Building Brand Gravity Podcast

00:00:00.000 ‚  00:00:21.920  Anne Green
There will be things that the machine should do more of and it we then, whether it's senior people or more junior people, become the orchestrators of agents of colleagues that are machines. But I think we're going to have to be really open and nimble. And I love your idea about how do you look at other types of value add that may not be just a monetary outcome too.

00:00:33.120 ‚  00:00:37.640  Anne Green
Hi, and welcome to another episode of Building Brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green.

00:00:37.640 ‚  00:00:41.000  Steve Halsey
And I'm Steve Halsey. It's great to be together again an.

00:00:41.040 ‚  00:01:18.120  Anne Green
It always is. It always is here, both in our New York office today, just at opposite ends of the office, which is fine. Um, later in the episode today, we're going to be digging into data and insights from the 13th annual Public Relations Industry Trends report from Davis+Gilbert, well known to you and I and many of our listeners, I'm sure, Steve, and it's a good read this year.

There's a lot of really important points to discuss, and Michael Lasky is going to be on deck to take us through the findings. But to kick things off today, I thought we'd do a quick round of in the news. What headlines have been catching your eye in the last week or so, Steve?

00:01:18.360 ‚  00:02:32.600  Steve Halsey
You know, one that I saw was really interesting, which is a new report that came out from McKinsey called Nail Your First. And what's interesting about this is the core idea of this was really that the CEO role now starts first with stakeholder credibility, not operational cadence. So what the article was really talking about and the findings were saying, hey, in those first 100 days, the most critical thing for leaders is to really communicate well, because that's how they're going to be evaluated, how they show up, how they listen, and how they build trust so long before their strategy has actually taken place.

And long before you're seeing the operational changes, they're really being judged by that. And what I really find fascinating about that is how much pressure that then places on the corporate comms and corporate affairs ecosystem to really make sure the CEO gets out of the gate really strong, really fast.

And, you know, you've got to be aligned and you've really got to help make sure the CEO really isn't flying without instruments, that they're really putting that vision out there quick and fast.

00:02:32.800 ‚  00:03:16.080  Anne Green
You know, that reminds me, um, I resonate with that being a CEO. And, you know, we're in a smaller pond here, but still leading you and I and our partners in this space. But it reminds me of reading some articles in Harvard Business Review about the skill sets that are needed for CEOs today, and that emotional intelligence and that communication across stakeholders is so critical.

And it makes me think of for years now? I felt that MBAs in particular. You know, these training grounds for corporate leadership were very under indexed from my perspective on the communication side and that skill set that many of us learn either through study or on the job, when we're practitioners like you and I are.

00:03:17.120 ‚  00:03:25.480  Anne Green
It sounds to me like more than ever, you know, CEOs need to be coming in or those that may be on the path for organizational leadership need to really lean into that.

00:03:25.520 ‚  00:04:06.680  Steve Halsey
Well, and, you know, we're communicating everywhere and always in every way, shape or form that that I think you're right, is really having that communications, um, framework to really bring that vision of life. And let me just read here, I wanted to pull this quote because I found it really interesting.

It says new and incoming CEOs are often unprepared for the intensity of internal and external stakeholder engagement. There's no honeymoon period. People in other roles may have six months or even a year to find their footing. But as CEO, you're expected to be ready from day one and communicate from day one.

That's some serious pressure.

00:04:06.920 ‚  00:04:12.520  Anne Green
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think we see that with a lot of our clients and just what we're observing in the landscape.

00:04:12.720 ‚  00:04:37.160  Steve Halsey
So I thought that's interesting. And that really parlays a lot of the things I'm hearing from the chief communications officers I'm talking to. And kind of as we've talked about in previous episodes of Brand Gravity, it's no longer the old question, do you have a seat at the table? It's like, what do you do now?

It's how do you get them out the door as quickly as possible? But but that's something that kind of stuck with me. What have you been reading? What's sticking out for you?

00:04:37.240 ‚  00:07:11.320  Anne Green
So in preparing for this, I definitely had a story that caught my eye. You and I have been talking a lot about structure and the role of integrated communications within corporations, within those functions. So a big story that caught my eye this week is the appointment of an executive Vice president, a new EVP to lead a newly unified corporate affairs structure at Verizon.

So this was in PR week and covered in many other places. Now this group is going to combine corporate communications, public affairs, government relations and what they term at Verizon Responsible Business, which is very interesting to to see how that language evolves. And the new EVP Frans Pash, I believe that's how you pronounce it.

He's a seasoned veteran that's worked at a lot of agencies and a range of corporations. But the thing that of course really caught my eye is Dan Schulman is the newly appointed CEO at Verizon. He was at PayPal before, and he had some very powerful quotes. This was in the actual formal announcement in the press release that was quoted.

I have them here. So some of his quotes on this. We have an opportunity to redefine not just who we are as a company, but to fundamentally change and lead our entire industry. And then he also said, in a world where trust and transparency matter more than ever. How we show up, communicate and deliver. Define who we are as a company by creating a world class corporate affairs function will take bold and responsible actions to drive growth and position Verizon as a leader with all our stakeholders.

Now, I was telling you this, Steve. Offline, I had the honor of working with Dan Shulman years ago in his first CEO role at Virgin Mobile USA, and he, I found, was always very savvy about brand, about reputation, about the breadth of stakeholders and the critical importance of building trust. He brought a lot of values with him from that entity to a stint at Amex and then of course, famously at PayPal, where, um, you know, some people might call him an activist CEO.

I don't think he would typify it. Like that was much more about being very clear on the values of the organization tied to their business and their stakeholders and their customers and living those values. But for me, just this idea about being so clear and deliberate about this move at a time where other entities, as we've discussed on this podcast, are kind of fragmenting that comms structure.

I don't know. I just found that really interesting. What's your take on this?

00:07:11.360 ‚  00:07:59.120  Steve Halsey
Yeah, is is very interesting. And I like some of the words that he use like redefine be bold. You know that that to me really kind of ties those themes together that we're talking about. You know, the McKinsey piece is really arguing about leading with reputation for results. And what I think is interesting that Verizon is doing is they're clearly architecting a system here around Dan that makes this whole thing possible, right?

By unifying corporate comms, public affairs, government relations. It's more than a structural change. It's really, as you said, a deliberate signal of trust, of transparency, of stakeholder leadership. So this one's going to be interesting to see. To see how it works out. But yeah absolutely interesting story in the news.

00:07:59.280 ‚  00:09:05.520  Anne Green
Yeah. And just you know, the day after I saw this story, I noted um, fortune in their CEO daily or it might have been Wall Street Journal in their, in their CEO brief. There's so many good newsletters. But one of them had featured more remarks from Dan Schulman from one of their board level gatherings. And so a lot about needing, um, the kind of mindset that's needed, the kind of boldness and also even large entities needing to think about themselves as a startup and being more nimble and agile.

So definitely a space to watch. And I guess, you know, we've been talking a lot so far on this episode about the corporate side of the fence. Now I think it's time to turn our attention back to the agency landscape, and that's our chance to ask Michael Lasky, who's been a long time partner at Davis+Gilbert, well known in the industry.

You know, you and I, Steve, have known him for decades. Um, to everything we want to know about the new Trends report. Having done it for 13 years is a long scope of time, and there is so much change right now. And I think the conversation I had with Michael yesterday will bring that level of change into focus.

So for now, please stay tuned for my conversation with Michael.

00:09:07.480 ‚  00:09:14.120  Anne Green
I am so excited to welcome an old friend and colleague for many years now, Michael Lasky. Welcome, Michael.

00:09:14.160 ‚  00:09:15.640  Michael Lasky
Thank you and a real pleasure.

00:09:15.640 ‚  00:09:46.000  Anne Green
And Michael is the chair of the public relations practice at Davis+Gilbert, as well as co-chair of litigation and dispute resolution practice. But, Michael, you are well, well known in our industry, and I've known you for many years, as I've said, and you've been a great mentor and a support and counselor to me over those years.

But I don't know that a lot of people know your own story in terms of how did you end up in this specific practice area because you're so deep in it? Tell us a little bit about that. I think it's a great way to start.

00:09:46.040 ‚  00:12:15.480  Michael Lasky
Sure. Well thank you. Well, you know, I'd like to say it's a it was a combination of strategy and serendipity. Um, the strategy was when I joined Davis+Gilbert, the firm had a, you know, really proud history of, um, being preeminent in the advertising law area. And back then, in 1983, advertising was still king, and everything else was a below the line business.

But the firm had been around since the early part of the 20th century, and we literally put the first radio spots. Yes, I said radio on the air for P&G. Um, and we've been synonymous with the monetization of what we now referred to as commercial speech since the early days of radio. And to be frank, our practice followed the technology of the day radio, television point to purchase then internet, social, digital and the like.

So when I joined the firm, I actually came at a time when I thought we were really well positioned to essentially work with firms whose key assets were people and ideas, creative businesses. You know, the term marketing communications had not yet been invented yet. And I looked at what we were good at and thought of what were logical line extensions and public relations.

You know, cried out as something that I thought we really could add a lot of value to. I think that was in part so that was the strategy. And I think the strategy was in part informed by my own background. I did a lot of writing as, um, uh, a student and, uh, I ran a 1200 page publication when I was in law school, and I actually was a, um, I wrote for my student newspaper.

I was a Broadway theater critic, Um, uh, for a bit. Um, when I was in college. So the craft of storytelling and authentic communications always resonated with me. And I thought reaching, you know, audiences with the information that would influence outcomes was also something that I think really resonated a lot with me.

So, you know, strategy and serendipity came together and I, um, you know, consistency and persistence also probably played an important role.

00:12:15.840 ‚  00:12:55.320  Anne Green
I think that is how my life often goes. What's interesting to reflect back on the trajectory of many of the agencies in this space is where we came from and what we are today, like you said. You know, I would describe our firm today at G&S Integrated Marketing Communications. I still really love and feel passionate about the term of public relations, too.

But we also, like many firms, do much more than that. And, you know, I can think about the trends I've seen over time. You've got some years on me to to think about that too. When you think about the evolution of the whole space, especially the agency side, what are some of the things that you've noticed, some of those bigger trends?

00:12:55.560 ‚  00:12:57.280  Michael Lasky
Well, I mean, certainly

00:12:58.320 ‚  00:14:00.840  Michael Lasky
it's changed dramatically. And, um, you know, largely influenced by, um, you know, both scope of services, the complexity of the services and the technology that's enabled the, um, very substantial expansion of the swim lanes. So, you know, I, I was actually thinking this morning and I've thought about this a lot as it relates to the skyrocketing use of AI in the industry and, frankly, in all industries.

But, um, it really reminds me to a time in the in 1994 War ish when we started with the year, with virtually no firms having websites to by the end of the year, you know, WW w became synonymous with, you know, an extraordinary explosion. But frankly, it was a time when people were still trying to grapple with.

00:14:02.880 ‚  00:14:36.800  Michael Lasky
Was this world regulated? And, you know, I kidded at the time that, you know, WW w stood for Wild Wild West. People thought it was, you know, completely unpolished, when in fact it was policed the very same way. Um, it was old wine and new bottle. So the technology created new issues, but a lot of the same kinds of framework applied.

And I think, you know, um, I, I certainly the kind of trends that I'm seeing are also greatly influenced by the expansion of services and the technology.

00:14:36.840 ‚  00:15:47.880  Anne Green
It's funny to hear you speak about those early days. I very much remember when my firm, Cooper Cat's, back in the early 90s, sent out a postcard that said we are on the internet superhighway, and that just dates us all. But I embrace it. I, you know, you got to get in the Wayback Machine and enjoy those old memories.

Um, one of the reasons I wanted to connect with you, Michael, is talking about today and the trends that are really shaping our industry, and you folks have had for many years now your annual public relations trends report. Very helpful. I always look forward to it. I have participated, you know, in events when we're speaking about the trends.

I've, you know, done mainstage work with you guys on the AI side and some other pieces, M&A. So, um, just came out and the overall theme and I've got it here. That report really emphasized the gap between strategy and reality, those disconnects between agencies aspirations and the actual execution. So I want to go piece by piece through some of the findings.

And I know you've been on a bit of a road show for this, so you're ready to go, but what what are some of the top lines that you would identify before we drill down a bit?

00:15:48.320 ‚  00:17:40.520  Michael Lasky
Well, I think I'd focus on three. Um, and certainly, you know, the whole purpose of the report is to look at the white space. Where can we influence outcomes? What is separating the the, um, advancement of the kind of firm that every firm hopes to be, you know, growing profitable. Well, you know, positioned.

And, um, as we looked at the data, um, there were three areas. One is I really saw some misalignment between the the virtual unanimity of firms using AI for a virtual explosion in types of services and for types of purposes, from content creation to media monitoring to data analytics, to proof of concept to crisis communications.

Let's just went on and on. But when you look to see, though it was popular, many firms did not have comprehensive policies in place. And that exposes them to liability for how employees were to be using it. What kind of client involvement and consent they had, and virtually no firms had, you know, appropriate AI policies for the vendors they used.

So, frankly, getting an alignment on the usage and policy to reduce risk was one area that we certainly I certainly felt would improve agency performance and check a lot of important boxes for alignment.

00:17:41.720 ‚  00:17:55.120  Michael Lasky
Second area that came out very clearly from this year's data was while there was a very sharp increase in training at firms around AI platforms.

00:17:57.840 ‚  00:18:05.440  Michael Lasky
Ways to, um, you know, you know, best prompts, um, best outcomes.

00:18:07.240 ‚  00:18:52.440  Michael Lasky
Every other area of training was dramatically down. And, you know, the shoemaker's kids were going barefoot. So at a time when many agencies were struggling mightily to grow top line, maintain or grow profits, business development and client growth strategies, and operating holistically to cross collaborate.

Elaborate. Notice I didn't say cross sell, but cross collaborate. Among types of service offerings and between and among areas of specialization that was dramatically down over prior years. You know, similarly, um,

00:18:53.720 ‚  00:18:55.199  Michael Lasky
we saw a lot of

00:18:56.960 ‚  00:19:15.960  Michael Lasky
agencies still having the bulk of their revenue driven by retainer work, yet there was very little training being done around financial management, client contracts, how to appropriately stay within the scope of work,

00:19:17.560 ‚  00:19:40.400  Michael Lasky
making sure the account people know you know, how to proactively communicate with clients on those issues. So that was another area of probably, if not leaving money on the table, losing money in part because that training piece was misaligned with, you know, the growth opportunities.

00:19:41.600 ‚  00:20:03.280  Michael Lasky
You know, the third area that, um, came out in this year's data in terms of, um, what I would call closing the gap, was, you know, I'm a strong believer in economics, driving behavior. And while there is, again, um, the agencies were struggling to grow revenue and profitability,

00:20:04.920 ‚  00:21:21.880  Michael Lasky
many of them still were operating in a annual discretionary bonus arrangement and did not properly and appropriately incentivize um, uh, uh, key employees over a multi-year period, typically referred to as long term incentive plans of one kind or another. And you have to sort of reverse engineer, um, what outcomes you want for your mid-level and senior people.

And if you needed a roadmap about what works, well, the data. Um, you know, uh, the the endpoint is not the data, it's the starting point. But the data shows that the top performing firms, firms that grew revenue or profits or both, by more than 10% this year had, on average, a very higher percentage of these, uh, long term incentive programs for mid-level and key employees, both as a retention tool and as an incentive arrangement, then agencies at large.

So those are the three areas that really struck me, as, you know, um,

00:21:23.040 ‚  00:21:32.200  Michael Lasky
what I would recommend is sort of advisory services to help, um, enhance performance in the year ahead.

00:21:32.360 ‚  00:22:52.840  Anne Green
That's really helpful overview and a lot to dig in there. I want to take the second one first on training. Um, I think that's very critical. And as I was listening to you, you know, I always have a double consciousness in these things, which is I'm thinking about the industry at large, but I'm also trying to also interrogate myself and say, what are we doing?

Where are we at? You know, that's the helpful thing. I always joke that there's a pendulum that swings between, we're doing great or we have to fix everything, you know? And I think that's a healthy, dynamic tension. But your point about the focus on training in AI, which I think is obviously critical, this is a massive upskilling moment, but missing some of these other pieces.

A lot of the trainings you mentioned, Michael, are known to us as leaders. Agency leaders. We should know that these are critical, the constant refreshing of financial management skills, how an agency works, how it makes money. But even recently, our Chief Growth officer, when my partner Steve Halsey, did a series of events around, some of our officers had called Coachella.

And it was a fun, tongue in cheek way of saying for both junior people, but also more senior people, how does our business work? How is our new business process work? What are the pricing models, etc.? Why do you think that these sort of perennial best practices are falling by the wayside?

00:22:53.280 ‚  00:23:08.480  Michael Lasky
You know, I think it's harder to, um, stay current and, um, you know, maybe, uh, there's a strong focus on the new hula hoop. If I can date myself with that analogy.

00:23:08.800 ‚  00:23:11.880  Anne Green
Go for it. The pet rock of today.

00:23:12.360 ‚  00:23:43.560  Michael Lasky
There you go. And and, uh, you know, I think a lot of firms are really, um, working really hard to stay current and to move quickly. And, you know, there's an obvious expression. The harder we go, the behavior we get and sometimes, you know, things that are really back to the basics get left behind. And I think that some of what came out in this year's data that that it was easy to focus on, I mean, there was so much energy.

00:23:44.600 ‚  00:24:27.630  Michael Lasky
I mean, 37% of the firms said they're building, you know, an AI, um, model, and 62% said they're investing in an AI powered program. I mean, that's a Herculean undertaking. So, you know, not looking to be critical, but just to provide, you know, comment. And that's sometimes the perspective that an outside advisor can, whether it's a public relations professional or a lawyer who does a lot of work in the industry can provide is, you know, um, you know, objectively, I get it.

But there's also this other thing here which you can't leave behind. It's it's it's basic.

00:24:27.750 ‚  00:26:01.110  Anne Green
Yeah. And you're making me think of two. I was looking this morning. Um, I was scanning fortune CEO daily, and they were quoting. That was Wall Street Journal CEO brief, one of those types of newsletters, and they were quoting a Deloitte leader. I think it was the Deloitte CEO talking about, um, recent research they did with CEOs in general.

And they and he was just talking about two of the most important things of this pivot is, is really human mindset. It's a growth mindset. Um, and it's kind of leaning into the ability to change and emotional intelligence. So that growth mindset and emotional intelligence, interestingly, both randomly and I guess happily, both things we've been focused on here this year very intentionally, but this is very much a human challenge.

So you've got the core skill sets of the business. You've got the training on the business of the business, and then you have that training on being a manager and a business leader and how you bring your best self to it. So I find that really interesting. Switching over to, some of the other trends. Revenue and profitability.

It was really interesting to me. And there's a million different details in here. But there's this there was this donut effect that you guys found that smaller firms and larger firms, and there was numbers associated with them tend to be outperforming whatever we see as midsize. And I think larger firms were typified as over 100.

Was that right in terms of staff? But how would you. And I feel like you've seen that effect before in earlier studies in different years. But tell us a little bit more about that donut effect and what you noticed about it.

00:26:01.310 ‚  00:26:26.590  Michael Lasky
Yeah, I think there are a few things that account for that. I mean, certainly, and the devil's in the details. Look, there are a lot of very large firms that have had massive layoffs this year and are continuing to have them. So it's not like, um, you know, larger firms have all the answers and are immune from all the kinds of trends, the uncertainty, the,

00:26:27.910 ‚  00:26:50.710  Michael Lasky
you know, you know, clients asking more for less than anybody else. But they do have, you know, a larger, um, revenue base to, um, put against their expenses. So I think that has helped them in some way. Um, you know, uh.

00:26:53.430 ‚  00:26:58.589  Michael Lasky
Again, as a monolith, you know, do a little bit better than the midsize

00:26:59.910 ‚  00:27:29.150  Michael Lasky
at the, you know, 30 and under which we called, you know, smaller, not small, small, but mighty, you know, remember, the tugboat can also pull the ocean liner. So it's not it's not big as not always best. But, you know, I think the reason for the stronger profitability at the smaller firms is they tend to be laser focused.

They tend to be, um, very much, um,

00:27:30.670 ‚  00:27:49.109  Michael Lasky
focused on an industry. And, you know, this is a hard time to be all things to all people. So I think the specialization has become more important than ever. And whether you're a firm over 100 or a firm that is smaller but nimble, I think

00:27:50.470 ‚  00:28:53.390  Michael Lasky
knowing and understanding your competitive advantage, where are you going to make your investments? Being close to, you know, a particular or or more than one industry, but having some laser focus in those industries and envelop all the service offerings that are relevant for that industry, you know, can really be very helpful to drive both revenue and profits and actually also grow, you know, your clients internally so that there's a stronger connection with them.

