Singapore PR Agency Formalizes European Expansion in Switzerland
Singapore PR agency Ellerton opens Geneva office, signaling independent APAC firms are positioning between Asia and Europe's growth corridors.
A Singapore-founded communications firm has quietly been building a European client base for years. Now it's making the move official.
Ellerton & Co., the PR and integrated marketing agency established in Singapore in 2015, has launched a formal European practice based in Switzerland, led by newly appointed Europe lead Gloria Montgomery. The move formalizes what the agency's own data already confirmed: Switzerland accounts for about 20% of its client base, before a single office was opened there.
That's the same threshold the agency hit in Japan before expanding there. The playbook is intentional.
Switzerland as a Strategic Base
The choice of Geneva is not accidental. Switzerland sits at the center of a dense cluster of multinational headquarters and multilateral institutions, including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Trade Organization. It's also the Swiss government's own designated gateway for deepening ties with Southeast Asia. Bern adopted a formal Southeast Asia Strategy running from 2023 to 2026, its fifth dedicated geographic foreign policy focus. Commercial and diplomatic interest in APAC from Switzerland is institutionally backed, not aspirational.
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Montgomery herself reflects this positioning. Her background spans the United Nations and Amnesty International, plus commercial roles at PwC and The Information Lab. This is not a media pitching hire. It's a public affairs and senior stakeholder hire, designed for the world of regulators, diplomats, and policy environments where European expansion often gets complicated.
The Two-Way Gap Ellerton Is Filling
The agency is betting on a gap that flows in both directions. European companies in their market-entry phase increasingly want to reach consumers and partners across Southeast Asia and India, but they don't have teams on the ground to do it. As Oliver Ellerton, the agency's managing partner, put it: "Most of our European clients tell us the same thing. They see the Asian growth opportunity clearly, but they don't have a marketing team in Singapore or Jakarta, let alone in Hanoi or Manila. They need a partner who can be their team on the ground: localizing messaging, working in their time zones, and helping them earn credibility in markets that don't reward generic playbooks."
The reverse problem is just as real. Asian brands building recognition in Europe run into a continent that is not one market. It is dozens of separate media environments, languages, regulatory bodies, and stakeholder communities that require dedicated expertise to navigate. A network contact in Brussels doesn't cut it when a Southeast Asian brand needs substantive media engagement across German, French, and Italian-language press simultaneously.
What the Expansion Signals
Ellerton is not the first to identify the cross-border opportunity. Comms8 has built a dedicated Asia-Europe bidirectional practice, and UP for Asia focuses on Nordic and European brands entering Asian markets. But Ellerton's expansion adds a distinctive layer: it is one of the few independent APAC agencies to plant a formal, full-time presence in Europe rather than relying on referrals from a global network.
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The network piece matters too. Ellerton recently joined GlobalCom PR Network as the exclusive Southeast Asia representative. That connects it to a network of 80 agencies across more than 100 countries, with US$37.8 million in annual revenue and over 1,400 consultants. Immediate referral infrastructure across continental Europe is now built in.
The broader trend points in one direction. Asia Pacific's PR market is growing at roughly 9.3% annually through 2034, the fastest rate of any region globally. Europe tracks at about 6.9%. Agencies that can position themselves between the two growth corridors don't have to choose which wave to ride.
The internal governance changes at Ellerton, including Oliver Ellerton's elevation to managing partner and the promotion of two colleagues to partner level, follow a pattern that typically precedes serious international expansion. The agency has now added India and Europe in the span of two years.
For comms leaders across Asia, the move is a signal worth watching. Specialized intermediaries that genuinely know both ends of the corridor are becoming commercially viable at the independent level. The era of relying on a global network's loosely affiliated local offices to manage cross-continental mandates now has a credible alternative.
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