Ed Williams

Ed Williams is Chair of the board of Aspen UK. Ed leads the 28-country Edelman business outside the United States and has worked at the firm for over a decade. This includes oversight and accountability for our work in EMEA, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Canada. He was previously President and CEO of Edelman EMEA and as CEO, led the Edelman UK and Ireland business before that. Before joining Edelman, Ed led Corporate Affairs and Communications for two global media companies – the BBC for four years and Reuters for three years. At the BBC, Ed sat on the management board and was responsible for delivering a new era of transparency reporting at the corporation, which continues to this day. Prior to these roles, Ed spent five years at financial communications consultancy Brunswick advising on the communication aspects of a range of transactions, primarily for FTSE corporates. While at Brunswick he also advised General Wesley Clark on media strategy at his evidence-giving at the Milosevic trial at the Hague and was a consultant speech writer to Gordon Brown. Ed started his career in news and television journalism, where he cut his teeth working the graveyard shift in the early days of the 24-hour news cycle. He was one of the youngest news editors at GMTV, where he worked for 5 years. Ed has served on a number of boards, including the Royal College of Art, the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, Thomson Reuters Foundation, International Crisis Group’s Advisory Council, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. He has been a Visiting Fellow of Strategy and Transformation at The Institute of Management Studies, and is an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths University, delivering regular lectures.