20 Years of Babel: Why Great Tech Comms Has Always Been About People

There’s always been a misconception that to work in B2B tech PR and marketing, you must be a highly technical person. I’ll start by refuting that, totally. I’m quite possibly the least technical person you’ll ever meet. Yet, I absolutely love this industry. Here’s why… 

Technology is the backbone of our culture, providing the fundamental infrastructure that our society is built upon - often demonised, sometimes revered, but never stagnant. Despite this, it often suffers from the incredibly inaccurate stigma of being uncreative, or even boring. Babel was born, in part, to dispel that myth. No matter the technological sub-sector, every tech brand I’ve met has something interesting, and often groundbreaking, to say. Unearthing what it is and knowing how to position it has been the key to both Babel’s and our client’s success. 

The Birth of Babel

Twenty years ago, on July 26th, 2006, my co-founder, Ian Hood, registered Babel Public Relations Limited. The brief for our name, expertly delivered by Ian’s wife, Nikki, was simple: one word, first half of the alphabet, no more than two syllables, please. I still remember the surreal core memory of seeing Ian’s company logo design for the very first time, winging its way to me from a dusty internet café, while he was on a two-week trek around South America.

By August 2006, we were up and running and  had officially launched from our first base - a serviced office in Chancery Lane. The original strapline, “Technology Explained”, is a core component of our business to this day. One of our most important jobs is to strip away technical jargon, allowing our clients to reveal the elements of their products that customers deeply care about. For context, we launched in the exact same year as Twitter and Facebook, which shows just how far our market has come over the last two decades. And, while the narrative has shifted away from the dawn of mobile internet (power of the internet in your palm), towards deepfakes and the proliferation of AI, our core business purpose remains exactly the same.

A Shared Journey

Over the last two decades, Babel has weathered the 2008 global recession, Brexit, not to mention a global pandemic (and more!). But we’ve also shared some profound personal milestones - marriages, births, and the forging of meaningful and lasting friendships.

We’ve changed our location a few times as we’ve grown. Starting with me riding my Triumph Bonneville motorbike to our Shaftesbury Avenue office, progressing to our next home on Soho Street (until we had to make way for a Zara flagship store), and eventually we moved into our current home on Clipstone Street.

We’ve also had the immense privilege to have grown-up alongside an incredible team - many of whom have been with us almost since our inception. People like Ash Lockett, Paul Campbell, Ed Cooper and Jenny Mowat who have helped shape the agency you see today - alongside alumni like Jennifer Kelham who even returned to us as a client. It’s this history and our shared mission to dispel the myth of ‘boring B2B’ that has built the unrivalled loyalty we see from our team, our partner network, and of course, our many wonderful clients - some of whom we have worked with for the best part of two decades.

Securing Babel’s Future

When Ian and I came together twenty years ago, our goal was to create a space where independence and uniqueness were championed. Recently, we took massive steps to secure that legacy, with our transition to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) in May 2024. A move that simultaneously allowed Ian to take a well-deserved retirement and secured the agency's future for our team. Shortly after this, we became B Corp Certified, proving that which we have embraced since our inception - purpose and people come before profit. Always. 

The tech sector has proven itself to be a rich, diverse, and exciting industry, full of opportunity. An industry that I’m so proud to be a part of. I feel immensely privileged to have built a career and an agency that has sat at the cutting-edge of technological progress for the last 20 years. Here’s to the next chapter of championing the human side of tech, together.

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