Helping a Singapore PR Agency Build Thought Leadership for Startup Founders
Working behind the scenes, we partnered with the agency to turn founder expertise into compelling opinion articles tailored for leading business and mainstream publications.
Agency Partnership
Thought Leadership
Executive Positioning
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The Client
A Singapore-based integrated communications agency with clients across Asia Pacific. As part of its growth strategy, the agency had launched a dedicated startup practice, with a focus on helping high-growth, young companies build credibility with customers, investors, and the media.
The Problem Statement
Thought leadership through earned media was a key component of the agency’s offering. Its clients wanted to establish themselves as industry experts by contributing opinion articles to tier 1 business and mainstream publications.
However, creating thought leadership demanded far more than strong writing.
Most founders were first-time contributors to the media. While they possessed deep expertise in their respective domains, they had little experience articulating a point of view suitable for a target audience.
The agency needed an editorial partner who could bridge this gap. The partner needed to:
- Understand how newsrooms evaluated contributed articles
- Interview founders to go beyond company offerings and uncover compelling perspectives
- Transform technical expertise into publication-ready thought leadership
The engagement was particularly demanding because it involved founders from diverse industries, each requiring a different level of subject matter immersion.
What We Did: The Scope
Purple Iris Communications worked as the agency’s editorial partner, helping founders translate their expertise into thought leadership that could stand up to editorial scrutiny.
Our responsibilities included:
- Interviewing founders to uncover original insights and distinctive perspectives
- Coaching first-time contributors on how opinion articles differ from marketing content
- Identifying timely themes with strong editorial potential
- Developing storylines aligned with both the founder’s expertise and the publication’s audience
- Ghostwriting publication-ready articles in the founder’s voice
- Refining drafts to minimize editorial revisions prior to submission
How We Did it: The Approach
Each engagement began with structured interviews to understand the founder's experience, market observations, business philosophy, and industry perspective.
Our primary objective was to distil ideas into credible industry commentary.
We guided the founders through the editorial process, helping them understand what editors look for in contributed articles, how to subtly draw attention to the organization’s expertise without sounding promotional, and how to build evidence-backed arguments.
We monitored market developments, industry conversations, and competing viewpoints to identify topics that were timely, relevant, and likely to resonate with editors.
An article intended for a mainstream publication required a different narrative structure and level of technical detail than one written for a business daily or startup-focused publication. We adapted each article to suit the publication's readership and editorial expectations while preserving the founder's voice and expertise.
Articles went through our internal editorial reviews to ensure clarity, credibility, narrative quality to ensure publication-ready copy with minimal changes.
The Value We Delivered
Within three months, the engagement delivered measurable outcomes for both the agency partner and its clients.
- Seven thought leadership articles published across five leading publications.
- Successful placements in The Straits Times, The Business Times, Gulf News, YourStory, and Deccan Herald.
- Coverage spanning fintech, digital transformation and AI, and workplace design.
- Strengthened the PR agency’s executive thought leadership offering for startup clients
- Established a repeatable editorial process that combined founder interviews, editorial strategy, and publication-specific storytelling