In the traditional telling of public relations, the spreadsheet belongs to somebody else. Finance owns the numbers. Marketing owns the media budget. The data team owns the dashboard. The communications adviser arrives later, when the chief executive needs a phrase that will survive contact with journalists, employees, regulators and the internet.
LLYC has spent the better part of a decade trying to reverse that order. The Madrid firm wants to be in the room before the phrase exists - when a company is weighing a deal, sensing a political risk, repairing a reputation or deciding why an algorithm has stopped recommending its products. This is why a business founded in 1995 as Llorente & Cuenca now describes itself as a Marketing and Corporate Affairs company. Public relations is still there. It simply has more people sitting beside it.
The odd acquisition
The revealing deal was not a glamorous ad agency. It was Zeus, a Valencia consultancy that captures, analyzes and visualizes data. LLYC bought an initial 80 percent in 2024, with the ultimate price tied to future EBITDA. The same year it took 70 percent of Lambert in the United States and 78.69 percent of Dattis in Colombia. Three purchases, more than €30 million committed, and three different jobs: scale in America, leadership in Colombia, and a better way to see what was happening inside the numbers.
This is acquisition as vocabulary. Lambert added investor relations and an American footprint. Dattis added local authority and 140-plus clients to the combined Colombian operation. Zeus added dashboards and command centers. Earlier purchases had brought advertising, performance marketing and deep-learning talent. In 2025, Digital Solvers added Brazilian healthcare work and digital experiences involving video, virtual reality, avatars and AI agents.
The logic is easy to admire because corporate problems refuse to respect agency categories. An activist investor does not pause while the financial-communications team asks the public-affairs team for a calendar invite. A product boycott can be a media problem by breakfast, an employee problem by lunch and a regulatory problem before anyone goes home. LLYC sells the table at which those people are meant to meet.
“Capabilities are bought in a day. A client experiences the integration over years.”The quiet rule beneath LLYC's expansion
The bill arrives
Growth stories become useful at the first awkward number. For LLYC, that number is $9 million. In March 2023, the company paid an initial $6.4 million for 80 percent of BAM, a U.S. agency known for working with venture-backed companies. The purchase doubled LLYC's American scale. Less than two years later, BAM founder Rebecca Bamberger bought the stake back for $9 million.
The settlement ended legal actions LLYC had begun months earlier. Only $2.5 million arrived up front; the rest is due in installments, with interest, through 2030 and backed by a stipulated judgment. LLYC said the price recovered its initial payment and transaction costs. That is not a catastrophe. It is something more instructive: a deal that stopped fitting, followed by a controlled exit.
What changed was allocation. Lambert, not BAM, became the American anchor. LLYC bought Lambert's remaining 30 percent in 2025, folded the business into a single U.S. structure and retired the Lambert name in February 2026. The sequence is unusually legible: buy two routes into a market, discover which one integrates, unwind the other, then remove the surviving sub-brand.
The financial curve tells the same story. Operating revenue reached a record €93.1 million in 2024, up 19 percent. It slipped to €89.5 million in 2025, while recurring EBITDA fell from €17.4 million to €13.8 million. Management blamed much of the decline on slower U.S. work during a 42-day government shutdown and Mexican customers cutting or canceling spending amid tariff uncertainty. The response was a two-year plan that sounds less like empire building and more like housekeeping: simplify the organization, consolidate recent acquisitions, lower leverage and remove €8.8 million in annual operating costs.
A machine enters the room
LLYC's second bet is that reputation now has two audiences. There are people, who can be persuaded, annoyed or reassured. And there are machines, which summarize a company from whatever sources they can find. The firm calls its answer “Dual Marketing and Communication.” The phrase is inelegant; the problem is not. If an AI assistant gives a customer a stale description of a brand, no executive interview can correct the answer in real time.
The service menu now includes answer-engine optimization, AI visibility audits, synthetic audiences, content systems, maturity assessments and analysis of traffic coming from generative tools. These sit beside familiar work: crisis preparation, investor communications, media, creative campaigns, advocacy, ESG and employer branding. LLYC's claim is not that software replaces judgment. It is that judgment without an instrument panel arrives late.
That breadth places LLYC in an interesting market crease. It competes with global communications networks such as Edelman, Weber Shandwick and Burson; with corporate-affairs specialists such as Brunswick and FGS Global; and, on data-heavy transformation work, with consultancies that would never call themselves PR firms. Its edge is strongest where Spain, Portugal, Latin America and the United States overlap - places where language, regulation and business culture do not line up neatly.
The part worth copying
LLYC's playbook is not “buy fourteen companies.” Most firms should not. The portable idea is smaller: organize around the client's expensive decision, then add only the capability that improves that decision. Three habits follow.
Name the moment. “Reputation” is foggy. An IPO, plant closure, hostile campaign or change in regulation has an owner, a clock and a measurable downside.
Make the data visible. Zeus mattered because it turned information into a shared object. A good dashboard does not settle an argument; it gives everyone the same argument.
Let a failed deal edit the strategy. LLYC did not abandon the United States after BAM. It concentrated the bet on Lambert, completed the purchase and simplified the brand.
There are limits. This model is built for organizations with expensive ambiguity: regulated industries, public companies, governments, cross-border businesses and brands exposed to fast-moving public scrutiny. A small company needing a quick campaign may find the machinery excessive. A buyer seeking self-serve software will find advisers instead. And an organization that keeps marketing, legal, policy and communications in hard silos can hire an integrated firm while refusing to use it in an integrated way.
José Antonio Llorente, who co-founded the firm with Olga Cuenca and died in 2023, liked to say that in five years the company would be doing things it could not yet imagine. Thirty years after the founding, the surprising part is not that a PR firm talks about artificial intelligence. Everyone does. It is that LLYC has spent real money rearranging the company around the idea - and has published enough awkward numbers for outsiders to see the price.
The spreadsheet, it turns out, was never the strategy. Getting it into the room early was.