Brian Kilgore
Brian Kilgore helps clients facing a crisis or when they require government relations.
Brian A. Kilgore provides senior level counsel to First Principles Communication and its clients.
He understands communications.
He has more than 40 years communication experience in journalism, advertising, marketing and public relations. He has worked in virtually every industry, serving a huge range of clients and employers: From bagels to brokerage, telephones to tourism, lawyers to lobsters.
He’s a past president of the Toronto Public Relations Society (Toronto Chapter, the largest chapter in Canada), and has written and lectured widely on public relations. At CPRS, he was also the National By-Laws Officer and an accreditation judge.
He understands business, from the general management, operational, marketing, sales, and financial points of view, thanks in part to his years as an executive at Northern Electric / Northern Telecom and CNCP Telecommunications.
Brian always takes the broadest possible view of public relations, looking at how all business decisions affect the company’s reputation and each stakeholder group (customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, regulators, politicians and the public-at-large) in particular. The best way to avoid a crisis is to prevent it from happening in the first place.
During client crises or for government relations, Brian takes the lead in salvaging clients’ reputations through the media, or negotiating with federal, provincial, and municipal governments to advance the reputation of FPC clients.
He was formally trained in business journalism at the University of Toronto, and informally educated by editors at trade magazines, Macleans and Chatelaine, and The Financial Post. He joined three public relations agencies, and then left the agency world to become Director of Public Relations at Northern Electric / Northern Telecom and then Director of Public Affairs at CNCP Telecommunications.
He was recruited by Burson Marsteller, then the world’s largest PR agency, staying a year before leaving in 1986 to establish his own PR firm.
His clients included several of the organizations employing Jana Schilder, and after she established First Principles and it became busier, he became increasingly involved in serving FPC’s clients.
He is also a photographer, specializing in editorial portraits that have run in many trade magazines, Macleans and Chatelaine, most major Canadian newspapers, on many web sites, and in international publications.
He started his career during high school, working as a photographer for the three newspapers in Moncton one summer, and then becoming a stringer for The Globe and Mail. He was educated as an economist at York, but returned to journalism upon graduation.