Andy Polansky is president of Weber Shandwick, a leading global public relations agency with offices in 81 countries around the world. Andy has been with the agency for more than 25 years, and was named to his current global role in March 2004, after leading the firm’s North American business. Over the past few years, Weber Shandwick has been recognized as PRWeek's inaugural Global Agency Report Card Gold Medal Winner, an Agency of the Decade and A-List Agency by Advertising Age, Global Agency of the Year by The Holmes Report, and International Consultancy of the Year by PRWeek UK. The firm also has won numerous "best place to work" awards around the world including PR News and The Holmes Report.
Andy has extensive experience in a broad range of communications disciplines, including business-to-business and consumer product marketing, corporate communications and issues management. Andy led the development of Weber Shandwick’s Client Relationship Leader (CRL) program, which has been featured as a Harvard Business School case study. He serves as a senior strategist on a number of corporate and business-to-business client engagements, and has particular expertise working with consumer electronics, financial services, consumer products, telecommunications and technology clients.
PRWeek US has featured Andy in its “Who to Watch” issue and earlier in his career he was named “All Star of the Future” by Inside PR magazine. Programs he has developed have won numerous industry awards, and in 2010 he was named to the PR News Hall of Fame.
Currently, Andy is chair of the Council of Public Relations Firms, which seeks to advance the business of public relations firms by building the market and firms’ value as strategic business partners. He sits on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), an independent foundation in the field of public relations focusing on research and education.
Andy also has served as a non-executive director of Freeplay Energy, a leading global supplier of clean, off-the-grid energy products, and of MobileWave Group plc.
Prior to joining Weber Shandwick (as a member of a firm then known as Bozell Public Relations), Andy was a municipal reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, PA, a business and feature writer for the Princeton Packet in Princeton, NJ, and a sportswriter at The Trentonian in Trenton, NJ.
Andy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from The College of New Jersey.