Why George Coleman keeps changing the script

George Coleman has a useful answer to the problem of explaining public relations: try a film. He once used the climactic rap battle in 8 Mile to pitch a reputation strategy to the international president of a major company. Corporate counsel, delivered by way of Eminem. A boardroom can accommodate rather more imagination than its furniture suggests.

The anecdote suits a former electronics engineer who collects cinema posters and helped create a global communications agency. Coleman has spent his career moving between technical problems, creative ideas and the business of persuading people to act. The job titles have changed. His interest in finding a story people will pay attention to has endured.

Now CEO of The PHA Group, he is applying that interest to another agency's next chapter. His earlier business, Current Global, brought together two founders on opposite sides of the Atlantic. His latest move returns him to an independent firm, with another transatlantic partnership taking shape. Along the way, he has acquired a habit of accepting new responsibilities when the economic weather looks distinctly uninviting.

A different kind of circuit

Before communications came electronics engineering. Coleman wanted more room for creative work, moved into marketing communications, spent time at the BBC and then entered agency life. That sequence makes his later career easier to understand: technical subjects never disappeared from his work, even as the means of explaining them became more inventive.

He founded Creation in 2011 and became its global president. Its name was an ambitious choice for a business dealing in ideas, but at least it left room to grow. The work covered brand building, reputation, digital communications, policy and government affairs. An agency leader working across those disciplines has to translate between people who may use the same words to mean quite different things.

At the University of Sussex, where his education listing runs from 1995 to 1998, Coleman founded the Rag Society, wrote its constitution and handled public relations and marketing. Even the student chapter contains a miniature version of the later job: start something, establish how it works, persuade people to become involved. His Chartered PR Practitioner credential followed in June 2016.

Two founders, one new name

On 1 April 2019, Creation merged with Current Marketing to form Current Global. Coleman was based in London; fellow founder and co-CEO Virginia Devlin was in Chicago. She had built Current, while he had built Creation. The arrangement gave the combined agency two leaders with their own history of starting and running a business.

The fit was practical. Current brought a strong consumer business, while Creation added technology experience, including Microsoft. The merger offered clients a broader set of skills and gave the founders a larger organisation to lead. There is something pleasantly literal about the resulting name: two existing operations joined to make a business intended to work across borders.

Co-leadership also makes for a more interesting founding story than the solitary entrepreneur at a whiteboard. Current Global began with complementary capabilities, established client relationships and two geographical centres of gravity. Coleman’s part in that story was substantial, but shared. The partnership belongs in any account of how the agency came together.

Technology remained a working concern. In 2022, Current Global promoted London-based Andy Rohr to lead its global technology practice. Rohr had helped expand the Microsoft relationship in EMEA and China. The wider technology roster included LinkedIn, Oracle and SAS. Coleman was helping run an agency whose subjects required understanding the product as well as finding the words.

The audience beyond the office

One of Coleman's recurring questions is whose experience an agency mistakes for everybody else's. In 2020 he discussed the dangers of social-media tribalism and the need to bring a wider range of specialists into PR teams. Behavioural scientists were among the people he wanted involved. An office full of people agreeing with one another can still be a poor sample of the world.

His argument has a useful practical consequence. Before predicting what will interest an audience, spend time understanding how that audience lives. The people approving a campaign and the people encountering it may have very little in common. A lively response among colleagues offers encouragement; it does not settle the matter.

Current Global's Accessible by Design initiative gave that concern an operational form. Its commitment covered the communications the agency created, curated and published. The associated guidelines dealt with everyday materials, websites, presentations and content. The task was to build accessibility into production, so that reaching an audience involved checking whether people could actually use what had been made.

The work received recognition in Fast Company's 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards. Coleman also appeared in PRovoke's Innovator 25 EMEA that year. His account of innovation favoured straightforward solutions to an identifiable problem. In this case, the tools already existed; the work involved changing habits and making them part of the routine.

