By: Christos Makridis
Ten years ago in the hot summer sun of Raleigh, North Carolina, you could have walked over to Halifax Mall by the legislative building and found a then-33-year-old Jon Lindsay Phillips on stage in front of five thousand Carolinians, leading a group of clergy, NC NAACP members, and various “fusion politics” activists in song—original songs written by he and other artists in the “NC Music Love Army” collective, conceived to support Rev. William Barber III and the Forward Together Moral Monday Movement. But now, Phillips runs a sophisticated, boutique public relations agency focused on helping companies specializing in emerging technology.
At the time, Phillips, a graduate of Queens University of Charlotte, and later, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA in Writing Program (2005), lived in Charlotte, NC, was a full-time artist and producer under his first two names – not realizing that he had been involved with a version of PR. From 2006-2009, Phillips had been back in Charlotte after grad school for fiction writing, working on the 21st floor of the Bank of America Corporate Center as an HR analyst, all while moonlighting on nights, weekends—and weeknights, too, in the early days of remote work—to get his music career off the ground. Phillips’ main gigs at the time: keyboard player extraordinaire, background singer, and music director of sorts for Charlottean Benji Hughes (New West/Merge Records); bandleader/singer/songwriter in his own right with two power pop outfits, The Young Sons, and The Catch Fire; and plans to begin work that would one day comprise the Jon Lindsay solo catalog.
It was in these early musical environs that Phillips, out of underwhelm and disappointment, found himself becoming quickly interested in and involved with the outbound communications related to the recordings and tours for his own projects, and those he soon began to produce.
Phillips began challenging and pushing the his labels’ and publishers’ PR firms to think differently, try harder and do better, and to put him out there in more organic, interesting, raw and contrarian ways. “I couldn’t believe how generic and ‘safe’ these leaflets and materials were- totally afraid to be eschewed. I rolled my eyes so hard at copy and positioning that was either totally flat and templated, or so self-congratulatory it was unbearable,” said Phillips.
Phillips – then 5 releases into a solo career with momentum, publishing deals, recognition from Ad Age for TV commercial composition, and Vice’s “Best of 2012” – decided in 2013 to devote the next 4 years to political music, taking the helm directing public relations for the NC Music Love Army- the 50+ member 501c3 he co-founded with Caitlin Cary (of Whiskeytown), in addition to serving as the group’s co-founder and music producer. The group included musical luminaries like Rhiannon Giddens, American Aquarium, Hiss Golden Messenger, The Love Language, Chris Stamey, Pierce Freelon, and members of the Mountain Goats and Black Crowes.
Over the course of fourteen releases, the “Love Army” brought visibility and support to the progressive causes of the people of NC at the time, in no small part due to the power of the creative and aggressive earned media campaigns Phillips and his team were able to execute, receiving coverage in The Washington Post, Salon, Southern Poverty Law Center, Rolling Stone, on MSBNC, CNN, the “big 3” news networks, and in many daily papers of record, like the Charlotte Observer, who profiled Phillip’s journalistic, investigative approach to both songwriting and truth-seeking, in the case of Lennon Lacy, a young from Bladenboro, NC, believed to be lynched. Phillips’ issue-based songs such as “Dear Mr. McCrory” captured the imagination—and pocketbooks—of supporters around the country, and the “NCMLA” raised funds for its progressive causes and candidates as a result of running protest songs through conventional mainstream distribution and promotional channels, including the college radio industrial complex, the independent and mainstream music press, and broadcast television.
From Politics And Entertainment To NYC Agencies
Following a European tour in 2016 behind “Cities and Schools” (File 13 Records), the third Jon Lindsay LP, Phillips finally accepted one of the many PR agency job offers from New York that had been coming in for several years stemming from the visibility of his work with the NCMLA. One short year after moving to NYC, he became executive director at RLM Public Relations, leading a team of 12, and architecting the public-facing communications programs of a slew of publicly-traded companies (Interxion, Citi, Aon) and hot startups (Wondery, HashtagPaid, Green Flower Media, Foria). Phillips climbed the ranks to chief operating officer at RLM and then chief growth officer of CMW Media, subway-commuting daily from Brooklyn to work 50-60 hours a week in midtown Manhattan’s agency jungle. During these years, he completely retreated from the relentless touring, and concentrated exclusively on mastering his new full-time craft- save the new batch of songs he’d begin to shape, again on nights and weekends.
