WHEN Jacob Puthenparambil set up Redhill Communications in 2014, he had a lofty goal: to build a global public relations (PR) agency that would rival big names such as Ogilvy and Edelman.

“There were four to five global PR companies that dominated the market back then, and about two dozen small boutique Singapore firms,” he told The Business Times. “I felt there was a huge gap between the two.”

As the leading incumbents tended to “automatically” sweep contracts from multinational corporations, local firms had fewer opportunities to win large contracts and were stuck with smaller clients, he added.