Harry and Meghan have turned to a new PR agency
Mathilde Grandjean,
The Independent
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have hired a new communications agency as their PR team undergoes a significant shake-up. Harry and Meghan have turned to US-based Method Communications to promote their business and philanthropic endeavours after several members of their team reportedly departed. Kyle Boulia, their Los Angeles-based deputy press secretary, and Charlie Gipson, who had been serving as the couple's European communications director, are among those who are said to have left the couple, the Mail Online reports. Meredith Maines, the chief communications officer to Harry and Meghan, is overseeing the revamp which she said will swell the ranks of the Sussex PR machine from two members of staff to "an agency support staff of eight". She said: "As the duke and duchess's business and philanthropic interests grow, I have made the strategic decision to move toward a more traditional communications structure of specialist agency support, as previously reported in Forbes and PR Week several weeks ago.
"Transitioning from a team of two to an agency support staff of eight, operating across five different time zones, will give international media and stakeholders better access, and critically, faster response times to inquiries."
The couple's business portfolio include Meghan's lifestyle brand As Ever, launched in April this year; their media production company, Archewell Productions; and a multi-project deal with Netflix.
Harry, 40, and Meghan, 43, announced they were stepping back as working members of the royal family on January 8 2020. The couple have since been at the centre of tensions with other royals, with the duke becoming estranged from his father, the King, and his brother, the Prince of Wales. In a recent television interview, Harry said he "would love a reconciliation" with the royal family, claiming Charles will not speak to him and expressing concern that he does not know "how much longer my father has".
In that same BBC interview, Harry complained his loss of a legal challenge over his UK security was a "stitch-up", adding that he felt "let down".
Harry and Meghan were told following their departure from the royal family that they would not be able to retain the full-time police protection granted to the royals.
The Sussexes would instead receive a "bespoke" security service, whereby they would be required to give 30 days' notice of any plans to travel to the UK, with each visit being assessed for threat levels and whether protection is needed.
Last month, Harry lost his Court of Appeal challenge over his security arrangements while in the UK and said, in the TV interview following the decision, he "can't see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK". Earlier this month, the duchess posted a video of herself twerking in a bid to bring on labour while pregnant with Princess Lilibet.
In the clip, a heavily pregnant Meghan is shown dancing in a hospital room to the Starrkeisha song Baby Momma, alongside the Duke of Sussex. Meghan posted on her Instagram to celebrate Lili's fourth birthday on Wednesday, writing: "Four years ago today, this also happened.
"Both of our children were a week past their due dates ... so when spicy food, all that walking, and acupuncture didn't work - there was only one thing left to do!" The candid video, which runs for more than a minute, also features Harry, who is seen dancing in and out of the frame. The couple were also noticeably absent from the Trooping the Colour parade on Saturday. It is the third year in a row the Sussexes were not present at the event.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Harpers Bazaar Arabia
2 hours ago
- Harpers Bazaar Arabia
Why Sound Therapy Could Be The Cure-All To The Modern Mental Health Crisis
Modern sound therapy — from baths to app to binaural beats — has exploded in popularity, promising everything from better sleep to reduced road rage. Why are we tuning in now? The term 'nervous breakdown' is no longer used – 'mental-health crisis' is the nomenclature du jour – but I think I had one two years ago. My journey into the psychological night was precipitated by a propensity for clinical depression and catalysed by the death of my father, the loss of two friends to suicide, and my husband's transition into a wheelchair after years of chronic illness. I don't believe that sound therapy cured me. I gradually escaped the darkness through medical intervention from a brilliant Russian psychiatrist who was well worth his exorbitant fee. But throughout my odyssey, I relied on sound-healing tools for comfort. I regularly attended in-person sound baths with a Los Angeles sound-bowl practitioner, Devon Cunningham, which helped me return to the world by lying on a mat in public, surrounded by strangers. At home, I soothed anxiety using a YouTube video with a very long title: 'Sleep Release [Insomnia Healing] Deeply Relaxing Sleep Music * Binaural Beats.' The 'Sleep Release' audio that accompanied me through what Emily Dickinson would call 'a funeral in my brain' was created by a musician from the Netherlands who, like Prince, is simply named Zac. Zac's YouTube channel, @SleepTube, offers a seemingly infinite collection of audio tracks with subtitles like 'Binaural Delta Brainwaves @2.0Hz' to alleviate worry and foster sleep. He has nearly a million subscribers, including one video ('The Deepest Healing Sleep | 3.2Hz Delta Brain Waves | REM Sleep Music – Binaural Beats') that has more than 45 