Google's head of communications and public affairs, Corey duBrowa, will leave the company in June 2023 to serve as the CEO of global PR firm Burson Cohn & Wolfe
Eleanor Hawkins / Axios :
Context & Ripple Effects
The exit continues a long churn at the top of Google's communications and policy bench: Rachel Whetstone held this same portfolio before her 2015 move to Uber, and the company announced Susan Molinari would leave her D.C. policy lead role back in 2018, followed by a reorganization of its global lobbying operations aimed at emerging markets amid mounting regulatory pressure.
duBrowa's destination is notable: rather than moving to another platform, he crosses to the agency side as CEO of Burson Cohn & Wolfe, one of the largest global PR firms — a sign that corporate-affairs veterans of Big Tech are now prized hires for the firms advising everyone else.
First-order effects
- Burson Cohn & Wolfe installs a new global CEO with direct experience running communications at one of the world's most heavily scrutinized companies, effective June 2023.
- Google must backfill its head of communications and public affairs while its policy apparatus is still being reshaped after the lobbying reorganization.
Second-order effects
- BCW gains an internal advocate who understands what tech clients need under regulatory fire, sharpening its pitch against rival global agencies competing for Big Tech accounts.
- Google's competitors and agency rivals gain a recruiting template: the pool of ex-platform communications chiefs is now a proven CEO pipeline, raising the market price for senior corporate-affairs talent.
Third-order effects
- If the Whetstone-to-Uber and duBrowa-to-agency moves are a pattern rather than exceptions, Big Tech's top communications roles function less as career endpoints than as springboards — pushing platforms toward shorter tenures and agencies toward deeper institutional knowledge of their largest clients.
- As regulatory scrutiny keeps expanding the scope of corporate affairs work, expect the boundary between in-house tech comms leadership and the agency world to keep blurring.
The trend: Big Tech's communications and policy leadership has become a revolving door feeding agencies and rivals, as rising regulatory pressure makes veteran corporate-affairs operators more valuable on the outside.