Mark Flanagan (communications)


Mark Flanagan is a senior partner for content and digital strategy at Portland Communications.

Life and career

Flanagan graduated from Leeds Trinity and All Saints College with an Honours Bachelor in History and Public Media in 1982.
Flanagan has worked as a journalist, DJ and manager in a variety of commercial radio stations around the UK. His career in Radio began at the newly formed Ocean Sound in 1986. Initially he formed part of the daytime team on Ocean Sound West's afternoon show between 1300 and 1800. He soon swapped shifts with the presenter of the morning show broadcasting between 0900 and 1300. In the late 1980s, Flanagan's career took a more current affairs brief which saw him as a newsreader/journalist on the station. He subsequently moved to Southern Sound in Brighton. Flanagan’s later radio career took him to the First Oxfordshire Radio Company, known as Fox FM, as the managing director from 1995 to 1997.
From 1998 to 2002, Flanagan was operations director of the media company Chrysalis Group plc, where he was responsible for regional radio and online. He was the managing director of the Wales and the West broadcasting area of Galaxy Radio from January 1998 to July 2000. From there he began working for the Chrysalis Group as the operations director for Chrysalis Radio until 2002, then as the managing director of LBC radio from September 2002 to July 2005.
He worked in Downing Street from 2005, where he was head of strategic communications for the Labour and Coalition UK Governments. Subsequently, he has become managing director responsible for Portland’s Corporate, Health, Content & Brand and Research & Insights teams.
Flanagan is married to the BBC journalist and broadcaster Jo Coburn.