Published on: October 6, 2026
A brand’s reputation can now come undone in the time it takes to finish a workday: a handful of comments in the morning, a full-blown crisis by evening, if nobody was ready for it. Ameer Ismail has spent close to three decades managing reputations at that speed, including 29 years as President of Lintas Live within the MullenLowe Lintas Group, before launching Apostrophe Ventures, where he is now Founder and CEO.
Speaking with him is always a genuinely warm experience, candid and unhurried even on a subject built around pressure. In this exclusive conversation, he explains why the real work of crisis management happens long before anything goes wrong, and the one judgment call he says he’d never hand to a machine, no matter how fast it gets.
You’ve managed reputation for major brands through the shift from print-cycle crises to real-time social backlash. What’s the biggest shift you’ve had to make in your own approach, to keep pace with how fast a crisis moves today?
The way a crisis progresses has changed completely. It can start with a handful of social media comments and, if a brand doesn’t have a structured plan to respond within the first few hours, escalate into a full-blown crisis within a day.
But speed is only one part of the change. What has made crisis management more complex is the context in which people consume information. In India, that ecosystem continues to straddle newspapers, television, social platforms and multiple digital devices, often simultaneously.
So, the biggest shift for me has been from thinking about crisis management as a response mechanism to thinking about it as a state of continuous preparedness. You cannot start building your response when the crisis has already broken. You need the right people, processes, information and decision-making frameworks in place beforehand.
I have always believed in “fix it before it breaks”, a philosophy from Golin’s founder. A crisis should never be treated as a standalone event. The relationship and trust you’ve built with stakeholders before the crisis are what ultimately give you the credibility and room to handle it when something goes wrong.
The reflex now is to respond to any controversy within hours, sometimes minutes. When is staying silent actually the smarter call, and how do you tell the difference in the moment?
“Silence and inaction are not the same thing.”
There are situations where responding immediately can actually amplify an issue that may otherwise have remained contained. The first question should therefore be: do we have something meaningful to say, and will saying it help move the situation forward?
The first few minutes and hours should be about understanding the facts, assessing the velocity and nature of the conversation, identifying the stakeholders who matter, and determining whether there is a genuine issue that requires action.
Strategic silence should never become an excuse for avoiding accountability, though. If there is a legitimate concern, particularly one involving customers, employees or other stakeholders, people expect organisations to take responsibility and be part of the solution.
The principle I have followed throughout my career is that communication during a crisis needs to be transparent, clear and truthful. Sometimes that means responding quickly; sometimes it means taking a little time to establish the facts before responding. The objective should not be to win the news cycle. It should be to protect trust and solve the underlying problem.
AI tools can now draft a statement, track sentiment and flag a brewing controversy faster than any team. What’s a judgement call in a reputation crisis you’d still never hand to a tool?
“I would never outsource the ultimate judgement on people, context and consequence to a machine.”
AI can be extraordinarily useful. It can help us process enormous volumes of information, spot patterns and give teams a much faster view of what’s happening. It can also help explore different communication approaches and speed up execution.
But a reputation crisis is not simply a data problem. It involves culture, emotion, relationships, ethics and sometimes very little information at the beginning. The question is not just what people are saying; it is why they are saying it, what they expect from the organisation and what the organisation is prepared to do about it.
That is where human judgement becomes critical. I see AI as an enabler and an accelerant, not a replacement for experience, empathy or accountability.
The more technology we bring into communications, the more those human qualities matter. We have to use AI well, while keeping the human ability to make the difficult call when the answer isn’t sitting neatly inside the data.
With Apostrophe Ventures, you’re keeping senior people hands-on with clients through delivery, not just the pitch, after decades of watching that handoff happen at scale. What’s the first habit from running a large network that you had to actively unlearn to make this work?
Perhaps the assumption that scale and layers automatically create better outcomes.
After almost three decades in a large network, you learn how powerful scale can be. The breadth of talent, expertise, resources and global relationships is invaluable. But you also see where complexity can creep in. As organisations grow, the distance between the person who understands the problem and the person who ultimately delivers the solution can sometimes become too great.
Apostrophe Ventures is deliberately designed around the opposite principle. Senior people need to be close to the problem and remain close to the client through execution, not simply appear at the beginning of a relationship and at the end.
The other habit we’ve had to unlearn is thinking in conventional service lines. Clients don’t wake up with a “PR problem” or a “creative problem”. They have a business challenge, a reputation opportunity, a growth ambition or a transformation they need to work through.
As reputation increasingly sits inside every customer touchpoint, where do you think the responsibility for protecting it should sit inside a business, and who still tends to underestimate that responsibility?
“Reputation cannot belong to one department anymore. It is a leadership responsibility.”
Communications can advise, anticipate and help orchestrate the response, but reputation is ultimately created by what an organisation does, how it treats its customers, employees and partners, how it behaves in difficult moments, and whether its actions are consistent with what it says. This is why I have always believed that PR needs to move beyond being seen as a support function. As
audiences became more empowered by digital platforms, communications increasingly became part of the strategic conversation inside the business.
The organisations that underestimate reputation are often those that still see communication as something that happens after the business decision has been made. In reality, communications thinking needs to be present much earlier, when decisions are being made, risks are being assessed, and stakeholder expectations are being considered.
The role of the communications leader, therefore, is not simply to protect the organisation from a bad headline. It is to help the organisation make better decisions about how it behaves, communicates and builds relationships with its stakeholders.
Audiences form and revise their opinion of a brand faster than any agency process can keep pace with. What’s one thing about earning an audience’s trust that hasn’t changed at all in thirty years?
The fundamental principle has not changed: trust has to be earned through consistency between what you say and what you do.
Technology has transformed the speed, scale and channels of communication. Thirty years ago, organisations had more time to shape a narrative. Today, audiences can respond instantly, create their own narratives and hold organisations accountable in real time. Yet, authenticity still matters. People look at whether a company does what it says, takes responsibility when things go wrong and behaves consistently over time.
“Trust cannot be manufactured through a statement, campaign or clever piece of content.”
Communication can articulate what an organisation stands for, but its actions ultimately have to substantiate the story. That is why reputation cannot be managed only during a crisis. It is built every day, through every stakeholder interaction. This is also why communications needs to evolve. Our role should not simply be to help organisations tell better stories, but to help them build businesses and relationships that give those stories credibility.
