TelecityGroup’s data centres are behind many of the companies you know and love. But how did James Tyler, marketing and communications director, work his way up? Jenni Marsh meets him

Photographs by Jeff Leyshon

For most undergraduates, an enthusiasm for alcohol is an academic, not to mention financial, handicap. But for James Tyler it was his keen interest in wine that kickstarted an illustrious communications career - and earned him the campus moniker of Mr PR.

While studying for an MA in History of Philosophy at university in Aberdeen, Tyler – now the marketing and communications director of TelecityGroup PLC – founded a wine society. “I was interested in wine – as every student is – but I wanted to learn more,” he explains. “So I set up a wine soc, but tried to do it on a more commercial basis.” It was the 90s, when wine TV shows had risen in popularity, and so Tyler began writing to celebrities known for their connoisseurship of a good grape.

“So I wrote speculatively to Oz Clarke and asked him to be a patron and use his name on promotional material, and he said yes as long it didn’t mean he had to visit.” Inspired by how easy celebrity endorsement had been to secure – or how good he’d been at it – Tyler campaigned other high-profile wine lovers. He drew Oddbins into the mix to sponsor the society and turned it into one of the few campus enterprises that was profitable.

“It was the first time I understood that I enjoy starting something up and marketing it,” he explains. Upon graduating, Tyler tossed up a career in advertising and public relations and plumped for the latter. After a placement at Shell, a friend made an introduction to a contact at Porter Novelli and Tyler won a place on the graduate scheme as a trainee account manager. But while today Porter Novelli is one of the country’s biggest PR players, Tyler only stayed a year.

“I thought it would be fantastic and it wasn’t quite what I expected,” he says, diplomatically. “I went into a consumerfacing PR role with Kraft and was talking about a Terry’s Chocolate Orange launch in the morning, then rushing to a meeting about a new baby milk packaging system for Cow & Milk, and then on to a white goods retailer.” For a professional who has since focused on the tech industry, and in niche pockets such as data centres, such a broad base was perhaps not the right fit. “It was great to learn the principles of PR, and deal with some milk-industry-wide issues [for Cow & Gate], and store closures with a white goods retailer – knowing how to handle a crisis of any kind is invaluable. But it was tough going from the sheltered existence of university to real life.”

After 12 months, Tyler handed in his notice, in pursuit of some more life experience. He upped sticks to Umbria and decided to learn Italian. “I was still young and I’d had a good start to my career, but I wanted to add a few more strings to my bow.” He spent the next few years putting to good use the knowledge he had acquired in his university society start up, and eventually working for an Italian company gaining an understanding of how business works on the continent. It was a formative experience, which has told in his communications career.

Today, as a manager heading up a team of five, he favours recruits with international experience and a flair for foreign languages, who can communicate in pan-European tandem. “I’ve headed up teams where we’ve spoken seven to eight languages between us. When it came to rolling out new business across Europe and holding the hands of local managing directors, that diversity has proved to be invaluable.”

After a two-and-half year stint in Italy, Tyler decided it was time to return to the UK. In the autumn of 1998 it was the eve of the dot-com boom. After two years studying at a foreign university, he had been impressed by how modern communications were changing, particularly with the adoption of email.

“I saw a handful of US firms were investing heavily in fibre optic companies and one of the major players was Level 3 Communications, a NASDAQ-listed global telecoms business” he remembers. However, when Tyler did his research it emerged that Level 3 didn’t have any marketing or communications people in Europe. So he wrote to the company, outlining his skills and ambitions, and was invited to London for a meeting where he was hired on the spot.

Tyler’s brief was to launch the company in Europe – no small task for a 20-something with one year’s corporate experience. His primary objective was to explain in layman’s terms to the European trade media exactly what the company did and how it functioned. The majority of Europe had never heard of this US company; he needed to explain why they were investing billions of dollars into fibre optics and why it was vital.

“Simplicity has always been one of my key principles as a communicator,” says Tyler. “So I try to take any message by the principle of ‘could I explain this to my mum, and would she understand?’” He also did things the old fashioned way: schmoozing journalists, building contacts and getting the word out.

