VCCP Roar, the parent company of Sling & Stone, is leaning into a few areas of growth: social influencer marketing, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and executive visibility.
For VCCP Roar chief executive Stephanie Brimacombe, the integration of brand and reputation is only coming closer together.
“There is a new era of executive visibility from our perspective,” she said. “Brands and corporate leaders need to make sure that your earned messages, across whatever channel they’re going out, are laddering up very closely to the paid media articulation for a brand.
“Are you delivering and living up to everything that you’re setting the expectation for as a brand director and a growth metric, right through to how that’s articulated in earned?”
In APAC, VCCP Roar is represented by the communications agency Sling & Stone, which it acquired in 2021, and GOVT VCCP in Singapore.
VCCP is looking to expand its footprint into other parts of Asia, but Brimacombe remained coy on which countries the challenger communications network is targeting.
“We are really interested in all of the growth markets in the region,” she said. “Where we see a real opportunity in the communications business is that this is the era of executive visibility. The kind of rock star CEO world has passed, but executive visibility in terms of delivering trust is fundamental to what we deliver for clients.
“Seven in 10 people would argue that they are more likely to buy from a brand if they know a CEO is somebody that they would trust. So having those voices behind brands, has become incredibly important again.”
The rise of GEO
Brimacombe, who caught up with B&T at Sling & Stone’s Surry Hills office, said that optimising GEO has become an intrinsic part of public relations and that VCCP Roar weaves it into every pitch response strategy.
Sling & Stone chief executive James Hutchinson told B&T that integrated comms budgets, which combine influencer marketing, media and PR are becoming much more common.
“As an example, we ran an event for Levi’s recently, where it was about 70/30 split between creator and media and what’s the best way to reach their target audience. We don’t treat it as ‘this is a media campaign or this is an influencer campaign’,” he said.
Another trend in Australia is that far more briefs have a GEO element.
“Maybe six months ago, a single digit percentage of our client base would be talking about it. Now, more than half of our client base is asking about it and putting varying degrees of investment,” he said.
“It’s obviously such an evolving space because the large language models are moving and changing what works and what doesn’t. It’s just like the early days of SEO where there was a lot of quick wins that people hoped would get through.
“We’re we’re finding out that a lot of those quick wins don’t actually help you in the long term. What actually helps is a really good strong story that’s told consistently across the channels. You need to make sure you reach those audiences, and have the right mix of first party brand owned content as well as third-party messaging through things like earned and social.”
Hutchinson said that one area a lot of brands get wrong with AI and GEO is measurement.
“They want that one easy sort of metric to track. And so in the AI space at the moment, it is things like presence and visibility,” he said.
Sling & Stone works with clients including Origin Energy, Levi’s, Krispy Creme, Google Cloud and Reddit. Hutchinson said the agency has reported double digit growth in recent years.
“We’re continuing to grow. In 2025, we were just named Provoke’s Large Agency of the Year for ANZ and also for this year’s Communication and Public Relations Australia (CPRA) Golden Target Awards.”
