Emma Kane is a strategic communications expert whose career spans over three decades and has been focused on building brands and protecting reputations.
Emma is an expert in strategic communications focused on helping clients communicate in the most powerful and effective way across their whole spectrum of stakeholders. She is a special adviser to CEOs and Chairs of leading international organisations and is a black belt at issues and crisis management. Since 2020, has been included in the ‘PR Week UK Power Book’, the definitive guide to the brightest and most influential communications professionals in Britain.
She spent 18 years building her own corporate and financial communications business, Redleaf Communications, before become CEO of the Group that bought her agency in 2018. Since then, she has led the integration of all the Group’s four UK agencies and been part of the board that has transformed the Group into a major global, fully integrated communications group operating across five continents.
In her role as Head of Western EMEA, she has responsibility for growth of sales and talent across the Group’s agencies in UK, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain.
Emma’s career began in 1986 working in a communications agency specialising in the Government’s privatisation programme. Her first ‘in-house’ role was as Head of Marketing & Communications for ProShare, a body set up by the London Stock Exchange and industry to promote wider share ownership. She later became Head of Investor Services for Charles Schwab.
Emma is also actively involved in not-for-profit and philanthropic work. She is currently Deputy Chair of both Green Finance Institute and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. She is the former Chair of Target Ovarian Cancer and of the Barbican Centre Trust after 9 years in both roles. She is also a former trustee of The Wiener Holocaust Library, Children of St Mary’s Intensive Care (‘COSMIC’) and Nightingale Hammerson.
She is passionate about the arts and is an avid sculptor, and started life as a tenor saxophonist studying with the late Bobby Wellins.
Emma was recognised for her distinguished contribution to the communications sector with the Freedom of the City of London award in 2017and is a Member of the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights.