He is the great-grandson of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who himself was the uncle of Edward Bernays, the Austrian-American pioneer of public relations.
Freud Communications was bought in 1994 by another independent agency in the United Kingdom, Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV), for about £10 million, only for Matthew Freud together with other partners to buy back the company for a similar sum in 2001.
[3] In 1999 Leapman reported in The Times that Freud Communications had offered an Internet brand management service to its clients.
This would "scour the Net for references to its clients" and if they were criticised, "the agency would use rebuttal tactics to minimise the potentially negative impact of online inaccuracy".
[4] In 2007 PR Week ran a story documenting the use of WikiScanner to track anonymous edits and link them to organizations through their IP addresses; it found that "Freud Communications' London office was caught making Wikipedia edits on behalf of clients.