40 Under 40 2020: Richard Brosgill, ForwardPMX

Richard Brosgill

Managing director, APAC and Russia
ForwardPMX 
Hong Kong

Treat interns well—one day, they may be running your company. Richard Brosgill is living proof. The once-eager sales and marketing intern at ForwardPMX has ascended to the corner office within 10 years. He now runs the show in Asia Pacific and Russia for the company, with 120 staff across the region under his wing.

Brosgill is now, as his fellow agency head Edison Woo puts it, “the core of our six offices in APAC”. The light-footed marketing acrobat has dived into a variety of roles, from channel activation to channel innovation to team management to client leadership, and also served as business director for British Airways, HostelWorld and Gucci.

Moving from the London headquarters to Hong Kong, Brosgill established ForwardPMX’s APAC headquarters in 2016, opened the Singapore shop, and expanded business footprints to China, Japan, South Korea and Moscow. 

In the past four years, Brosgill’s leadership in APAC coincided with revenue growth of 25% year-on-year. As brands increasingly moved marketing in-house, Brosgill decided to strike while the iron was hot and extended the APAC office’s proposition beyond media buying to strategy and consultancy. This led to Brosgill helping travel experience platform Klook to develop an in-house model that provided the tools, technology and training to scale its team. The model would go on to serve as a template for ForwardPMX’s global business to support its partners.

With Brosgill at the helm, ForwardPMX in APAC signed 151 contracts in the past year. It closed out 2020 with 28% growth, riding on key client accounts like Uber Eats and Marina Bay Sands.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Brosgill leaned into new industries, scoring a lucrative Adobe win that closed the revenue gap following reductions from the travel portfolio. Meanwhile, the former intern did not neglect the people working under him during the difficult period. He secured resources from ForwardPMX’s global offices to help the APAC team manage local shortages and sent gifts to each member of the team as a gratitude for their resilience—walking the talk he often gives during client consultations on how to navigate and lead through adversity.