Scanners going nonstop. Phones ringing off the hook. A crew’s live signal drops because the storm made their corner of the city unsafe, and the interview booked for the next segment just fell through. Somewhere inside that noise, one person is deciding, minute by minute, what millions of people are about to hear first. For roughly fifteen years, that was Astrid Greve Spencer’s role. She was very good at it. She left anyway.
Four Chapters, One Instinct
Astrid Greve Spencer is the CEO and founder of About Us Media LLC in Chicago. An Emmy-winning television news executive producer, she now helps senior leaders find the words they actually want to say, and just as often, the ones they’re better off leaving out. She spent almost two decades knowing that airtime is finite and that attention is borrowed, never owned. She has yet to find a reason to grade corporate language on a softer curve. Her newsroom years became chapter one of a career she now tells in four parts.
Munich, Missouri, Toledo, Chicago: A Career Built In Motion
Fluent in German, English, and French, Greve Spencer’s early career moved between newsrooms and countries. After earning degrees in broadcast journalism and communication from the University of Missouri-Columbia, she reported for Munich-online.de and edited for the German broadcast agency Deutsche Fernsehnachrichten Agentur.
Greve Spencer had already worked as supervising producer at KOMU-TV in Columbia and at KATU-TV in Portland when she returned to Missouri for a master’s in magazine design. While there, she worked the photo desk at the Columbia Missourian, a daily newspaper, and served as art director of Vox Magazine – early training in a lesson she still relies on today: where something sits on a page decides what people actually notice.
She later went on to WTVG/13abc in Toledo – producing the market’s top-rated weekday 6 p.m. newscast, along with election coverage, severe weather special reports, and public affairs programs. In 2010, she moved to WLS-TV/ABC7 Chicago as senior news producer, running the top-rated weekend morning newscasts and the staff behind them. While working full-time, she earned an MBA and an MS in PR management – knowledge and expertise she later also put in action while teaching reporting and public relations at Loyola University Chicago.
Her work in journalism earned her top industry recognition, including Emmy and Associated Press honors. The fifteen years in the news industry also left her with one standard she never let go: “In the end, I knew it worked when people stayed.” Ratings were the only scoreboard, and they did not care about intentions.
From Crisis Rooms to the C-Suite
Career chapters two and three were in communications – first in the agency world, then in-house. At KemperLesnik, a Chicago-based PR agency, she led worldwide media relations for an auto industry crisis response campaign alongside former White House officials, and ran coverage for NFL Draft Town 2016, among work with many other clients. The next step was as senior communications manager for North America at AkzoNobel – a global paints and coatings leader, and then four years at the global software company Wolters Kluwer – first as global director of corporate affairs and communications on a business executive leadership team, later making the case for – and becoming – the company’s inaugural global director of thought leadership strategy.
Cutting Nine Topics to Find the One
In January 2025 – driven by a belief that good storytelling moves audiences, brings people together, and makes complex ideas make sense – Greve Spencer launched About Us Media LLC.
The business runs on two tracks. As ‘The Executive Legacy Producer’, she offers coaching and education for senior leaders who want to tell their own story on their own terms. There’s the approach for organizations with The Executive Legacy Method™ – a licensed workshop series delivered to executive clubs, peer advisory groups, and corporate leadership programs. There’s also the individual approach: Strategy Sprints, focused one-on-one working sessions, and Office Hours – an ongoing coaching cohort.
The other business track is strategic communications – executive positioning, media training, thought leadership content – mostly for B2B companies, from startups and mid-sized manufacturers to Fortune 500 companies of the kind Greve Spencer once worked for from the inside. Her clients arrive accomplished – and that is usually where the challenge starts.
“Clients come to me with a ton of experience, able to speak credibly on ten different topics. But when you can talk about everything, no one remembers you for anything.”
So, she takes the ten topics and picks the one that’s actually worth being known for. Everything else stops competing for attention and becomes evidence. She doesn’t ask anyone to write new material to get there; she and the client revisit past talks, prior conversations, and existing materials, looking for the moments where the argument was already there in the leader’s own words. From there, she builds proof points from specific outcomes and specific numbers, rather than general credentials.
The Difference Between a Statement and a Message
Ask her why most corporate speech fails, and the answer is unsentimental:
“A statement is something you say because you have to. A message is something you say because you want to be understood.”
Most organizations, Greve Spencer argues, have quietly made the empty statement the easy option, because it clears legal, clears the comms team, and draws no objections. Her work is to reverse that default, so the real thing is what gets shipped without a fight. She holds it to the same bar every time, and she is careful to say the bar is not personal taste. “It’s a checklist, not a mood.”
The Payoff of Saying Less
The results of that shift – from broad expertise to one clear message – show up in warm signals before they show up in dashboards. Internal teams adopt the sharper message and start repeating it themselves, unprompted. Inbound notes from prospects begin referencing a point of view instead of offering a generic compliment. Speaking invitations name the topic outright rather than asking whether the executive can talk broadly about their industry.
Voice, AI, and What Not to Automate
As more executives lean on AI to produce content, Greve Spencer is blunt: “AI is excellent at helping you say something faster. But it cannot tell you what’s worth saying.” Her test is whether a stranger could identify a post as yours without the byline. If not, it doesn’t go out.
The Scoreboard She Refuses to Soften
Back in the newsroom, the decision was about what to air just as much as it was about what to drop, with the clock running and the audience one remote click from being gone. It came down to time and relevance – what still mattered, and what didn’t anymore. She never filled a second of airtime without first deciding what to leave out.
Today, Greve Spencer has moved that decision into boardrooms, where the clock is more measured and the stakes are a career’s worth of credibility. Executives come to her wanting to be heard on everything. They leave knowing what they will be remembered for, which is almost always considerably harder to say.
Her expertise resonates, including with her peers. Greve Spencer is president-elect of IABC Chicago (International Association of Business Communicators) for 2026/2027 and a council member with The Executives’ Club of Chicago, alongside several other industry affiliations.
In the end, whatever the subject, channel, or audience, her proven approach remains: decide what matters, then leave the rest out.
Astrid Greve-Spencer, MBA, MS, MA, is the CEO and founder of About Us Media LLC, based in Chicago, Illinois. An Emmy-winning former television news executive producer, she helps senior executives and B2B organizations build the visibility their expertise deserves through message clarity, executive positioning, and media training. To connect with Astrid or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile or www.about-us-media.com.
