerable work before it makes sense in Brussels.

In April 2026, Bleeker joined Jo-ann Robertson, BPI's president of Europe and Transatlantic growth leader, for a podcast conversation in London about the firm's origins and European ambitions. In May, BPI announced the acquisition of German corporate affairs consultancy 365 Sherpas. Germany had become the firm's third-largest global market.

The 365 Sherpas leadership remained in place, and its senior leaders became BPI shareholders. That detail gives the expansion a human dimension. An acquisition joins people who bring relationships, judgment, and local knowledge, as well as adding a name to an organization chart. For a business built around interpreting audiences, those are consequential assets.

Bleeker's ambition is visible in the geography. He is building an advisory business that can follow a problem across jurisdictions. The campaign mindset travels, but the audience still requires understanding on its own terms. Persuasion has always been particular, even when the organization doing it becomes international.

When the audience has an algorithm

By 2026, Bleeker was also using conversation as a way to examine another shift. Actionable Impact brings executives and communicators into discussions about working with AI. His guests include Semafor co-founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith, McKinsey communications leader Max Gleischman, Walmart chief communications officer Allyson Park, and Cognizant chief communications officer Jeff DeMarrais.

The subjects are specific. With Smith, the discussion considered AI's implications for journalism and the continuing importance of original stories and human relationships. With Gleischman, it covered leaders learning the tools themselves and moving from gathering data to strategic analysis. With Park, it examined AI workflows, communications across a large workforce, and a change of chief executive.

These conversations position Bleeker as a questioner as well as an adviser. They ask how a communications department changes its working habits while continuing to serve an organization. The practical unit is a decision: what to automate, what to test, what to ask a person to judge. That is a more useful scale than predicting the fate of every job before lunch.

In an August 28 special edition, he sat down with BPI executive communications lead Jeff Nussbaum to discuss AI-assisted public commentary. The conversation considered the line between synthesizing information and producing original thought, along with the implications for executive writing. A leader's name still goes above the argument, whatever helped produce the draft.

That month, BPI's Reputation Resilience Index examined more than 18,000 adults across four countries, testing 15 reputational attacks against 170 companies. Its premise was that trust and resilience can differ. Two brands with similar trust levels may fare differently when challenged. The study asks what happens to belief under pressure, rather than treating a favorable opinion as permanently banked.

The connection to Bleeker's earlier career is clear. Campaigns must respond to arguments, opposition, and changing circumstances. Corporate reputations encounter their own tests. His work now extends the interest in measurable responses to a setting where an audience can receive a convincing claim before a company has found the appropriate reply.

A boat somewhere in the background

There is another Bleeker in the interviews, away from the acquisitions and measurement debates. He listens to audiobooks while traveling or walking the dog. He has spoken about his enthusiasm for Jimmy Buffett and for Hubert Joly's The Heart of Business. Asked about an alternative career, he returned to the idea of building electric boats, with hydrofoils holding particular appeal.

The boats remain an expressed interest, rather than another business to put on the timeline. Still, the answer is pleasingly concrete. After so many years working with messages, audiences, and opinions, here is something that would have to move through water. An electric boat offers a rather decisive performance review.

For now, there is a microphone to face. Bleeker's public work has widened from helping a candidate reach voters to helping leaders understand audiences across companies, countries, and technologies. The podcast gives that work a conversational form. His guests bring their experiences; he asks what they are doing with them. Somewhere behind the changing tools sits the old campaign requirement: give the attention a purpose, then see what happens.