“The best innovation is always the most elegantly simple solution to a problem or need.”

George Coleman, 2021

The return to independent life

His appointment at The PHA Group was announced on 30 April 2025, effective 1 May. Founder and chairman Phil Hall remained in place. The change formed part of a wider restructuring that also brought Rebecca Horne onto the board as a non-executive director and Anthony Sherick into a sales and marketing leadership role.

For Coleman, it meant taking responsibility for a business with its own long history. Hall and his wife Marina had founded the agency in 2005. By the time Coleman arrived, it had developed beyond its original media consultancy roots and had offices in London, Manchester and Leeds. He inherited colleagues, relationships and a reputation built before his appointment.

That distinction matters in a profession fond of announcing a new era every time somebody orders fresh stationery. The PHA Group's expansion into digital and creative services was already under way. Coleman's job was to develop that business further, bringing his experience of building agencies to an organisation approaching its twentieth anniversary.

A familiar colleague across the Atlantic

In February 2026, PHA announced its US operation, led from New York by Renée Austin. The connection was personal as well as professional: Austin and Coleman had worked together at Current Global. She arrived as president of PHA U.S., bringing experience of both large agency networks and independent firms.

They were returning to a problem they had tackled together before: growing an agency internationally. Austin described an established working relationship and shared trust. Those are useful things to carry into an expansion. A new market supplies enough unfamiliar variables without requiring the leadership team to discover how its members make decisions.

The US business had already begun work with OneDell and Hallmark's Crayola Studios. It added earned-media and creative capabilities alongside Dig & Dig, PHA's digital and social agency brand, which had been established in Boston in 2024. The expansion therefore had an existing operation to build on, as well as a new leadership appointment to announce.

What earns its place in the budget?

Coleman's current view of agency work starts with the client's business problem. In a demanding economy, a menu of services offers limited comfort. Clients want to understand what an idea will achieve and why the expenditure makes sense. He sees strategy and creativity carrying more of that burden, with execution and reporting treated as expected parts of the service.

AI makes the question sharper. If some tasks take less time, agencies have to explain where their value sits. Coleman places it in judgement, creative thinking and advice. His leadership prescription is similarly practical: invest in people's skills, make room for other leaders' experience, and give capable colleagues the authority to work.

In April 2026, he outlined plans for an agency operating system intended to change how PHA worked. He also described ambitions to expand further in the US and develop a presence in the Middle East and Asia. These were plans, expressed in the future tense. They show where he wanted to take the business, rather than providing a finished scorecard.

His argument for independence centres on speed and the ability to assemble teams around a changing brief. He wants creative ideas to travel across earned, paid, social and digital channels. For a former network-agency founder, that is a pointed commercial position: offer breadth while keeping decisions close to the people doing the work.

Roll the credits, leave the door open

There is a quieter version of Coleman away from agency expansion. His interests include growing vegetables, brewing beer and collecting original cinema posters. A 2022 biography listed a cat named Butch Cassidy and a dog named Sundance. The film collection, evidently, had escaped its frames and acquired feeding requirements.

He has described long walks and afternoons making pasta as ways of getting past a creative rut. He enjoys history, including Dan Carlin's podcasts, and values the early morning before the rest of the family gets up. The details offer a more ordinary picture of an ideas business: sometimes the useful thing is to leave the problem alone for a while.

Recognition still arrives. In March 2026, Coleman appeared alongside Phil Hall in the PRWeek UK Power Book. His response brought the grandness of an industry directory back to domestic scale: “I’ll show it to my mum, but she still won’t get what I do.” It is a good line from somebody professionally occupied with making things understood.

The 8 Mile pitch offers one possible explanation. Find a story with enough life in it to make somebody reconsider a problem. Learn the business well enough to know why that reconsideration matters. Then give the idea room to work. Coleman has carried that combination from technical subjects to agency leadership. The next audience may be in New York. The principle travels light.