Creators aren't the destination; they're often a launching point: Edelman’s Tristan Roy

During his two-week tour across Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, Tristan Roy met with some of Edelman’s largest regional clients — including Unilever, Microsoft and Starbucks — and returned with a stark assessment. After years of uncertainty, the company’s APAC business is back on offence. The momentum, he said in an exclusive conversation with Campaign, is driven by ingenuity, cultural complexity and a horizontally skilled talent base spanning data science, analytics and creative production.  

An 18-year Edelman veteran who joined as an intern and now supports a team of nearly 2,000 across non-traditional PR capabilities, Roy was appointed president of Integrated Solutions and Delivery in January 2025, reporting to Matthew Harrington, global president and COO. His remit spans the global chair of AI, president of DxI, global head of Project Management, global head of Resource Management, deputy global chair of Digital, and global chief production officer, tasked with streamlining offerings and strengthening delivery across the firm’s largest accounts.

A committed surfer who loves Hawaii, Roy drew an analogy between reading the ocean and navigating market transitions. Surfing, he said, requires time in the water, not just watching weather charts. Similarly, agencies cannot rely solely on academic analysis of AI or geopolitics but must test, learn and stay close to client realities. “Unless you're on the surfboard in the water with clients and the work… you can’t ultimately catch the wave.”

The metaphor extends further: even the best surfers wipe out but get back on the board. In an industry bracing for volatility, Roy concludes with a question now confronting agency leaders: is integration a defensive shelter or the momentum needed to ride the next swell?

Here are edited excerpts of the interview:

Clients fear horizontal integration could homogenise creativity. As you merge data, insights, content and production, have fault lines emerged, and how do you resolve them without stifling originality?

Historically we might have looked with some scepticism on paid media and paid advertising as a part of our toolbox and perhaps in some ways limited how we thought about what our opportunity was to bring the work to life. We fundamentally believe that earned media has a new role in leading the marketing mix.

We always approach solving client problems from an audience-first and earned-first mindset. So, we're not optimising our business to fit in a paid business model to make money off of placing a TV commercial. Instead, we allow our strategists and creatives to find solutions to a client problem that are optimised for the real world and the audiences they're trying to engage with.

Historically, we haven't necessarily included all of the tools in our toolbox, like paid or even production, which is fairly new. Till few years ago, we did not have anything in Bogota in terms of design or production capability.

Tristan Roy with Mazuin Zin, CEO of Edelman Malaysia and Southeast Asia regional advisor alongside Edelman's global chief production officer Pat Sidoti, during his recent visit to Malaysia.

Our fault lines have been less about homogeneity and more about embracing the notion that we can do production in a contemporary way because we don't have a legacy production business that we have to feed and ensure is profitable. We actually built something in 2020-2021 that is built to move at speed and integrate technology and is in paid. We don't have to direct a client to a certain media network or media buying environments. Instead, we can take an open view and build up capability around performance.

As Edelman’s largest clients operate across geographies, what recurring challenges are shaping new delivery models, particularly in APAC?

When I met clients in APAC recently, complexity across many vectors is a common theme. One complexity of the world we're living in, where the intersection of policy matters and things like tariffs are impacting our clients, be it in financial services or FMCG, in places like Singapore. We are operating in an environment where it's hard to decouple a consumer message from a policy implication or decision, from how you're talking to consumers. That is challenging our clients across their own silos just as it's putting the burden on us to ensure that we're connecting the dots between team members in sectors like public affairs, crisis management or advisory, or those doing strategy or creative work.

Besides this common theme, the second one is about navigating the changing media landscape and getting arms around influencers. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach in a diverse market like India, if you're going to be relevant with a creator. You may need thousands of creators to speak to different subcultures, communities and geographies within the country.

Many of our clients are cognisant of this need with creators to deliver trusted messages to audiences in an environment in places where the traditional media environment has either fragmented or become less trusted. They are dealing with the challenge of taking advantage of this scale to ensure they are talking to the right and trusted creators so that they don’t put themselves in a reputational situation by working with the wrong creator.

Coming to AI, all clients are balancing and calibrating its responsible use with a drive for innovation and an understanding that this is a generational technology that can’t be put back in a box. It has changed our industry and jobs, but they have a practical view of where humans need to continue to be a part of the work from their agency teams.

Clients are maximising their AI budget and spend to take away process-oriented and automated work and relocate that investment and time to solve their business problem by putting more working dollars into things like creator marketing, content production, etc.

(Left to right) Christina Fosgard, ethics chair at International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), Chad Latz, Burson's chief innovation officer and Tristan Roy at ICCO's event in India in November 2025.

How do you help clients navigate martech and AI investments without being steered by vendor bias or the hype cycle?

Edelman is fairly technology agnostic and our clientele have a host of different technology stacks, including AI and marketing. We don't have any one technology per se that a client signing up with Edelman has to sign up for. This makes us a bit different from holding companies, which often come with a fairly specific set of stacks that they're dealing with.

We take an agnostic view of the client problem, the work we're doing for them and how we can meet that need with a tech solution. That's not to say that we're not investing heavily in technology for our teams; as an agency, we've invested a significant amount in AI tools over the last few years. It's just that the work isn't always necessarily predicated on or doesn't have a prerequisite that the clients also adopt the technology.

Agencies often nudge tech solutions that they commercially benefit from. With trust as Edelman’s stated cornerstone, what does integration look like without compromising that principle?

Historically, Edelman hasn’t sold technology or software as a service to clients, and we're on a journey to thinking about how that continues to evolve. We consider some of what we're doing with technology, data and AI as a permanent OpEx and CapEx investment and how it is structurally making into how their teams work day in and out.

For instance, our teams use Archie AI, which is our proprietary LLM. It's powers our teams in how they do strategic work or think about social audiences. But it is not something that our client has to buy at this point as a product subscription.

We have become more of a holistic strategic partner to many of our clients, not just a PR partner on the communication and marketing side. For example, as a strategic communications partner, we are having conversations with clients on helping them through collaboration and partnership as a driving force where trust needs to be a business KPI.

Influence has shifted dramatically from institutions to individuals. What does Edelman’s data show about the new power brokers of trust?

While a structural shift has taken place, it doesn't mean it'll be permanent. But it’s here for the foreseeable future because of the void left by fragmentation and trust issues of, and in, traditional media and personalities. So, people develop parasocial relationships with podcasters or Youtubers, which have become go-to sources of culture, credibility, information and trust. That, as a premise, is proven and consistent.

When we start with this notion of people as media, it isn't constrained to just influencers. It includes executives and experts working at the client organisations, whether a CEO or scientist, and building them into a voice on places like LinkedIn, Substack or Reddit as a way of creating some reference points in the communications ecosystem.

We also don't take a programmatic approach to identifying influencers and creators for our clients. That's not to say that we don't do it at scale, but we don't do it like a media buy. We go through a rigorous approach of analysing every creator that we work with, looking at things like trust and authenticity.

Some of the industry is moving toward more of a programmatic approach to activating and deploying armies of creators. It's important that we have scale, but I don't think that scale can come at the expense of trust and authenticity and protecting the brand, not just promoting the brand.