million views. But Zac's free YouTube channel is only the tip of the contemporary sound-healing iceberg. International media music and intellectual-property giant Cutting Edge has launched a wellness division, Myndstream, and is currently partnering on wellness music with producer and rapper Timbaland, as well as on an album with Sigur Rós's Jónsi. In a 2023 interview with Harper's Bazaar, Reese Witherspoon espoused the benefits of falling asleep to binaural beats, and on a recent episode of Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast, actress Rashida Jones discussed using sound-wave technology to manage road rage. So why has sound healing, which has a 2,000-year history rooted in the singing bowls of Nepal, Tibet, and India, become so popular? What exactly is a binaural beat? And what does it do to our brains? Manuela Kogon, a clinical professor and integrative-medicine internist at the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, describes binaural beats as an 'auditory illusion.' 'If you give the brain two different sounds that have different frequencies but are close together – within 30 hertz of each other – the brain is like, 'What the heck? There are two sounds. What am I supposed to do?'' she explains. 'The brain can't differentiate that. It can't say that it's two; it also can't say it's one. It just averages the difference and hallucinates a new sound. It's kind of funny.' The binaural beat may be newly viral, but Manuela points out that they've been around for more than a hundred years. A German scientist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered them and published a paper about his findings in 1839. Manuela, a self-described 'brain junkie,' has been studying them for decades; she digs out one of her papers from the '90s for me where she states that 'binaural beats have been purported to induce mood alterations, contingent on the beat frequency. Claims range from entraining the whole brain to altering states of consciousness.' Modern sound healing is not limited to binaural beats alone. Modalities include sound baths, guided meditation, tuning fork therapy, vibroacoustic therapy, audiovisual technology, and music therapy, and the espoused results range from mood enhancement, sleep improvement, stress reduction, and relaxation to wilder claims of destroying cancer cells and manifesting wealth. A binaural beat or sound bath has not been proven to cure cancer or make you rich, but the beneficial effects of sound healing, according to Manuela, involve 'modulating physiology, including blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, EEG … altering immune and endocrine function, and improving pain, anxiety, fatigue, and depression and have been extensively studied.' Like many alternative wellness treatments, sound therapy seems to have increased in popularity during Covid. 'We were all stuck at home,' says New York based practitioner Lavender Suarez, author of the book Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives. 'So how could we get these same healing tools?' A sound-healing practitioner for 10 years and an experimental musician for 20, with an academic background in counselling and art therapy, Lavender uses physical instruments like gongs, often in repetitive patterns that function in similar brain-entraining ways to digital audio fi les. She's wary, though, of the claims tossed around related to sound frequencies. 'When people are prescriptive about sound frequencies, I'm like, hold on. Brain waves and sound waves are not in direct correlation,' she says. 'I think the interest in specific frequencies comes from our culture's obsession with data. We want that single-shot fix that's always been building in the wellness industry. How do we get to things quicker, faster? 'I only have X amount of time.'' The impact of sound on healing may be just as much about the recipient's goals as it is about the healer's design. 'It's more about the intentions you're putting behind these binaural beats when you're listening,' Lavender says. 'When people are listening to these essentially generic audio fi les online, they're taking what they're bringing into it. The creator is trying to steer the intention by saying, 432 Hz for self-love. You go into it thinking, 'Okay, self-love.' But you could listen to binaural beats for sleep and go for a jog.' I spoke with Robert Koch, an official musical partner of the Monroe Institute, which bills itself as 'the world's leading education center for the study of human consciousness' and has extensive programming around sound technology to 'empower the journey to self-discovery.' Robert, who goes by the stage name Robot Koch, is an L.A.-based composer, producer, and sonic innovator who began his career as a heavy-metal drummer. He now embeds signals produced by the Monroe Institute into his compositions. 'I'm my own guinea pig,' says Robert. 'I try these things on myself, and I can tell when something works on my nervous system because I get more relaxed.' Robert sent me a Spotify link to one of his Monroe Institute collaborations, titled Ocean Consciousness. I found the track relaxing and sleep-inducing, though the sirenic voices peppered throughout the piece made me melancholic. Maybe that's the point. 'It's powerful when people write to me about experiences they've had with my music helping them move through something emotional,' says Robert. 