You're not only, you know, doing their media relations, you're doing their content creation. You're doing their events, you're doing their thought leadership. You know, you're doing their data analytics. And, you know, sometimes firms have had to acquire different talent or even do smaller acquisitions to be able to bring in a capacity to get more heavily involved with an industry or a client so that they're not they're using their relationship to build the strongest connection to that client.

00:28:53.630 ‚  00:30:07.510  Anne Green
Yeah, it's a very it was helpful and heartening to read some of this data and also hear right now what you're saying, um, we've been having a lot of conversations about where, especially in the world of AI, right? Where is the human and where is the machine, and there needs to be a symbiotic relationship there.

The PR Council recently put out a framework that I really liked, and it was more about the writing side, but it was looking at how do you understand a framework so you're very intentional about this is all human. This is all machine. But this is where on the spectrum they merge. Mostly human, mostly machine.

ET cetera, etc. and being intentional about that. But the reason I bring that up is that where is the human essential as counselor. So sector expertise, deep knowledge of an area or an industry. Um, really going deeper into areas or service sets that are fueled by technology, underpinned by AI as a tool, but then overlaid with human analysis?

I mean, I think this really puts a sharp point when you look at it from like the revenue and profitability side, it puts a sharper point to, you know, as you dig into the details on how we need to be thinking about what why someone needs a counselor at this point. Why do they need someone outside their walls?

00:30:07.630 ‚  00:31:01.550  Michael Lasky
Well, you know, I the the analogy to law, you know, rings true to me because there was a time in the practice of law where a lot of attorneys, business cards, said attorneys and counselors at law. And that, you know, um, really was a reference to the English legal system where there were two distinct roles that lawyers provided.

One was transactional, and that was, you know, the, the, the, the solicitor. But there also was the barrister, the counselor, the, the, the, you know, advice and counsel role. And I think actually that has become, you know, more important than ever in a lot of professional services, certainly in strategic communications and public relations.

And I'd argue perhaps even in law.

00:31:01.870 ‚  00:32:14.310  Anne Green
That is an excellent metaphor. Are we in what we're seeking to do? When are we the solicitor and when are we the counselor or the barrister? I think that's an excellent, excellent analogy. So in your trends and when you're talking about training, you mentioned something I wanted to get into, which is the persistence of the retainer and retainer billing.

Obviously, we're both in professional service. It's it's it's a common construct, as you well know, in our industry. There's been talk for so, so long about this, um, buzzword of value based pricing. And my observation, and I'm not the only one has been easy to talk about. Difficult to do, I think by other names it might be consulting or it might be project, or there might be other words for it, but it's been a buzzword and a bit of a cudgel at times, where it's kind of beating agency leaders over the head like, hey dummies, why haven't you done moved to value based pricing yet, when oftentimes the corporate side really needs that retainer model, or would prefer a model that's sort of legible and understandable?

What's your take on the persistence of the retainer model, and what are the the things you're seeing now that are interesting relative to how pricing may shift over time, if you have a POV on that?

00:32:14.350 ‚  00:32:17.229  Michael Lasky
Well, yes, my my point of view is

00:32:18.270 ‚  00:32:25.790  Michael Lasky
it's the wrong discussion to think about it as an either or. Um, I'd like to have, you know, clients

00:32:27.030 ‚  00:34:30.709  Michael Lasky
either early in the process of onboarding a new client or sometimes even in the, you know, end of the pitch process. Um, or maybe when it's time to renew the contract, say, okay, what is your home run look like? We're going to do all these things and that's going to give you, you know, great results, great outcomes.

You know, to use maybe a sports analogy, just for a moment. There'll be some great, you know, singles and some great doubles. Um, might even be an occasional triple. But what is your home run look like? And, you know, if I think there's a no lose scenario to that discussion, even it may well be okay. Uh, home runs are rare, but if I can deliver a against that, would you be open to at least having a placeholder in the contract?

So at year end we have a discussion as to whether or not that success fee is warranted for for the home run. It might even be given that we now have, you know, a lot of data tools on our hands, setting an objective measure for how to how to measure not solid work, but spectacular, you know, outcomes. And, you know, I would like to think that either for new relationships or one where there's a history of trust that, you know, those conversations can be had more frequently.

Look, there are there are a number of ways to also do this. Maybe it's okay. Um, I understand that, you know, corporate won't allow, you know, this kind of success fee. But how about this? The next time one of your brands, you know, wants to do a RFP for new work, can we basically have a most favored nation status and not have to go through the RFP process, which costs us

00:34:32.110 ‚  00:34:51.310  Michael Lasky
thousands of dollars? You know, I think it just elevates the debate about, um, we want to hit the home run for you. And if you know, to use the analogy again, if economics drive behavior, we want to align our incentive with your preferred, you know, home run.

00:34:51.750 ‚  00:36:29.590  Anne Green
Yeah. And I think you're really talking about a both and in a way which I think we need to embrace, which is not all pricing models. It doesn't need to go away. Something doesn't need to go away in favor of only one model. One thing we've been talking a lot about on our leadership team is kind of having freedom to operate across different models within the same entity, and that even within the same client, especially with um AI, there may be aspects of the program that really need one kind of contract structure and another aspect of the program that needs a different one.

And it's not like this is unheard of in our field. I just I just think that there's been a lot of angst about trying to get away from the hourly bill, which I agree, you know, billing by hours, especially as now there will be things that will be more commoditized, there will be things that the machine should do more of.

