People & Purpose
People & Purpose

Proud to be Independent, Employee-Owned and Female-led

Caroline Kinsey

Chairman

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Senior Team
Caroline Kinsey
Chairman
Believing passionately about the power of PR, Caroline founded Cirkle in 1998 after 12 years in marketing and PR.  At the heart of the agency’s success lies Caroline’s energy and positivity and a belief in balancing commercial understanding with campaign excellence and unswerving client satisfaction.  In 2018, Caroline made Cirkle the first  PRCA-accredited agency to become a majority employee-owned business. A Fellow of the PRCA, inaugural Chairman of PRCA PR Council, the UK’s Female Entrepreneur of the Year, PRCA’s Agency Head of the Year and The Daily Telegraph’s ‘Britain’s Fittest Director’, Caroline was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bedfordshire for services to Marketing/PR.

Ruth Kieran

CEO

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Ruth Kieran
CEO
Ruth has worked in the creative communications industry for over 25 years, having begun her career in Asia, firstly with McCann-Erickson in Sydney, before moving into corporate communications, running programmes for brands such as Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo! in Hong Kong. Ruth returned to the UK in 2002, to work for behaviour change and purpose agency, Kindred, ultimately as Managing Partner. Ruth has worked on communications programmes for Government departments and third-sector organisations, including Department of Education, Department for Transport, Department for Work & Pensions, Investors in People, The Open University and The National Lottery. She also has led campaigns for a range food and drink and consumer brands, including Birds Eye, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, Costa Coffee, Harley-Davidson and Whitbread, and has particular expertise in crisis and issues management. Ruth is currently co-chair of the Alliance of Independent Agencies, which champions the work and needs of the independent creative industries, and leads the ‘people pillar’ of the organisation’s activities across wellbeing, talent and EDI. A passionate advocate for good culture and social inclusion, she has worked with Career Ready as a mentor, and on EDI and wellbeing initiatives including Brilliant Creative Minds.  

Kate Gibson

Managing Partner - Consumer Brands

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Kate Gibson
Managing Partner - Consumer Brands
Kate has worked agency side for 20 years, specialising in distinctive consumer brand communications for clients in the retail and FMCG sectors. Working at top agencies of all shapes and sizes over the years, Kate has developed and led integrated comms strategies and award winning creative campaigns for some of the UK’s best known brands including John Lewis Partnership, Morrisons, Caffe Nero, Vue Entertainment, B&Q, Mars Petcare, Pets At Home, McDonald’s, Britvic, Persil and Warburtons. In her role leading the fast growing consumer brands team at Cirkle, Kate is most passionate about creating powerful integrated comms campaigns across earned and owned channels to tell brand stories which drive behaviour change and generate tangible results for her clients.  

Annemarie Penderis

Managing Partner - Corporate Reputation & B2B

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Annemarie Penderis
Managing Partner - Corporate Reputation & B2B
Annemarie left her native South Africa more than 13 years ago to embrace the UK. She has over 20 years corporate, retail trade, foodservice and B2B experience working across a range of sectors for brands including Stella Artois, Bidfood, Mission Foods, Cadbury, Bayer Aspirin and PepsiCo. A seasoned corporate comms professional, Annemarie’s remit includes driving corporate profile, media training, thought leadership and building employer brands for her clients. She is a highly experienced crisis & issues expert and has helped brands including  Hovis, Hipp Organic, Noble Foods, Loyd Grossman and Mission Foods in addition to those who face difficult trading environments.

Claire Haddrill

Strategy Director

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Claire Haddrill
Strategy Director
Claire is passionate about shaping stories, and always ensures a clear and consistent narrative thread runs right through the work she leads - from strategy development through to the activation of insight-driven and audience-centric campaigns. With 14 years of global communications agency experience in the UK and UAE Claire has worked with multi-cultural teams across disciplines, sectors and geographies. She thrives on the challenge of creating omni-channel communication campaigns that are insight-driven and audience centric, and has brought together her diverse skill set to successfully deliver work for varied businesses including GSK Consumer Healthcare, Louvre Abu Dhabi, PepsiCo, Hilton, Dubai Tourism, Facebook and Ocean Spray.

Chris Grabowski

Creative Director

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Chris Grabowski
Creative Director
Starting out on the account management side of PR agency life, Chris quickly discovered a love for ideas, innovation, tech and creative craft and soon moved into a purely creative role.  He now has over a decade of experience creating award winning campaigns for leading lifestyle, bluechip and FMCG brands, including: Bacardi, BMW, Cadbury, Nando’s, Nestle, Nintendo, and Under Armour.

