Welcome to the PR Pepper Challenge, produced in association with our good friends at Meltwater.

On the show today we've got Bieneosa Ebite, Head of Corporate Communications at Centrica.

Bieneosa talks about her role at Centrica, why she loves corporate communications and how PRs diversity stats have not moved in 10 years.

The reason we've called this series of interviews The PR Pepper Challenge is that interwoven between my chat with Bieneosa I'll be asking her three PR Pepper Challenge questions.

If she gets those questions right, PRmoment’s Ben Smith has to eat one of the chillies and if she gets the questions wrong she has to eat one of them.

The peppers are of increasing strength—so we'll begin with mild, move on to medium and finish with hot.

Here’s a summary of what Bieneosa and I discussed:

Questions:

3 mins As host of the newsbants podcast Bienoesa gives us her perspective on the COVID news cycle, including the anti-vaxxers agenda.

9 mins The first PR Pepper Challenge (unmissable drama.)

13 mins Bieneosa talks about Centrica’s approach to sustainability and ESG communications.

18 mins As a comms person what is Bieneosa’s role in Centrica’s ESG strategy?

20 mins In the second PR Pepper Challenge we ask Bieneosa how many newsbants podcasts have there been this year?

25 mins Why does Bieneosa believe PR’s D&I stats haven’t shifted in the last 10 years?

27 mins “I think there’s a real problem with discrimination and racism within the PR industry.”

28 mins Here’s the link to an interview we referred to in the show, a PRmoment video interview with Avril Lee discussing the CIPR’s Race in the Workplace: BAME lived experiences in the UK PR industry report.

30 mins What would Bieneosa do to tackle PR’s diversity problem?

34 mins What does success look like for diversity in PR?

38 mins “I’m for quotas. You can’t just have one person, you need a tipping point to change the culture in an organisation...I don’t want my niece to walk into an organisation, like what happened to me. We need to be bolder and more aggressive.”

40 mins For the 3rd PR Pepper Challenge, the question we asked Bieneosa when British Gas floated on the London stock market. Did she have to eat the final chilli?