And it we then whether it's senior people or more junior people, become the orchestrators of agents of colleagues that are machines. But I think we're going to have to be really open and nimble. And I love your idea about how do you look at other types of value add that may not be just a monetary outcome too.

Yeah. Let's let's talk about the AI of it all. That's what I like to the AI of it all. Um, I was very Be interested in what you're saying about these gaps between. It's almost like a governance and behavior gap. How does it relate to the client? What are those governance structures? What are the ethical structures, the legal structures?

What's the risk matrix? As you've talked to various firms, I know you were just at the

00:36:30.710 ‚  00:36:39.830  Anne Green
summit speaking there, but what have people's reactions been to the gaps you've identified in around this sort of AI practices?

00:36:39.950 ‚  00:37:15.430  Michael Lasky
I think, um, people have really responded like a bit of a oh yeah. Aha. And I think people have it has resonated with them. Um, and I'm, I'm a little humbled by that. But, um, um, you know, one of the things that really struck me also when I looked at what I call closing the gap and the difference between strategy and, and and and actually how it's being executed is when we asked the question about are you using with clients?

Have you modified your contracts? Um,

00:37:16.790 ‚  00:37:33.550  Michael Lasky
most responded that they had not had the conversation with clients, but those that did responded in a very high percentage, that the clients were receptive and were open to the conversation when proactively,

00:37:34.910 ‚  00:37:50.430  Michael Lasky
you know, um, brought up by the agency. And that actually told me a lot, which, you know, um, one of my favorite quotes from, uh, Louis Pasteur is chance favors the prepared mind. And, you know, you know,

00:37:51.470 ‚  00:37:55.949  Michael Lasky
being passive about something, uh, is, is probably

00:37:57.630 ‚  00:38:59.990  Michael Lasky
a worse set of state of mind when things are moving as quickly as they are in this industry than, frankly, ever before. But, you know, having to use your word, intentional conversations with clients about. Let's talk about why I think we can get better outcomes with you, for you, for your brand, for your objectives.

If we use AI in this way, these platforms for these tasks, and this is the ROI we expect from it, and that ROI is not just measured by, okay, we're going to save you a few nickels here and there. It can be about we're going to have a much better crisis plan in place, because we're going to be using this to help, really, you know, look at experience for similar kinds of situations to help use data to guide

00:39:01.030 ‚  00:39:32.470  Michael Lasky
your next strategic moves. And that's, you know, a conversation. Mission? Yes. Advisory in nature. And yes. Strategic. You know, you're using the AI, um, to maybe, you know, um, empower you, if I may, to have the conversation. But it's only the starting point. And I think clients are looking for their communications firm to be, you know, good stewards of their trust.

And frankly, you know,

00:39:33.510 ‚  00:39:57.389  Michael Lasky
this is their area of expertise. And the client, frankly, I think will respect and value. There's that word, the kind of advice and counsel that is not just relegating the function to execution. And I think that's a big mistake that the business some

00:39:59.150 ‚  00:40:05.870  Michael Lasky
firms make more than others. And if we were to look at, frankly, the firms that are

00:40:06.990 ‚  00:40:11.190  Michael Lasky
defying gravity, to use the analogy from the Wicked song.

00:40:13.350 ‚  00:40:53.310  Michael Lasky
Very timely. Yes, we're all waiting for, uh, you know, the release on, I guess, the Thanksgiving weekend of wicked for good. Um, and, you know, I think it's, um, firms that are really, you know, playing at a higher level. They, they're leveraging off, um, you know, their, their value and, um, playing not just the execution, you know, aspects, but also the strategic advisory as the threshold that then guides the execution.

00:40:53.390 ‚  00:43:34.350  Anne Green
I couldn't agree with this conversation more. I have a few observations. It was interesting in the research to see. I have it here that 63% of respondents to the trends report said clients are cautious but open to integration. I would say that it really depends on which clients you're talking to. And I would say some of the corporates are really starting to get ahead.

And it's radically different than a few months ago. And so one of the things I enjoy about being out and about in our industry, and it's not just the agency side, it's not just PR, it's that broader integrated marketing communications. It's both corporates, agency side nonprofit academia, venues like page PR counsel.

What's really helpful about a venue like page is that it's very self-selected about who has decided to be in that room. Not only are they senior communications professionals and leaders and counselors, they've also said that their commitment to the industry and professional development is such that they want to make that time.

And I feel like and I'm sure, Michael, you agree, when you're in those kinds of rooms, you hear how quickly a sect of the organizations out there, sectors of them and categories of them are leaning in and starting to find acceleration And looking at what does this mean for our FT's in-house, our partners out of house, you know.

Um, and so to build on what you're saying, my feeling is that I say to my people when it comes to AI and our clients show the work we need to go intentionally and be the ones to bring up this conversation and say, we want to, first of all, show you our AI policies. This is how they're in our contracts. This is how we're thinking about it.

These are how all the levels at which this is how we're doing peer to peer discussions and counsel are tech stack, because there's so much focus on generative AI through the large platforms and the language models that there's a transformation of our entire tech stack, a lot of which are technologies that we carry and use on behalf of many of our clients to lower their cost basis.

But if we don't know how AI is tracking, but then from there, how do we have those discussions to say, these are the this is the ethical framework we're using. This is how it's making us smarter. This is how we're getting to value. Because as I as I've said many times to my peers, if we don't lead that conversation, eventually the call comes from procurement and the procurement professionals are going to be under huge pressure here.