'Music isn't just entertainment. It's a language that speaks to the subconscious.' Virginia-based sound therapist and musician Guy Blakeslee works with clients on everything from alleviating anxiety and increasing physical energy to manifesting love and assisting with fertility issues. Guy interviews his clients and then creates personalised 'sonic talismans' using custom blends of sounds, including Mellotron and Nord synthesizer tones, dolphin and whale sounds, honeybee sounds and a heartbeat. 'Have you ever gotten anyone pregnant?' I ask him. 'I have met the baby,' he says. Guy always believed in the healing properties of music, but it wasn't until he was hit by a car and suff ered a traumatic brain injury that he began pursuing music as therapy. 'It was March 13th 2020, and I was unconscious in the hospital when lockdown took effect,' he says. 'I woke up in the pandemic with this brain injury and spent most of my time using music and sound to guide myself through the recovery process. I found that long, sustaining tones were healing and soothing. I went on to get certifi ed through an online course. What I learned was what I'd intuitively discovered in my own recovery.' Musician, heal thyself. My sound practitioner, Devon Cunningham, who has played her singing bowls for Hermès and Dartmouth College and in outreach programs for Los Angeles County, also describes her trajectory from a job in real estate to sound-bowl practitioner as healing. Devon went on a plant-medicine retreat in Ecuador with her 80-something-year-old mother, and it was there that she first began playing the singing bowls. She found that sound healing provided additional benefits for her chronic lung disease. 'The bowls saved my life,' she says. When Devon ordered new quartz-crystal bowls for a residency at Colgate University, she discovered that 432 Hz, had a heightened impact on healing. 'I witnessed people having experiences with these new 432 bowls that I hadn't seen with my 440 Hz bowls. Ever since then, I've been on the 432, and I've seen miracle after miracle.' While Devon's results with the god frequency are experiential, a 2022 study by researchers at University of Florence and Careggi University Hospital that was published in the journal Acto Biomedica concluded, 'Listening to music at 432 Hz is a low cost and short intervention that can be a useful resource to manage anxiety and stress.' Robert Koch composes music with a frequency called the Schumann resonance: a natural phenomenon, also known as the Earth's heartbeat, that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hz. He's also pursuing vibroacoustics, where listeners feel sounds in their bodies. 'Einstein said that music is the medicine of the future,' he notes. 'Vibration. And I think we're just scratching the surface.' I, myself, am no Einstein. Maybe this is why I find Brainwaves – the most popular binaural-beats app in the Apple App Store – overwhelming. Upon downloading the app, I'm asked which goals I hope to achieve, and I'm given an abundance of choices: Body Wellness, Binaural Sleep, Relax and Calm, Spiritual Awakening. Who doesn't want all of these things? I go with Spiritual Awakening and am brought to another page, where my path to enlightenment is broken down into still more categories: Connection with a Higher Power, Fulfillment and Meaning, Self- Understanding and Clarity. As an existentially challenged person, I choose Fulfillment and Meaning, but then I get FOMO and go back to the beginning. Rather than soothing my nervous system, the choices give me more anxiety. This choose-your-own-adventure approach is unsurprising, given that some of the latest sound-healing tools emerged from gaming. SoundSelf, an interactive audiovisual therapeutic, uses video-game technology, vocal-toning biofeedback, and generative soundscapes to induce drug-free psychedelic states. On Zoom, I meet with the audio director for the digital therapeutics company SoundSelf, Lorna Dune, a Milwaukee-based sound designer and electronic musician. Lorna walks me through several experiments with immersive audiovisual tech. First, we tinker with bilateral light signals: a visual version of binaural beats purported to induce brainwave states like theta (associated with relaxation) and delta (emitted during deep sleep). The light signals make me anxious. But to be fair, a lot of things make me anxious. We then play with binaural beats at varying frequencies, and this experiment is much more successful. As we transition from an alpha (alert but relaxed) to theta, I feel a palpable shift to a more serene physiological state. Maybe this is the power of suggestion, but I could stay here all afternoon. 'Just like with binaural beats, you can look at dance music and how when we're all moving together to one rhythm, we synchronise,' says Lorna. She adds, 'Our brain wants to synchronise. It's normal behaviour that we've been displaced from in modern society. But we find it again through festivals and in pop culture. We say, 'Oh, it's something new.' No, it's actually just who we are.' Of course, we can't always be at a rave. Or in a sound bath. 'I'm happy for people to receive care in whatever way they can, as long as it's not detrimental,' says Manuela. 'I'm not like, 'No, don't listen to the YouTube audio.' If that's what's working for you, go for it.' The takeaway, says Robert, is that 'acoustic therapies make people feel better, and it might be as simple as that the relaxation happens through focusing on sound, or associated imagery, rather than stressful thoughts, which most of us have too many of these days.' Two years later, I am still listening to the same YouTube audio from Zac's channel. Sometimes I even sleep soundly.
