The Story of the Lighthouse PR Founders.

The Partnership Behind Lighthouse PR

There is no other agency in Romania — and very few anywhere in Europe — where the founding partnership brings this depth of formation, this breadth of experience, and this combination of disciplines to every client engagement.

This is not a credentials claim. Facts state that the careers behind Lighthouse PR are unarguable.

Steve Gardiner — The Marketing Architect

Steve Gardiner has never applied for a job in his life.

Every significant role in a career spanning thirty years across four continents arrived the same way — a call from someone at the top of an organisation who had identified a problem that needed solving and concluded, after exhaustive consideration, that Steve was the person to solve it.

Accenture - Management Consultant

That pattern began at University, where Steve graduated top of his year in business and economics and was immediately recruited by Accenture – not through the standard graduate process, but specifically identified and pursued by the firm.

He spent eight years there, becoming one of their most senior management consultants, leading business transformation programmes for major corporate clients.

European Marketing Chief - Electronic Arts

One of those clients was Electronic Arts (EA). Steve left Accenture to join EA as European marketing director, transforming and restructuring the entire European marketing operation and establishing the seamless pan-European product launch architecture that brought territory CEOs across multiple cultures and markets into alignment for the first time.

In an industry defined by fragmentation and territorial independence, he made coherence work.

Then Richard Branson called.

Steve became VP Marketing of Virgin — brand custodian for the entire Virgin group globally, with ultimate authority over marketing across the TMT division covering telecoms, media, and technology. Every piece of marketing across multiple Virgin businesses worldwide is routed through his function.

When Branson sold Virgin Mobile to fund the legal battle against British Airways over transatlantic landing rights, Steve left along with most of the senior team. Virgin Mobile had operated under the T-Mobile architecture. The CEO of Telekom, watching from Bonn, made the call.

Marketing Chief of Telekom.

What he found was a state-owned entity of 60,000 employees operating on communist-era principles, typically four people performing the work of one; a marketing team of 45 where only 10 were needed.

Setting Industry Benchmark for Churn Reduction

He inherited a churn management approach that had never been systematically addressed. Steve reformed it entirely. He rebuilt churn architecture as a continuous process — reducing churn by 70% and setting the industry benchmark for ICT churn reduction that remains today.

That benchmark became so recognised in the industry that leading consultancies such as McKinsey, Arthur D. Little, and Boston Consulting Group — independently and at different times — retained Steve to deliver his churn methodology to their own clients, working in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran and Qatar, but only after a stint at the largest telco in the Emirates.

$1.8 billion in Revenues – A Remarkable Achievement.

Steve was recruited by Etisalat (one of the largest technology and telecom conglomerates in the world). He was appointed as the VP of a newly created SMB division. Steve developed the framework, team, proposition, and commercial infrastructure from scratch, culminating in $1.8 billion in revenues within 3 years.

Alignment

Returning to Romania, Steve and Ana formed Lighthouse together. At Lighthouse, Steve has been supporting multiple clients with reorganising their marketing departments and activities; boosting brands, products, and services; clarifying commercial propositions; building more coherent go-to-market strategies; and aligning marketing, sales, and leadership teams around practical growth objectives.

Delivery Mechanics

His expertise allows clients to look beyond communication alone and address the business architecture behind it: how the company is structured, how its offer is understood, how customers move through the acquisition and retention journey, how teams make decisions, and how marketing can become a driver of measurable commercial performance rather than a support function.

Ana Maria Gardiner — The Intelligence Behind the Counsel

Ana Maria Gardiner was destined to become a different kind of diplomat.

She graduated top of her year in political science, a circle whose members are in political and diplomatic positions for Romania across the globe. Instead, she chose to become a political journalist, later moving into investigative and business journalism.

Understanding Power Vacuums

For years, she worked at the heart of the political and diplomatic circles she had been educated to understand, interviewing the figures shaping Romanian and regional geopolitics and producing the kind of analytical insight into political and geopolitical dynamics that only someone with her academic formation could credibly deliver.