Encouraged by his success at Level 3, Tyler went on to ascend the heights of the tech world, joining CityReach – one of the first pure play data centres. But this was 2000 and by the time Tyler was recruited to head up PR and corporate relations the company was headed into an abyss that many firms wouldn’t find their way out of. During the burst of the dot-com bubble between 2000 and 2001 many firms, with previously promising futures, fell off the corporate cliff face. Even global brands such as Cisco saw its stock decline by 86%, while Amazon.com’s stock plummeted from 107 to seven dollars per share, though it rebounded later.

CityReach was not so fortunate. While Tyler joined the company briefed to prepare for its IPO later that year, when the bubble burst the demand that had been anticipated failed to materialise. The business was sold. “It was a rude awakening for me,” says Tyler, “And for a lot of people in the tech market, too. The rules we had followed were changing massively, by the sheer fact there was a whole sector of businesses that didn’t pull through.”

The proactive attitude that had kick-started his career swiftly found him another role with Baltimore Technologies in Reading as head of PR for six months – what he describes as an “interim role” before being pulled back into the data centre sector by Telecity, where he still works and for whom he has won a string of awards. The profile of the company immediately fit with Tyler’s international background. Headquartered in London, Telecity now has data centres in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Manchester, Milan, and Paris, and expanding into new European markets is a big part of its business.

While today, Telecity counts major brands such as iPlayer and Spotify as its customers, in 2002, when Tyler was hired as the company’s PR manager it was a different story. The firm was just four years old and, while Telecity’s outlook was very different to that of the likes of CityReach, its reputation had still been tainted by the dot-com crash, as had its revenues.

“It had suffered revenue losses – they weren’t bad comparatively, but people had had sky high hopes for the business, so I was joining to help bolster their communications effort to the market.” It was a crucial task. In order for the business to survive, it needed to convince the market and investors that it provided a relevant service that was in demand.

“The challenge was to tighten up that message and the story,” Tyler remembers. “Media sentiment had become extremely cynical when I joined. I pressed pause and made us all step back and think ‘who do we need to focus our energies on?’ Just as I joined a new CEO joined, there were redundancies and the marketing department was reduced to me, so my role started to broaden and the responsibilities were slung far and wide.” From reinventing the web presence, to dealing with branding, Tyler was fighting the communications battle on all fronts. He realised in order to be effective, he had to keep things simple.

The way forward, he decided, was through the trade press and so he began picking off one or two influential writers in each European market, knowing that the national technology writers would draw their material from these sources. “We took those journalists into the data centres and got them to really understand the process, how it was relevant to a lot of people and critical to the customers we had. It was re-educating really,” he explains. “Telecity now has 3,000 customers and the media sees us as an enabler - it was the birth of that message nine years ago that laid the foundation.”

Today, Telecity hosts data centres that are relied on by high street names and global brands. Tyler believes some of that custom comes from having a strong balance sheet, but that equally it would not have been achievable without conveying to the market why Telecity was a reliable and viable choice, in the shaky postcrash landscape.

More than a decade later, Tyler is still with the company. He saw the firm relist in 2006, which enabled it to access the liquidity necessary to keep building the £50 million-a-time data centres that push the business forward. And in 2007 he spearheaded a major change in the communications message, reshaping the concept of data centres as being where content meets connectivity.

“We weren’t talking about the number of customers using our centres to get content out to the online community. From Spotify to BBC iPlayer, if you’re running an online content platform you need to host in a data centre like ours to get your content out as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. So we reshaped the brand to reflect the business it had become where we were operating content and connectivity hubs. It took a while but that was a major step for the company and really resonated with people.” In 2007, Telecity got its IPO away just before the crash and has continued to weather the financial storm.

Tyler’s contribution is self-evident. This year the firm has won Most effective overall annual report (printed and online), at the IR Society Awards, made the shortlist at the Corporate Engagement Awards, and in 2011 it was ranked in Management Today magazine’s top 25 most admired companies in Britain.

Tyler says the challenges that lie ahead for the firm are of a very different nature to its previous struggles. “Energy efficiency is rising up the ladder of interest. So my role has expanded to become a public affairs role. We will be talking to the UK government about various green legislation, building our relationship with them and educating them about a market they don’t know much about.” One feels that with Tyler guiding them, the ministers will be in safe hands.