Key people Matthew Freud Website Freud Communications Founded 1985 | Number of employees 200 approx. Headquarters London, United Kingdom Parent organization Freud (Holdings) Limited | |
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Freud Communications is a public relations firm based in London. It was founded in 1985 by Matthew Freud—of the Public Relations dynasty of Edward Bernays—and great-grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud). The PR firm of Edward Bernays became Britain's largest independent consumer PR firm. The firm was bought in 1994 by another independent UK agency, Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV), in 1994 for about 10 million pounds only for Matthew Freud, together with other partners, to buy back the company in 2001, for a similar sum, when AMV was itself purchased by the US group Omnicom.
The French Publicis Groupe (the third largest communications firm in the world) acquired a 50.1% stake in Freud Communications in June, 2005. In 2006 Freud purchased advertising agency DFGW.
Freud Communications USA, which closed in February 2009, was based in New York City. The company had a turnover in 2011 of around £40million per year, a staff of more than two hundred and has been ranked by PR Week in their ranking system as 6th in the UK.
In 1999 Leapman reported in The Times that Freud Communications had offered an Internet brand management service to its clients. This would "scour the Net for references to its clients" and if they were criticised, "the agency would use rebuttal tactics to minimise the potentially negative impact of online inaccuracy".
In 2007 PR Week ran a story documenting the use of WikiScanner to track anonymous edits and link them to organizations through their IP addresses and found that "Freud Communications' London office was caught making edits on behalf of clients."