It’s PRsonal' Podcast Hands the Human Side of PR a Microphone

Nobody tells you the loneliest place in the world has a dress code. Ingy Yousri Ismail, a two-decade Egyptian-Italian veteran of the PR industry, knows the cut of that room. She has stood in it across continents, wearing many versions of the same outfit in heels that pinch by hour four and a smile that fits any occasion. At the centre of five hundred people, each saying the correct thing to the correct person, followed by the car ride home, the key turning, and then a silence so complete it had texture.  It's PRsonal is what she built on the other side of that silence. A podcast uninterested in press releases, quarterly growth or exclusive announcements. Available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Anghami, the podcast hosts brand owners, founders and public figures to tell stories that their Instagram grids cannot, to talk about the part of the journey that usually gets edited out. "Success comes at a price," Ingy tells SceneNowUAE. "On your physical health, your mental health. It's not as smooth as everyone says it is." The show took two years to find its shape as she was not interested in rushing into the kind of polished, hollow conversation that already fills every other feed. She wanted honest dialogue, emotional intelligence, the version of events people save for their therapists or their closest friends. Produced by TPP, the team behind more than thirty-five podcasts, It's PRsonal is—as far as anyone in the region can tell—the first of its kind. A show that treats PR, an industry that has spent decades convincing everyone it's all smoke and mirrors, as something with a soul. Where the question is never what did you launch but what did it take to launch it. “Every day you go out, this is PR. You're socially interacting with people. Every day you're making a first impression, leaving an impact, branding yourself,” Ingy shares with SceneNowUAE. “PR is within our day-to-day lives without us even noticing. Of course we talk about campaigns and success, but also the human parts behind it. That's PRsonal." She knows this because she lived it. For two decades she has built the machinery that makes other people visible. London, then Milan, then Florence. From Diesel to Aquazzura. At twenty-three she was managing forty-five countries for Salvatore Ferragamo, flying from China to the US, doing thirty-five events a year, launching collections and shaking hands and sitting in global strategy meetings learning to speak the language of ‘let's circle back and we'll take that offline and how are you, great, see you next time.’ Over the next couple of years she built the machinery herself when she moved back to Egypt and eventually started her own agency: Flare PR. Today, her ten-year-old agency has placed Egyptian designers on Hollywood red carpets, coordinated the first event at the Grand Egyptian Museum, and taught Ingy something she did not expect to learn: that running a company means you stop doing the work you fell in love with. "I became so deprived of my creativity," she says. "I was managing. Admin, finance, HR. I would walk into the girls' room and see them working on decks and feel like I was missing out." So she went around. Masterclasses. Consultancies. A teaching gig that surprised her—the students kept coming, and somewhere in there she realised that adding value felt better than adding billable hours. She was building a creative life from the side exits of her own company, and it was working, and she was busy, and her father was ill, and then in September 2022 he was gone. A month and a half later, a friend voiced a random thought, but I think you should start a podcast. In November, Ingy wrote back. Send me the logo. It's called PR Chronicles. "Both of us probably thought: what the hell? My dad just passed away and I'm launching a new project." She had spent years rushing past the people she loved—her father among them—without ever quite stopping. The podcast was, in that sense, a correction.  She recorded three episodes and stopped—grief had its own schedule—then went to Bali for a week and stayed three, and came back having decided that the show she wanted to make was not quite the show she had started. "I realised there is so much more to life that I need to explore. It just emphasised how important connection was to me." She called the production company TPP, and the conversation came out differently to the one she had planned. "I want the human touch. I want to go to the stories beyond the success. I want to speak about the humans behind these brands." Four episodes in, each running well over an hour, and the shape of the show is already clear. Every conversation circles the tension between visibility and vulnerability: what it means to build something while still remaining a person inside it. The industry education is woven through every episode. The most durable lessons, she'd tell you, arrive through story. In one conversation, the VP and CEO of Carina explain why advertising is the quick fix while PR is the long game. In another, Nayra, founder of SELF, talks about the pressure that follows entrepreneurs home long after the workday ends. The founder of Dara's Icecream reflects on building a company from scratch while learning to navigate personal branding without surrendering privacy entirely. Every guest arrives with a personal object—something that does the talking before they have to. Ingy brings one too, and then hands them the floor to ask her things back. The questions are almost always the ones nobody prepared for. "It becomes more of a conversation than an interview."  The people who spend their lives making others visible have spent decades learning how to disappear. Ingy Yousri Ismail is done disappearing. She bought a microphone instead.