Moving in the Right Circles

Her sources were often the people she had studied alongside. Her instincts were those of someone trained to understand how power actually operates, not merely how it presents itself.

After seven years in journalism, during which she worked across almost every major news format — from newspapers and business media to magazines, news agencies, and radio — Ana decided to go deeper into the other side of business: how things actually work inside leading international companies.

International PR Agencies

She went on to work for and learn from six different PR agencies, including several ranked among the top 10 globally, in Bucharest and Dubai, while coordinating communication campaigns across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Over time, however, she realised that not all of these organisations offered the challenging yet balanced working environment that top performers need to thrive, build sustainable careers, and stay in the profession long term. And many areas were identified that needed substantial improvement.

Lighthouse PR - Filling the Void

When she decided to set up Lighthouse PR, she wanted to create a company where senior consultants could use global best-practice tools, frameworks, and tactics on projects with real strategic intensity, while also building a healthier, more sustainable professional life.

A company where people give their best but also have a voice in how things are done. A perfect work-life balance.

Reputation as a Crisis Powerbroker

In addition to building B2B and B2C communication campaigns designed to win the hearts and minds of end customers, Ana acts as a crisis manager, crisis communication consultant, and crisis simulation trainer. She has a 100% success track record in crisis projects, with success measured not as reputational theatre but as the achievement of concrete business objectives.

Elite Client List

JP Morgan, Franklin Templeton, HSBC, Coca-Cola, Heineken, EssilorLuxottica, Egger, Lexus, Carrefour, Siemens Energy, and Pfizer are among the clients Ana and her team have proudly served over the years. From oil and gas to the wood industry, from FMCG and retail to finance and technology, she has covered all major business verticals.

Strength is in Strategic Communication

Ana brings to every Lighthouse PR engagement the analytical intelligence of someone trained in political science at the highest level — understanding how regulatory bodies, government institutions, and power networks actually make decisions, form positions, and respond to pressure. She brings the editorial instinct of a top journalist—knowing how stories are built, what makes them run, what kills them, and how to construct a communications position that holds up under the scrutiny of someone trained to find the gap between what is said and what is true.

Refined and Revered Communication

Ana brings to every Lighthouse PR engagement the analytical intelligence of someone trained in political science at the highest level: the ability to understand how regulatory bodies, government institutions, and power networks actually make decisions, form positions, and respond to pressure.

She brings the editorial instinct of a top journalist, knowing how stories are built, what makes them gain traction, what weakens them, and how to construct a communication position that can withstand the scrutiny of someone trained to find the gap between what is said and what is true.

Managing Complex Communication Strategies

And she brings more than 15 years of experience as a communication consultant for leading international companies, translating complex business realities into strategic counsel, credible narratives, and communication decisions that protect reputation while supporting concrete business objectives.

The Only Partnership of Its Kind in Romania

There is no other agency principal in Romania who has run significant marketing organisations with such an impressive track record.

There is no other PR agency co-founder in Romania whose political science places her in the same circles as the country's serving ambassadors and whose investigative journalism career was built inside the diplomatic and political circles most communications professionals never access.

A truly powerful combination

There is no other agency in Romania where the founding partnership combines this depth of commercial transformation expertise with this depth of political intelligence and media insight.

Lighthouse PR was not built from the PR industry outward. It was built from thirty years of exceptional careers — in management consulting, corporate transformation, brand stewardship, marketing excellence, investigative journalism, and political analysis — inward toward the discipline of strategic communications.

The result is an agency that thinks differently, counsels differently, and delivers differently from every other option available in this market.

Global and European Independent Networks.

As the exclusive member for Romania and the Republic of Moldova of both the Crisis Communications Network Europe (CCNE) and Eurocom Worldwide, Lighthouse PR brings more than international reach: it brings the intellectual firepower required for these alliances to function at their highest level.

Two careers. One agency. No comparable alternative in Romania.