Hill & Knowlton Brand Guidelines: A 1927 Cleveland Firm, a Plus Sign and Burson

A reporter, a bank and a second name.

Hill & Knowlton began in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1927. English Wikipedia says it was founded by John W. Hill, a newspaper reporter turned businessman, whose first two clients were the Cleveland-based Union Trust Company and the Otis Steel Company. The company’s own website still gives 1927 as its founding year.

The second name on the door arrived in 1933. When Union Trust closed in the Great Depression, Hill hired its former director of advertising and publicity, Don Knowlton, and the two established Hill & Knowlton of Cleveland, according to English Wikipedia. In 1934 Hill moved to New York to open a second office, while Knowlton ran the original Cleveland office until 1964. English Wikipedia gives New York City as the firm’s headquarters to this day. Hill served as chairman and chief executive until 1962, the same source says, and by 1977, according to the same source, the firm had 560 employees, with 36 offices in the United States and 18 abroad.

Its commercial clients in those decades included consumer goods and industrial companies; English Wikipedia names Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Warner-Lambert and Texaco among the firm’s clients in the late 1970s. The two founders’ surnames, joined by an ampersand, became the name the business would carry, in one form or another, for almost a century.

JWT, WPP and a plus sign.

Hill & Knowlton passed into larger groups in two steps. In 1980 it was acquired by the JWT Group, the parent of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, and continued to operate as an independent business under it, English Wikipedia says. It expanded into China in 1984 and in 1986 bought Carl Byoir & Associates, another public relations firm with a national presence in the United States. In 1987 JWT was acquired by WPP, the London-based marketing and communications group, which has owned Hill & Knowlton ever since.

Expansion continued through acquisitions and new offices. English Wikipedia lists a stake in the Argentine firm Vox Consulting in 2000, the Miami agency SAMCOR in 2002 and a majority holding in Rikes Communications of Hong Kong in 2008; an office in Nairobi opened in 2009 in partnership with the Kenyan company Scangroup, and new offices followed in China, India and Colombia in 2010. In January 2011 the firm announced a merger with Public Strategies, another WPP company, founded in Austin, Texas, in 1988. Jack Martin, the founder of Public Strategies, led the combined firm from 2011 until 2019, when he was succeeded by AnnaMaria DeSalva, English Wikipedia says.

That merger brought the first change to the name. In December 2011 the firm repositioned itself as Hill+Knowlton Strategies, often shortened to H+K, a move Marketing-Interactive later described as reflecting a greater emphasis on strategic communications advice. The plus sign replaced the ampersand in the name for almost twelve years. In September 2022 the firm acquired JeffreyGroup, a Miami-based agency with offices in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, adding to Grupo Ideal in Brazil; in March 2023 the German healthcare communications agency 3K Agentur für Kommunikation joined the group, and in 2023 English Wikipedia says it was chosen by Costa Coffee to handle consumer communications in the UK.

How agencies present themselves.

Public relations and communications agencies sell advice, so their visual identity is mostly carried by what they publish about themselves. Case-study pages, award announcements and research reports do much of the work that a product range does for a manufacturer. FleishmanHillard, for example, announced in October 2026 that a campaign it made with Icelandair had been named the top entry in PRovoke Media’s Global SABRE Awards, and the guides in this set treat such pages as the agency’s own dated claims.

Names change more often than logos in this field, usually after a merger. Founders’ surnames are joined, shortened or dropped, and a hyphen can disappear: FleishmanHillard closed up its two founders’ names in 2013, English Wikipedia says. When holding groups rearrange their agencies, one firm may also keep another as a dedicated brand inside it, as FleishmanHillard did with Porter Novelli in February 2026.

Many firms present their offices and their people rather than objects. Partner profiles, office lists and pages on how the firm is owned and run take the place of a catalogue; Brunswick’s site, for instance, gives a page to each of its offices and describes the firm as a partnership. Some firms also publish magazines or research series under their own names, which become a second visible identity beside the logo.

Ownership and leadership are recorded on corporate pages, in company registers and in trade and business press, and they change with each acquisition, investment or appointment. The guides in this set give office, staff and partner counts only as a dated source states them, name the owner as of that source, and treat colours and typefaces as an unofficial interpretation unless the agency has published its own.

From H+K back to H&K, then into Burson.

The plus sign did not last. In November 2023 Hill+Knowlton Strategies returned to its original name, Hill & Knowlton, shortened to H&K, with a refreshed visual identity, website and social media presence, Marketing-Interactive reported on 6 November 2023. According to the release quoted in that report, the new identity was meant to convey boldness and modernity while paying homage to the company’s heritage, and was developed with employees, alumni, clients and trade partners. The rebrand came with new units: H&K Advisory, which the report says had more than 50 advisers working where corporate strategy meets communication; Global Horizons, focused on the economies of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Gulf; and H&K Sonar, a predictive risk identification tool built with the AI company Pendulum Intelligence.

Less than three months later the firm’s future changed again. On 25 January 2024 WPP announced that it would merge Hill & Knowlton with BCW to form Burson, Marketing-Interactive and B&T reported that day. WPP said the combined agency would have more than 6,000 employees in 43 markets, that its name honoured Harold Burson, and that it would be operational from 1 July 2024. Corey duBrowa, then global CEO of BCW, was named Burson’s global CEO, and AnnaMaria DeSalva, then global chairman and chief executive of Hill & Knowlton, its global chairman; GCI Health and AxiCom were to continue as brands within Burson. The Hill & Knowlton name has carried on inside that structure: in 2026 its own website says Hill & Knowlton is part of Burson Group, “a strategic network of highly specialized global agencies” operating under WPP, and describes itself as “the original strategic communication company,” a claim that is its own.

For a design guide, Hill & Knowlton shows how much identity can sit in a single character: an ampersand that became a plus sign in 2011 and an ampersand again in 2023. Compare Burson, the agency it was folded into, and WPP, its owner since 1987. For this guide we use an ink blue, a slate grey and a pale stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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