Amy Searle

Head of Trade

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Amy Searle
Head of Trade
With over 14 years retail trade, foodservice, wholesale and B2B experience, Amy holds a rounded expertise garnered from a previous life at the Association of Convenience Stores and client-side roles. Amy is passionate in delivering commercial and reputational gains for her clients and applies curiosity and creativity when responding to briefs, which has amounted in a number of award-winning campaigns. Amy frequently applies fresh thinking to help brands on their journey to drive distribution, grow trade relationships or engage the trade with new category, product and marketing propositions - providing tangible results for her clients.

Rebecca Holmes

Digital Director

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Rebecca Holmes
Digital Director
Rebecca has been working within Social and Digital for almost a decade, riding the wave of its evolution across consumer and corporate brands. Previously she led the Digital divisions at both Splendid and Spider PR, working on clients such as The AA, LastMinute.Com and Virgin Trains. Rebecca believes in the power of earned reach and the ability of social media to transcend timelines and become a thread in culture. She has worked across a number of diverse social first brands such as Greggs, Samsung, PepsiCo, Peperami and Tim Hortons.

Lois McCloud

Head of Finance

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Lois McCloud
Head of Finance
Starting her career in account management side of PR – Lois spent six years running FMCG brand campaigns, before choosing a career in the world of management accounts.  Studying part-time alongside work, for four years, to become a fully qualified chartered accountant through CIMA – she now holds ACMA CGMA designatory letters. Lois leads the accounts team, instilling best practice and commercial acumen in the agency at all levels. A member of the Alliance of Independent Agencies, she has a strong interest in procurement – holding affiliate membership of the CIPS (Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply).

Our client charter sets out how we work together to build relationships that deliver strategic and business excellence.

EQUALITY, DIVERSITY & INCLUSION AT CIRKLE

We recognise that providing equality of opportunity, valuing diversity and promoting a culture of inclusion are vital to our success.  Our aim is to harness people’s individual talents and skills by creating an open and inclusive workplace culture where people can be free to be themselves no matter what their identity or background.  We are fully committed to this agenda and ensure that our policies and processes, recruitment and selection, measurement and reporting and team training follow D&I best practises. We believe that we have an important role to play in supporting this agenda externally and work closely with organisations like Career Ready,  Creative Access, Brilliant Creative Minds, Brixton Finishing School and as a member of the Alliance of Independent Agencies to support and drive change within the wider comms industry. 

 

WE ARE A BLUEPRINT ALLY

We were proud to be awarded Blueprint Ally status in October 2020, a diversity mark which helps organisations attract, retain and nurture diverse talent. As part of that accreditation, we have signed up to 23 business commitments, which cover everything from recruitment practices, retaining and nurturing talent, agency wide training, as well as publishing our diversity data each year.

 

As a Blueprinted agency we are committed to transparency and accountability and are pleased to report the following updates:

 

  • In 2020 we set out a goal to achieve 10% BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) representation within our team by the end of 2021. Due to our continued growth, we are pleased to report that since the beginning of January this year, we have created a number of new and incremental job roles at Cirkle, and we are set to meet our original BAME representation target by July, earlier than anticipated – hitting 10.6 % BME representation.

 

  • On gender, currently 79% of our team are women and we have over 66% female representation within our board of directors

 

We know we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are proud to be reporting positive progress. Never an agency to stand-still, we have also reviewed the ambitions we set last year, in light of our recent expansion, and have committed to extending our BAME representation goal, with the aim of hitting 12% BAME representation by the end of 2021.

 

We are ever thankful to Elizabeth Bananuka and her team, as well as the wider Blueprinted agency community, who are equally committed to working together to drive positive change.

 

"We lead the way in looking after our team’s physical and emotional wellbeing - investing in them through our robust ‘Wellbeing in the Round’ programme."

- Ruth Kieran, CEO

“ON-PURPOSE” AT CIRKLE

“ON-PURPOSE” AT CIRKLE

We believe we have the power to affect positive change – not only with the consultancy we provide to our clients – but to the wider community.   We call this ‘On Purpose’. This runs through everything we do, whether that’s delivering supplies to our local food bank, supporting our client’s charity initiatives, cycling 600km over five days for the Mines Advisory Group with industry partners, or providing career opportunities, mentoring and support for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We want our team to feel empowered that they are part of a company and culture that exists to contribute positively to society and our community.

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