There is a peculiar sort of confidence in naming a communications company after yourself. In 1983, Melissa Waggener did it in Bellevue, a city across Lake Washington from Seattle that had not yet become shorthand for the technology economy. A year later Pam Edstrom joined. The Waggener Group became Waggener Edstrom, and one of its first clients was a nearby software company called Microsoft. The agency was not merely lucky. Its founding idea was that technology would stop being a specialist subject and begin rearranging ordinary life. When that happened, somebody would have to translate.
The translation business turned out to be large. Today We. Communications says it has more than 1,500 employees working across more than 100 international markets. Its clients have included Microsoft, Intel, McDonald's, Otsuka, Autodesk, HPE, Vodacom and Volvo. The firm remains privately held and founder-led, an uncommon shape in a field dominated by giant holding companies. The independence gives it a long clock. The Microsoft relationship has survived Windows launches, antitrust battles, cloud computing, mobile misses, generative AI and now quantum chips.
The product is not publicity. It is reduced confusion.
A PR agency can sound like a factory for press releases. We. is better understood as an uncertainty contractor. A company has invented something strange, changed its strategy, acquired a rival, attracted activists, frightened customers or watched its chief executive become the story. We. maps the people who matter, finds the point they can understand, and builds a campaign around it. Sometimes that means media relations. Sometimes it means executive coaching, a crisis rehearsal, influencer outreach, paid social, research or a room where the legal team learns that its perfectly accurate sentence is completely unusable.
Launch Pad
Turn a product, service or category launch into adoption, attention and a story people can repeat.
C-Suite Surround
Find an executive's useful voice, then build the message and channels around it.
Reputation Resilience
Assess threats, simulate crises and measure whether the response is protecting the business.
AI Accelerator
Train communications teams, sharpen AI narratives and improve visibility inside generated answers.
The menu now has six named solution families: Company Transformation, Launch Pad, C-Suite Surround, Reputation Resilience, Brand Resonance and AI Accelerator. Beneath them sit practical modules. A crisis simulation lasts two or three hours and puts leaders under controlled pressure. GEO Compass examines how a brand appears in AI-generated answers. Reputation Forecast combines We.'s stakeholder intelligence with Steel City Re's financial measures of reputation value and risk across more than 7,000 public companies.
This is how the agency differs from a conventional publicity shop. It still pitches journalists, but it also sells research, decision practice and measurement. The competitors are the large global networks - Edelman, Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, Burson, Ketchum - plus specialists, management consultancies and the client's own in-house team. We.'s wedge is the combination of enterprise scale, technology fluency and private ownership.
“When we started this company in 1983, we placed a bet on technology and how it's going to change everything. It was a good bet.”Melissa Waggener Zorkin, founder and global CEO
A quantum chip walks into a newsroom
Consider Majorana 1. Microsoft wanted to announce a quantum chip built around a new state of matter. This is an awkward sentence before breakfast. The science mattered to quantum researchers, the business consequences mattered to executives, and the possibility of better batteries or drug discovery mattered to everybody else. One generic message would have satisfied none of them.
We. segmented business leaders, enthusiasts, researchers and skeptics. It brought selected journalists, analysts and creators into the lab, pre-briefed more than 200 others and supplied different storytelling assets for technical and general audiences. The announcement reached major business, science and technology outlets while creator videos carried it further. The reusable idea is almost embarrassingly plain: do not sand away complexity. Give each audience the right door into it, and let credible outsiders touch the work.
That method travels. A MED-EL campaign used five stories from real families to help parents understand hearing implants. It produced more than 210,000 web visits, nearly 2,000 brochure downloads and more than 1,150 conversations with mentors. For Rockwell Automation at China's import expo, executive-led stories began before the booth opened; the program reported more than 3,000 media stories and 800 million impressions. For Vodacom and partners, locally adaptable human stories generated more than 3,000 pieces of African coverage and enough requests to collaborate that the team created a dedicated email address.
The 42 points where confidence goes missing
We.'s sharpest advertisement may be a piece of research that makes communicators uncomfortable. In its 2025 Brands in Motion study, produced with Ipsos, 81 percent of communicators said they were effectively reaching audiences. Only 39 percent of stakeholders said organizations were good at communicating through complexity. The difference is 42 percentage points - a broad, well-lit market for anyone who can close it.
The confidence gap
The dangerous part is not that communication is difficult. It is that the sender often cannot see how difficult it has become.
The agency's advice from that work is refreshingly unornamental: speak plainly, acknowledge trade-offs and show principled action instead of polished vagueness. Its AI finding is equally awkward. Twenty-one percent of respondents said AI-generated messages would improve trust; 22 percent said they would pay less attention. Automating the sentence does not solve the problem of whether the sentence deserves to exist.
The first thing to fail was the old concentration
The founding technology bet was fruitful, but every bet has exposure. After two years of solid growth, We.'s revenue declined in 2023 as the technology sector pulled back. Global revenue later measured about $172.6 million in 2024 and $165 million in 2025. The latest drop was slight, but it clarified the assignment: retain the technology advantage without letting it become a cage.
Reported global revenue, US$ millions
The response has been diversification with a thesis. We. bought regional independents in Australia, China, Singapore and India, then acquired London's social-impact specialist Hopscotch in 2022. When Hopscotch completed its integration in 2025, the combined offer covered behavior change, education, employability and climate action. Healthcare grew to roughly $20 million worldwide. In 2025 the agency retained 92 percent of its top 25 clients and won more than 35 new assignments, including Autodesk, Lumen and MBX Biosciences.
The commercial model is changing too. We. does not publish a rate card. Enterprise clients buy retainers, campaigns, workshops and advisory products whose cost depends on scope and markets. In Asia, the agency has described a move away from pricing traditional capabilities by the hour and toward value-based solutions tied to business outcomes. That is a consequential change for a service business: the invoice begins to depend less on how long the work took and more on whether it moved something that mattered.
Three names, one operating belief
Waggener Edstrom became WE Communications and, in March 2025, We. Communications. The new mark is a deep red circle; the full stop makes the name feel both friendlier and oddly final. Yet the letters still honor Waggener and Edstrom. The branding caught up with the culture the company describes: collaborative, mentorship-heavy and deliberately human. Waggener Zorkin says she meets every intern. The firm offers hundreds of learning sessions and has expanded mentorship for LGBTQIA+ employees.
The useful lesson is not to copy the punctuation. It is to pick a durable change and become unusually good at explaining it. Give skeptical intermediaries real access. Build more than one entrance to the story. Measure the action after attention. And when your first successful category becomes too large a share of your identity, widen your expertise before the market does it for you.
What another company can copy
- Choose a long-lived shift, not a fashionable channel.
- Segment audiences by the question each one needs answered.
- Invite credible skeptics close enough to inspect the claim.
- Track visits, conversations, adoption and risk, not coverage alone.
- Practice the crisis while the room is still calm.
The approach is less effective when leaders want communication to disguise a weak product, when experts cannot provide evidence, when access is tightly controlled, or when the client counts mentions but refuses to define a business outcome. Translation can make a difficult truth understandable. It cannot make an unsupported claim true.
That boundary explains the enduring appeal of We.'s original bet. New technologies keep arriving with unfamiliar nouns and expensive promises. The public remains busy, skeptical and human. Between those two facts sits a company whose name has become shorter as its assignment has grown.