Gulf Today
13 hours ago
- Gulf Today
Harry and Meghan have turned to a new PR agency
Mathilde Grandjean, The Independent The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have hired a new communications agency as their PR team undergoes a significant shake-up. Harry and Meghan have turned to US-based Method Communications to promote their business and philanthropic endeavours after several members of their team reportedly departed. Kyle Boulia, their Los Angeles-based deputy press secretary, and Charlie Gipson, who had been serving as the couple's European communications director, are among those who are said to have left the couple, the Mail Online reports. Meredith Maines, the chief communications officer to Harry and Meghan, is overseeing the revamp which she said will swell the ranks of the Sussex PR machine from two members of staff to "an agency support staff of eight". She said: "As the duke and duchess's business and philanthropic interests grow, I have made the strategic decision to move toward a more traditional communications structure of specialist agency support, as previously reported in Forbes and PR Week several weeks ago. "Transitioning from a team of two to an agency support staff of eight, operating across five different time zones, will give international media and stakeholders better access, and critically, faster response times to inquiries." The couple's business portfolio include Meghan's lifestyle brand As Ever, launched in April this year; their media production company, Archewell Productions; and a multi-project deal with Netflix. Harry, 40, and Meghan, 43, announced they were stepping back as working members of the royal family on January 8 2020. The couple have since been at the centre of tensions with other royals, with the duke becoming estranged from his father, the King, and his brother, the Prince of Wales. In a recent television interview, Harry said he "would love a reconciliation" with the royal family, claiming Charles will not speak to him and expressing concern that he does not know "how much longer my father has". In that same BBC interview, Harry complained his loss of a legal challenge over his UK security was a "stitch-up", adding that he felt "let down". Harry and Meghan were told following their departure from the royal family that they would not be able to retain the full-time police protection granted to the royals. The Sussexes would instead receive a "bespoke" security service, whereby they would be required to give 30 days' notice of any plans to travel to the UK, with each visit being assessed for threat levels and whether protection is needed. Last month, Harry lost his Court of Appeal challenge over his security arrangements while in the UK and said, in the TV interview following the decision, he "can't see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK". Earlier this month, the duchess posted a video of herself twerking in a bid to bring on labour while pregnant with Princess Lilibet. In the clip, a heavily pregnant Meghan is shown dancing in a hospital room to the Starrkeisha song Baby Momma, alongside the Duke of Sussex. Meghan posted on her Instagram to celebrate Lili's fourth birthday on Wednesday, writing: "Four years ago today, this also happened. "Both of our children were a week past their due dates ... so when spicy food, all that walking, and acupuncture didn't work - there was only one thing left to do!" The candid video, which runs for more than a minute, also features Harry, who is seen dancing in and out of the frame. The couple were also noticeably absent from the Trooping the Colour parade on Saturday. It is the third year in a row the Sussexes were not present at the event.
Gulf Today
2 days ago
- Gulf Today
Pak music icon launches debut solo single
Dubai-based renowned international singer, humanitarian, and global goodwill ambassador Sonia Majeed, who has represented Pakistan and the Middle East on world stages and platforms like the UN, Google, and CNN, has just unveiled the audio release of her debut solo single 'Yariaan.' The full music video is set to premiere worldwide on Aug.1, 2025 in Dubai. While talking to Gulf Today, Sonia said 'My new song 'Yariaan' (friendship) is first-ever solo single and it is more than just a song. It is an emotional journey that celebrates the essence of true friendship, unconditional love, and the beauty of caring,' she said. It is making waves with its powerful message that love goes far beyond romantic relationships. 'This song is not just for the love era,' Sonia said. 'It's for every soul that has ever truly loved - be it a mother, a sibling, a friend, a colleague, a companion, a pet, or even God. Love is giving. Love is caring.' The audio of 'Yariaan' is now available on all major digital platforms, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. The track is already gaining momentum across global playlists and trending under the hashtag #YariaanChallenge. The Pakistani singer is also holder of UAE Golden Visa and is engaged in a number of social and humanitarian initiatives for under-privileged people in different parts of Pakistan. 'Besides many humanitarian projects in the past couple of years, I am part of new first-of-its-kind initiative, as this music video for 'Yariaan' will feature a special tribute to People of Determination, bringing forward a message of inclusion and love that the global music industry has rarely seen,' she added. Sonia's heartfelt performance promises to break barriers and touch hearts across every continent. The new song is brought to life by a powerhouse team including Imrana Majeed as producer, Samran Warsi as music director, video director and lyricist and the music is composed by Zain Khan while Rizwan Yaqoob Ali is the vocal recordist. Sonia also highlighted that 'to promote the message of love, friendship, and caring worldwide we have also launched an online challenge for social media community to make this song a unique creativity in their post and can win a brand-new iPhone, an iPad and a fully-sponsored 3-day trip to Baku. Lucky social media users will also have chances to receive an exclusive invite to the 'Yariaan' grand launch event in Dubai.'