“In many ways, the political years were amazing, formative, and I wouldn’t change a thing, but I was all of a sudden 36, had spent all of my very humble savings on advancing my causes and working for free. Making the leap to agency life was honestly more about trying to make a run at earning some decent money to attain more control over my music life, by taking what I’d learned about storytelling, coalition and fusion team building at the grassroots level and doing it at scale, and for businesses, for the first time. I was totally burned out from the road and the sheer exhaustion of full-time activism on top of an already stressful full-time artist life, and knew I’d have to retool my relationship to music in order to enjoy it again. Music could no longer be the only source of income, or it would never again be fun. Maybe PR as a day job could save my relationship with music,” said Phillips.
Then, Phillips launched PhillComm Global in 2021 as the CEO and founder of his first fully-fledged PR with the motto “highly bespoke solutions for visionary businesses.” Specialty practice areas are rooted in emerging tech, including: AI, cyber security, sustainability, infrastructure, blockchain technology and other global, mostly business-to-business sectors. The agency’s services pillars offered are conventional: earned and owned media, content creation, brand development, thought leadership, speaker program, awards, etc. But it is Phillips’ highly unconventional approach to launches and go-to-market strategy, bolstered with a “Y-combinator style” methodology for partnerships, networking and cross-client pollination that are turning heads in the industry and achieving serious client results.
“We are a metaverse company working on treating PTSD in military veterans using VR, before we’ll eventually move on to other groups at risk for suicidal ideation and self-harm,” said Robert Bell, CEO of 2B3D, a PhillComm client. “Jon immediately recognized that the biggest missing piece in our value proposition at launch was that we hadn’t addressed the addiction piece. He conceived and brokered a partnership with his cognitive behavioral therapy client, BioCorRx, who he was working with on a groundbreaking implant for overdose prevention at the time, and we soon formed a plan to launch a joint offering that really opened a lot of doors in our thinking, and our long-term play.”
“We’ve been working with Jon and his teams for almost 4 years now, starting with his earlier agencies up through today at PhillComm,” said Justis Kao, Chief Content Officer at Loop Media, Inc. “It’s been impressive to see the way he powered our PR program and uplist to NYSE last year with the same zeal, vigor, and creativity that he brings to the world of startups. He and his team truly possess the knowledge and affinity for our brand that we like to see from our own employees. That’s rare these days, and certainly helps in getting our messages out there effectively.”
In under two years, PhillComm Global has skyrocketed some of the most well-known projects in several of the most explosive, hypergrowth categories, representing Sei Labs, Sentinel Network, Phi Labs, RAIN Technologies, ALTRD, Arcanum Capital, Comdex, Nsure.com, Robin, Ronin Content Studios, Solar Labs, Tokenomics.Agency LTD., The William S. Dutterer Trust, Zipped Script, and others.
“Jon and his teams are working in a way you just don’t see out there in the PR landscape, but especially in blockchain, where most firms bill themselves as crypto-native and make that case,” said Dan Edlebeck, head of growth for Phi Labs. “Generally, with those firms that are good, they can cover the pubs native to the [crypto] space and that’s it. Jon’s teams run some of the most colorful and effective blockchain PR campaigns because there are no boxes on his thinking. He was the first person putting web3 infrastructure developers on mainstream trad-fi markets shows on cable TV because he knew it was possible with the right messages and he had a vision. His campaign for Sei Labs alone should be considered one of the first perfect textbook hybrid campaigns in simultaneously servicing Wall Street, The Alley, The Valley- and the complex global world of anons, node-hosters, stakers and the media they consume.”
Leading Industry Forward
Phillips believes that subject matter expertise and experience must be part of a marketing strategy, rather than mundane announcements or promotional stories. He believes the current era with the ‘Fancy New York PR Agency’ and its ivory-towered, mercurial leadership is winding down as readers increasingly question what they read and want more from the press.
“It’s such a relief and a long time coming to see this industry starting to move on from the ‘old gods.’ The openness and decentralization we are seeing in so many industries is exposing much of the smoke and mirrors in the agency world, creating an opportunity for firms like ours to trade in an honest, transparent work-product that is not only results-based, but adds new types of results on top of the earned media firepower we’re known for,” said Phillips. In fact, many PhillComm clients are just as excited about the business development opportunities that are created for them as they are getting a feature in TechCrunch. “They understand that we sit at an important nexus of technology, culture, and capital and that we have an extremely unique pipeline and network that can advance their business goals easily as much as the press coverage. The model we’re creating flips a lot of tired norms upside down, easily the biggest one being that management is completely divorced from the frontline trenches of the account. I live on the front lines,” he continued.
And, as for those songs in the “moonlight” pile for Jon Lindsay album 4? They were slowly recorded in LA over the past 4 years and will see release in early 2024. “My amazing wife also happens to be our general manager at PhillComm,” said Phillips. “We’re expecting our first child in late September this year, so as she’d say, ‘One release at a time.’”
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