building a managing director a voice in an industry he'd just joined

executive profiles usually get done badly. someone senior arrives, a press release goes out saying they’ve arrived, it’s picked up by two trade sites, and then nothing happens for three years. the appointment story is the easiest placement in comms and it’s worth almost nothing, because all it says is that a person exists.

this is what i did instead.

the situation

rupert bedell became managing director of fasthosts in late 2024. twenty-five years in financial marketing before that, at american express, hsbc, natwest and barclays. an engineering degree from dublin. no profile whatsoever in uk hosting or tech press, because he’d never worked in either.

fasthosts is a british company founded in 1998 as an a-level project, sold to a german parent in 2006, now running 1.1 million domains and 10,000 servers out of uk data centres. long history, low public voice.

so the job was to make a man credible in an industry he’d been in for about six weeks, without it looking like that’s what we were doing.

one argument per outlet, never the same one twice

the appointment went to the trades, and that was the last easy placement. everything after it carried a different argument, aimed at a different audience, and could stand on its own without the others.

the business story went to regional business press. revenue growing faster in one year than in the previous ten, £45m turnover, 19,000 sq ft as the first tenant in gloucester’s £107m forum development. concrete numbers, a growth claim he then had to live up to, and a physical thing readers could drive past.

the contrarian argument went to a customer experience title. cmos are going to run companies, and here’s a man who took that route explaining why. this is the placement that does the heavy lifting, because it moves him from someone who has a job to someone who has a position. it also happens to be true of him specifically, which is the only reason it works.

the future-of-it predictions piece went to a tech title. ai taking the grunt work, it moving out of the back office, the soft skills that will decide who survives it. forward-looking, quotable, and useful to a reader rather than about the company at all.

long-form video went to the local business channel. a gloucester employer needs a gloucester audience, and a thirty-minute interview where he talks about the worst mistake of his career does more for trust locally than any amount of national trade coverage.

a marketing-industry podcast for the audience of people who might come and work for him.

then the civic layer

a city stakeholder group convened across gloucester rugby, gloucester quays, the cathedral and the food docks. the gloucester gift card. the welcome to gloucester ambassador programme. shirt sponsorship of gloucester rugby for the 2026/27 season.

none of that is press coverage in the traditional sense and all of it generates the same thing: a named person, in the paper, doing something for the place the company lives in. it also means that when something goes wrong, there’s a relationship in the room before the phone call.

and then the profile does its work

in may 2026 fasthosts launched ai receptionist, the first ai product under the brand. the launch coverage carries him by name, arguing from a specific number: uk smes miss between 15 and 40% of incoming calls every week.

that lands differently because of everything above it. an unknown md saying that is a vendor making a claim. an md who has spent eighteen months being quoted on where the industry is going is a source. the profile was built first so that the product launch had somewhere to stand.

the principle underneath it

credibility before product, and never sell in the same breath as you explain.

every one of those placements is useful to the reader on its own terms. none of them is a hosting advert. that’s the whole trade: you spend eighteen months being worth reading, and you get to be believed once, when it counts.

the awkward part

fasthosts’ earned coverage is hard to find by search. i know it exists because i placed it. run a brand-name search and you get aggregator pages, review sites and company profiles, while the actual placements sit in body copy that search engines index badly and ai answer engines summarise worse.

i run generative engine optimisation work across the group, testing how the brand surfaces inside ai-generated answers. so this is a problem i already had a project about, and i still found it uncomfortable to see it laid out. earned coverage that can’t be retrieved is worth less than it used to be, and most of our industry has not caught up with that yet.

what i’d do differently

i’d have built the retrievable layer alongside the placements rather than after them. a profile that only exists as scattered third-party articles is a profile that decays. the same programme, with a structured home for it, would still be compounding now.