Julie Batliner named Padilla president. The longtime Carmichael Lynch leader succeeds Matt Kucharski, who is retiring after more than 37 years with Padilla. MINNEAPOLIS - Padilla has named longtime Carmichael Lynch leader Julie Batliner as its next president, succeeding Matt Kucharski as he prepares to retire after more than 37 years with the agency. Batliner spent more than 20 years at Carmichael Lynch, most recently as president and managing partner. She previously served as managing principal and chief client relations officer with Carmichael Lynch Relate and held leadership roles across client relations and the agency's living well practice. Before joining Carmichael Lynch in 2005, Batliner spent seven years at FleishmanHillard, rising to senior VP. Batliner will be based at Padilla's Minneapolis headquarters and report to Avenir Global president and CEO Jean-Pierre Vasseur. She brings nearly 30 years of agency experience, including work across food and beverage, financial services, consumer and corporate communications. Kucharski, who has served as Padilla president since 2017, joined the agency - then Padilla Speer Beardsley - in 1989 as an assistant account executive. During his tenure, he helped expand the agency's services and client portfolio and played a central role in its transition from an employee-owned firm to part of Avenir Global. Kucharski will move into a fractional role as executive counselor through the end of 2026 before retiring. Article tags News direct to your inbox The agency playbook. The PR industry's most comprehensive listing of firms from every region and specialty.

Praytell expands influence team with two senior hires. Praytell adds Catherine O'Neill and Paige Weber as it brings media, creators and social under one Influence Department. Praytell is expanding its Influence Department with two senior hires, bringing media relations, creator marketing and social under one leadership structure. Catherine O'Neill joins from Village Marketing as SVP of Creator Marketing & Paid Media, while Paige Weber joins from FleishmanHillard as SVP of Media. EVP Ciara Benko continues to lead the department. The change is more meaningful as an operating-model decision than as a headline-grabbing agency move. Praytell is formalizing a structure in which earned media, creators and social are planned together, while also adding senior specialists to run the individual disciplines. For clients, the test will be whether that structure produces clearer accountability and better cross-channel execution, rather than simply putting several services under a new department name. Table of contents. Jump to each section: What Praytell is changing. Praytell's expanded department places three disciplines that agencies have historically sold and staffed separately inside one operating group. Benko oversees the combined team, with O'Neill responsible for creator marketing and paid media, Weber leading media, Danielle Moreno leading creator marketing operations, and Sofia Gomes leading social. The agency is also expanding the services attached to the group, including its Influence Mapping work, a network of journalists and creators used for planning, and an AI-assisted forecasting product called PulseCheck. Those tools are supporting details, however. The larger organizational signal is the decision to treat media, creators and social as parts of the same influence problem rather than separate channel briefs. Benko summarized the premise in the announcement: "Influence today is about resonance and trust." That framing matches Praytell's broader research agenda around fragmented media, creator credibility and the role of personalities in shaping how audiences process information. 3,600 weekly media users across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia were surveyed for Praytell's 2026 research with YouGov, according to The Personality Era. Key takeaways. * Praytell is combining media, creator marketing and social under one Influence Department led by Ciara Benko. * Catherine O'Neill and Paige Weber add senior leadership from Village Marketing and FleishmanHillard. * The strategic value will depend on whether the integrated structure improves planning and accountability for clients. Why the structure matters for clients. The practical appeal is straightforward. A campaign can now move from earned-media planning into creator activation, social distribution and paid amplification without being handed between separate practice leaders. That can reduce duplicated briefing and make it easier to decide which audience needs a journalist, a creator, a brand-owned channel or some combination of the three. The structure also reflects a harder media-planning problem. Praytell's own research argues that audiences increasingly evaluate who is delivering a message alongside the message itself. The agency says independent creators and traditional journalists are now close in their ability to change opinions, which pushes communications teams to think across sources of authority instead of defaulting to an earned-media-first hierarchy. 70% of US respondents said undisclosed AI use reduced their trust in a brand, according to Praytell's 2026 research with YouGov. That does not mean every PR brief should become a creator campaign. It does mean the line between media relations, creator strategy and social distribution is increasingly an operating question. Clients need agencies to make trade-offs across those channels, not simply offer each one as an adjacent service. The competitive question is integration, not novelty. Praytell is part of Project Worldwide, so it sits between large global network agencies and smaller independent specialists. Its current model can be compared with integrated communications players such as Weber Shandwick, FleishmanHillard, Golin and MSL, although these are category comparisons rather than exact size peers. | Agency | Why it is relevant to this category | | Praytell | Project Worldwide agency formalizing media, creator and social work inside one Influence Department. | | Weber Shandwick | Large integrated communications agency that competes for cross-channel brand and reputation work. | | FleishmanHillard | Large integrated communications agency and the previous employer of Praytell's new media lead. | | Golin | Integrated PR and communications agency competing for brand, earned and social briefs. | | MSL | Integrated communications network competing across earned, influence and brand reputation work. | The distinction, then, is not that Praytell discovered integration. Most major communications networks already sell some version of it. The more relevant question is whether Praytell can make the integration operationally visible to clients through one leadership structure, shared planning tools and fewer internal handoffs. That is where the two hires matter. O'Neill arrives with creator and paid-media experience, while Weber brings a long media-relations background. Their roles give the department dedicated senior ownership on both sides of a channel mix that agencies often describe as integrated but still manage through separate teams. What the expansion does not prove. The announcement does not provide client-retention data, campaign-performance comparisons or financial results showing that the new structure is better than a more traditional practice model. Praytell says demand for creator-generated content has grown sharply, but that is a company-reported demand signal, not independent evidence that the reorganized department will improve outcomes. The move should therefore be read as organizational investment, not a market shift. Praytell is betting that brands increasingly want one senior team to decide how earned media, creators and social work together. That is a credible direction in a fragmented media environment, but its value will show up in client delivery, not in the department chart itself. For communications leaders evaluating agencies, the useful question is practical: who owns the integrated plan when channel priorities conflict? Praytell's latest structure gives a clearer answer than before. Whether it produces stronger work will depend on how consistently that answer holds once briefs, budgets and measurement enter the room. Need help getting media coverage? Content Collision is a PR agency specializing in earned media for brands across APAC and the Middle East. ContentGrip has secured placements in 5,000+ stories for more than 280 companies. 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