Tetsuya Honda spent nearly 20 years at Fleishman Hillard before leaving to build Honda Office, a strategy-only consultancy operating without permanent staff or execution mandates. Earlier this year he extended that model across six Southeast Asian markets with the launch of PR Collective Asia, a network of individual specialists serving Japanese companies with regional ambitions.

In this conversation with David Blecken, research and insights editor of Earned First, Honda examines why Japanese companies — despite strong brand equity and long-established regional presence — continue to under-invest in communications strategy in Southeast Asia. He discusses the structural gap between Tokyo headquarters and local subsidiaries, why Korean competitors have developed more sophisticated international communications, the case for integrating corporate and product brand strategy, and where AI can and cannot help Japanese companies move faster.

In this episode, Burson's Asia-Pacific head of intelligence and transformation Red Surtida joins Earned First founding editor Arun Sudhaman and research and insights editor David Blecken to explore the findings of the 'Credibility Paradox', a study that examines how AI answer engines assess and surface brand content. The conversation covers why corporate leadership content is underperforming as a credibility signal, how employee experience is emerging as a reputation asset in the GEO era, the channel dynamics that vary significantly across industries and markets, and what it means that business decision-makers find AI-generated answers more believable than the general population does.

Charlotte Mceleny has seen the PR and marketing industry from both sides, through 15 years as a journalist, then inside a holding group at MediaMonks. In this conversation, she and Arun Sudhaman work through what's actually happening to the holding group model, why PR keeps failing the measurement test, what the CMO role is becoming under CFO pressure, and whether Cannes still means what it once did.