Vlad Drazdovich

Who You Are

Tell us who you are and what you do.

I’m Vlad Drazdovich, Vice President at Red Banyan. I’ve spent more than a decade in strategic communications, and over that time I’ve touched pretty much every part of agency operations: crisis management, client relations, business development, and more recently, building out how we use AI across the firm. These days most of my time goes toward figuring out how artificial intelligence fits into strategic communications, both for our clients and for how we operate internally.

What does your company do, and who does it serve?

Red Banyan is a strategic communications firm built around what we call Powering Reputation. We handle proactive brand building, crisis preparedness, and rapid crisis response, and we do all three under one roof instead of treating them as separate services. Our clients range from businesses and nonprofits to public institutions, political figures, executives, and well-known individuals. Some of our work is quiet, building a reputation over time. Some of it happens in the middle of the night when something has gone very wrong.

How big is the operation today, in terms of team size, markets, and scope?

We’re a deliberately small team, about thirty people, all senior communications specialists. We don’t run a large junior staff model. Most of our work is domestic, but we also handle international engagements, including work for organizations and governments outside the US. Staying lean has been intentional. It means every person on an account is someone with real experience, not someone learning on the client’s time.

How You Got Here

What were you doing before this, and what made you make the leap?

I joined Red Banyan as an intern right out of college. I majored in communications with a minor in political science. Even back then I was interested in how messages get built and how differently people receive them depending on who’s talking and how. The idea that strategic messaging could actually shape outcomes, for a company or a public figure or an entire narrative, was what pulled me into this field in the first place.

What’s the hardest thing you had to figure out in the first year?

Honestly, almost everything was hard that first year. I graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0, and none of that prepared me for the pace of agency work. The speed was unlike anything I’d experienced. I spent most of that first year just trying to keep up and get better at the actual craft. It took a few years before I felt like I actually knew what I was doing, rather than just keeping my head above water.

Was there a moment where the whole thing nearly fell apart? What happened?

Yes, early on. Sometime in my first year, I hit a point where I genuinely didn’t know if I could sustain the pace. Evan Nierman, our founder, sat me down and asked me directly if I was fully committed to this, if this was really what I wanted. I remember knowing right away that saying no wasn’t something I was willing to do. So I said yes, and I doubled down. I put in whatever hours it took. That conversation was the turning point, though it still took time after that before things really clicked.

What Makes You Different

Why does your company win deals? What do clients come to you for that they can’t easily find elsewhere?

Most PR firms pick a lane. Some focus on getting clients into the press. Others focus on crisis response. What sets Red Banyan apart is that we do both, at a high level, under one model. The same strategic thinking that builds a brand is what protects it when something threatens to unravel it.

We manage around 200 crises a year, and we have people who do nothing but crisis work, full time. That’s not a side specialty for us, it’s a core discipline. And it’s not just our own opinion that we’re good at it. Red Banyan has been ranked the No. 1 boutique crisis communications firm in the US by O’Dwyer’s, named the No. 1 Communications Firm in the World for Communications Excellence by the World Communications Forum Association in Davos, and recognized in Chambers and Partners’ crisis risk management guide, one of the most respected independent rankings in the industry.

Who do you consider your real competition, and how do you stay ahead of them?

As the top boutique crisis firm in the country, we end up competing with agencies many times our size, with hundreds of staff. There are only a handful of firms doing top tier crisis work, and anyone in this industry knows who they are, so there’s no need to name names.

What’s changed the competitive landscape more than anything else is AI. Layoffs across media and PR have pushed agencies to invest heavily in AI just to keep pace, and the way companies get discovered online has shifted underneath everyone’s feet. Search engine optimization used to be the game. Now it’s about whether AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini actually cite you, which depends far more on earned credibility than it does on keywords or backlinks. For example, research from Muck Rack found that the vast majority of links AI systems cite in their answers come from earned, non paid sources like journalism and third party coverage, not from a company’s own website. Agencies that understand this shift, and help their clients build toward it, are the ones that are going to come out ahead. The ones still optimizing for the old rules are going to wonder why they’ve gone quiet.

What’s a decision you made that most people in your position wouldn’t have?

Staying at Red Banyan for over ten years. I started as an intern and worked my way up through nearly every role the firm has, and I’m now part of the leadership team. Most people who climb that fast tend to leave for a bigger name and a bigger paycheck somewhere else. I never felt the pull. What mattered more to me was whether I was still being challenged, still learning something new. Red Banyan kept giving me that, so I never had a reason to look elsewhere.

I also think the instinct to job hop for the sake of a resume line is starting to fade industry wide. For a long time, the assumption was that working at a string of big name firms proved your value. I think that’s shifting. Employers are starting to value people who stayed somewhere, grew there, and built real depth, over people who moved every eighteen months to chase a title.

Where You’re Going

What’s the biggest bet you’re making right now?

AI, without question. We’re investing in tools, workflows, and training across the entire agency. We know that AI fluency is going to separate the agencies that make it through the next few years from the ones that don’t. Firms that don’t become genuinely AI enabled, not just AI aware, are going to struggle to stay relevant.

What does success look like for you in the next three years, concretely?

The whole industry is in the middle of a transition driven by AI, and so is the rest of the economy. The next three years are going to determine which agencies come out the other side intact. Success for us means being fully AI enabled before that window closes.

What’s a shift happening in your industry that most people aren’t taking seriously enough yet?

Everyone’s talking about AI. What almost nobody’s talking about is what it’s doing to how junior people actually learn this job. When I started, the entry level work, such as drafting pitches, writing first pass press releases, doing the research nobody wanted to do, was tedious, but it’s also how you built your skills. You learned what a good pitch sounds like by writing forty bad ones first. Now AI can produce a lot of that first draft in seconds, which is  useful, but it also means a lot of young professionals are skipping the part where they struggle and actually absorb the fundamentals. I worry that in a few years we’re going to have people who are very fast at prompting and very thin on judgment, because judgment is the thing you only get from doing the hard version of the work yourself, more than once. Agencies that figure out how to keep that training intact, even as AI takes over the grunt work, are going to end up with stronger teams than the ones that neglect that part.

The Person Behind the Title

What drives you, beyond building a successful business?

Curiosity. I like learning new things and getting better at my craft. That’s true professionally, but it’s true for me as a person too. I don’t think that drive ever really goes away if you have it.

What’s the hardest part of the job that never shows up in press releases?

Setbacks. Every business goes through stretches where it feels like two steps forward and one step back. The part nobody sees is how many of those setbacks happen before you get to talk about a win. No path to this kind of success is smooth. It comes down to sticking with it and putting in consistent effort even when the progress isn’t visible yet.

What’s one thing you’d tell someone who wants to be where you are?

Focus on your skills before you focus on your title. Think about what you can actually add to the place you work, and treat its goals like they’re your own. Employers value people who can take a task and execute it well. But they value even more the people who bring them new ideas and new tasks without being asked. That’s the difference between someone who does the job and someone who moves the business forward.