Reported. Produced. Represented.
For 26 years we have believed one thing about how the world pays attention: a country, a company or a cause is taken seriously because of where its story appears, not how loudly it's told.
We've spent those years on every side of that idea. We wrote nations into the world's most trusted titles. We produced the films that introduced them to global audiences. Today we hold the commercial keys to the platforms themselves.
We reported it
We started in print, and not just any print. Through the late 1990s and 2000s we researched and produced the country and economic features that ran in The New York Times, Le Monde, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Corriere della Sera, Fortune, Handelsblatt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Economist and The Daily Telegraph. And we did it on the ground, months at a time in each country, reporting from the place itself, not from head office.
The work put us in front of heads of state, cabinet ministers and the people who actually run an economy: across Africa, the Gulf, Europe and the Americas. It taught us the thing that has guided us ever since: a nation's story doesn't become credible because it's well made. It becomes credible because of the title that carries it.
We produced it
In 2013, for a Myanmar opening to the world for the first time in a generation, we created the country's first-ever nation-branding campaign, “Let the Journey Begin.” We'd built it over months on the ground, much of it through the monsoon, and we launched it at the World Economic Forum on East Asia in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar's first time hosting the Forum, with more than 900 leaders from over 50 countries present. First, a press conference for the international press. Then the moment we still come back to: at the Forum's official opening, our socio-economic film played to a room of assembled heads of state and dignitaries: a country the world had barely seen, introducing itself on a film we had made, to exactly the people whose attention it had come for. From there it travelled to BBC World News, Channel News Asia and CNN, and it began a relationship with the BBC that still runs today.
We represent it
Image Diplomacy is now the official commercial representative for BBC News, Bloomberg Media and Robb Report across ten markets. For years we placed nations in the world's most trusted media from the outside; now we hold the keys ourselves, and we open them, directly, for the governments, agencies and brands that need to reach the people who shape decisions. We've really only ever done one thing: connect a story worth telling to the platform that makes the world believe it.
The standing behind it
The trust runs both ways. Beyond the brands we represent, the United Nations' International Trade Centre and European Union programmes still retain us to build the brands of nations and sectors: in Myanmar, the Seychelles, the Comoros. Across these years we've worked in more than twenty-eight countries, from Malta and Italy to Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Brazil, India and Myanmar.
All of it sits with the two of us who started the company. When you work with Image Diplomacy, the people who plan your campaign are the people who have been doing this, at this level, for a quarter of a century.
What it means for you
For a government or an investment agency: your country's story sits where the people who allocate capital and attention already place their trust. For an agency or a brand: direct access to premium editorial platforms, run by people who have sat on both sides of the table. Either way, one conversation, not a chain.
The right platform is the difference between a message and an audience. Let the journey begin.
Gabriele Villa & Sorcha Hellyer