And I see them already trying to interpret what this change means and how they pull value back to the organization. Um, sometimes that can be a blunt instrument. I think there are some very nuanced conversations going on, but I love that you're bringing this up, because if we don't come forward ourselves right then we are being.

I think you use the word passive, right? That's that's not a good place to be, right?

00:43:34.550 ‚  00:45:41.470  Michael Lasky
No. And I even take it one step further. Not only can't you be passive, you can't stand still. The the the the rate of the change has been so dramatic, you know, that, um, you know, I think more now, more than ever, staying still is really falling behind. And that's definitely not a good place to be. So, you know, anticipating the conversations, thinking through the ROI that you can explain to the client, making sure that you're not you're approaching the AI conversations with the right client, contract addenda with the right internal policies, that you're not setting yourself up for a breach of contract because, um, you're using it in an unauthorized ways or disclosing confidential information of the client in a, in a non in an open platform or, or worse, infringing on, uh, intellectual property of a third party.

So there are lots of let alone, you know, um, having, um, uh, you know, issues that could lead to, you know, bias in the results or, you know, using it in a way that's going to, um, lead to a deceptive practice. So there are. So it's a combination of the, you know, frankly, the artificial intelligence and the human intelligence.

You know, one of our colleagues used the expression that, um, you know, the the public relations professional of tomorrow is going to be a data engineer. Um, I like to think of the analogy of the tool kit. You know, what what tool from the toolkit you're going to pull out to advance the client's, um, uh, objectives.

And, um, that's not an automated function that's based upon your skill and experience and your knowledge of the client and your knowledge of the industry and everything else that you do.

00:45:42.030 ‚  00:46:13.190  Anne Green
Yeah. When you talked about not standing still, it reminded me of another Broadway reference, which is a song Move On from Sunday in the Park with George. You've got to move on, you know. You've got to find that next thing. So as we wrap up today, you know, we talked early on. You talked about those three takeaways we dug into many of them.

If you had one piece of advice not just for agency leaders, but other senior communicators that are working to transform or work with counselors, you know what would be maybe 1 or 2 things you really want folks to think about going forward?

00:46:13.390 ‚  00:47:23.230  Michael Lasky
You know, I'd say, you know, maybe reverse engineer, you know, um, you know, if you had a magic wand, what would you like to achieve for your agency and its clients? And then if you know that you know that goal, it's easier to achieve it. And then, frankly, try to think about what are the barriers right now within your organization to getting there.

Um, and, you know, it's almost like in the M&A context, we typically will tell independent firms to flip your hat around. And if you were buying your firm, what would you want to find? And, you know, build towards that outcome. Flip the hat around and what would you want the outcomes to be? And if that's on the people side, you know, build your compensation system that reflects what you want to achieve.

Um, for that practice group, for that office, for that whole firm. Um, and if it's on the training and development side, we'll think about what's missing in that equation and why you're not, you know, getting where you want to be and what you need to do to get there.

00:47:23.590 ‚  00:47:40.950  Anne Green
That's great advice. I love that. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today on Building Brant Gravity. And people can easily Google the report. Go to Davis+Gilbert, look for the Public Relations 13th Annual Trends report. We'll put a link in our show notes and thank you. It's always good to see you.

00:47:41.110 ‚  00:47:43.310  Michael Lasky
My pleasure. Anna, it's great being with you.

Steve Halsey: [00:00:00] Gone are the days that corporate communications is, we're gonna push out a press release. We're gonna manage a couple key stakeholder. It's really embedded in everything we do.
Anne Green: You can see how in larger entities, communications manifest in different ways in different parts of the business, and yet it's so critical across so many levels.
I think it's a good conversation to have. The pendulum tends to swing back and forth relative to centralized. Decentralized. But if we can embrace that both and two things being true at once, I think we're gonna be in a much of a stronger place.
Steve Halsey: Welcome to Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey.
Anne Green: And I'm Anne Green.
Steve Halsey: And we are your host of Building Brand Gravity. Well, today's gonna be fun. Today's episode's also gonna be a little bit different. We're diving into a mailbag of the big questions that have surfaced across our conversations so far this year.
[00:01:00] And Anne, we've spoken to some incredible, incredible guests from comms leaders, AI experts, researchers. How really. Ga, how we think about trust, and what really struck us is how often the themes seem to overlap. They're all very individual episodes, but a lot of them reflect what many of you are grappling with inside your own organizations.
Anne Green: Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. And instead of revisiting each episode one by one, we're just gonna weave together questions by theme. We're looking at the kinds of discussion points we're hearing most from communicators and marketers and leaders, so we can consider this a lightning round of the issues that just keep coming up in boardrooms in our conversations with ourselves and other agencies, and also in the media.
So Steve, I'm gonna let you jump right in.
Steve Halsey: Well, why don't we start with the topic that always comes up when you start the conversation about communications, the stature of communications, and where we fit in. In your, [00:02:00] uh, interview with Chrissy Jones in the future of the comms function, you and Chrissy discuss that off sided point that.
Quote unquote, comm needs to earn a seat at the table. Right. We've been, we've been hearing that for a long time and it kind of feels outdated. And that's the point you were saying. Yet it continues to come up over and over again. Why is that and how is the statue of comms in the C-suite still unsettled at this point?
Anne Green: Yeah, it's really interesting. We did talk about that. That was a very recent episode, so I encourage people to check it out. Um. I, I think about this a lot, why comms has to earn a seat at the table. And many organizations it has. Like, that's not even a question anymore yet. I think the continued challenge of how value is measured is probably at the heart of it, the revenue issues, stock price, those hard metrics, the dollars capital tends to still be the way, especially larger organizations measure value.
Um, the value of things like reputation. [00:03:00] As a business asset. Of course and have always been harder to measure. They're qualitative as well as quantitative, and there's been many efforts to put the quantitative number to it, the dollar figure. But those always, um, feel a little bit hollow or they fall short relative to a literal thing like bottom line revenue or stock price.
And so I think. That that is gonna continue to be a challenge. Yet you and I have been doing some reputation work recently, and in speaking with a whole C-suite of a very, very large organization, it's incredibly clear to those folks that reputation is a business asset and that these pieces are critical.
And so I think that we have to find a way to keep articulating that in and insisting on both qualitative and quantitative. And the other thing we need to do is remind folks that in a volatile landscape. Communications folks and communications functions are more central and necessary than ever.
Steve Halsey: Well, in, in a lot of ways, you know, there are people that try and make [00:04:00] it be a, almost like a binary question of, Hey, should comms really be sitting in the C-suite right there in the center of power?
Or should they be out where the customers are in the field with the businesses? How do they balance both in a lot of ways? I feel like sometimes that's a binary, um. Point that's, that's, that's being put out there, but you like to say it's yes and right.
Anne Green: Mm-hmm. Yeah. A lot of things can be true at once.
Steve Halsey: So, so that, that continues to be part of the challenge.
But, but you know, it, it really, uh, like you said, it's no longer about having the seat of the table. It's really about what are we going to do there? How do we demonstrate the value? And it's interesting that the role of senior comms has kind of shifted from that. Hey, we're kind of the, um. Kinda like that little voice, uh, of the organization kind of steering it on the path to really, like what you were saying, of really thinking about reputation as a value driver, particularly in as volatile, uh, [00:05:00] environment like we're in today.
Anne Green: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I, I just don't know that that question's ever gonna go away. Our role is gonna be different than a CFO's role or a senior counsel, um, legal counsel. And, and I think we just have to embrace the differences there and keep articulating it
Steve Halsey: well, and and part of that challenge too.
And, and you and Ethan McCarty covered this in that episode of Living with Values. When culture and Brand Collides, you guys really talked about the challenges of. What happens when organizational and individual employee values are not aligned sometimes in clear conflict, but isn't it impossible to ever fully achieve alignment between the corporation and the individual?
And what kind of expectation should leaders have for employees to truly buy in?
Anne Green: Yeah, when we had the Ethan episode, there was definitely some good feedback there and some discussions even among our own team about that question. There's like the organizational value, the the individual's value. 'cause [00:06:00] employees are not a monolith, right?
How do they overlap? How close are they? They one, are they the same? Right. So, you know, and I had actually reached out to Ethan when they had put out at um, integral some good research they do every year about. Employee values, um, employee experience, et cetera. 'cause that's their expertise. I think where we were netting out here is that there's no way that the circles completely overlap.
That would be something that you wouldn't expect to happen, you shouldn't expect to happen. Nor is that probably good. I think there's a dynamic tension between how. The organization and its leaders as a collective, and then the individuals in the entity pull and push at each other to find your center of gravity within those values.
Now, one thing Ethan said I think is very clear, and I think this is the the flag for organizational leaders, but also communications folks that are dealing with internal and external [00:07:00] communications. When the circles are too far apart, some very not good things can happen. Um, you wanna try to bring them more into alignment, so.
Trying to hope that you can have more of the overlap, but part of that is going through that consistent process frequently and refreshing it, of discussing what values really mean at a collective level and at an individual level, and creating an environment where people can speak about where they feel tensions with their own individual values.
You don't have to buy into everything, and sometimes it's better if people exit because they don't feel that alignment, but I, I think that. Leaders have to be more intentional and mindful about how they speak about this in their own ecosystem. I don't know. Does that resonate with you?
Steve Halsey: I think, I think it does.
And, and you know, when I had the, uh, the, the discussion with Elliot Rahi when he was with, uh, the Page Society and Rob Koeck of the Harris Poll, they did some research at the turn of the year, which was really focused on that idea of [00:08:00] values and to the point that you were talking about. How a corporation really needs to stay true and demonstrate and live out those values.
And then, like you said, at some point, if they don't align, sometimes it's, it's best to go different directions. But it's also bringing that why, why are these values important to us and why do we live every day? I think are, are beco are key and and they're becoming more and more, I was gonna say more and more transparent, but communication is so all encompassing.
They're just more evident.
Anne Green: It's true. And. I think sometimes where there's a disconnect and, and this, this is a big issue, but just to lightly touch on it, is when something's happening in the ecosystem, but it's not being named and openly discussed, that's when that sense of trust or transparency erodes.
So again, if there's something the organization has to do that's hard. There's a lot of those hard choices in an environment like ours that companies have to make. Speaking about it, [00:09:00] talking about how hard decisions can be commensurate with your values too, and allowing space for an employee body and individuals to kind of say, this doesn't feel good and I wanna talk about it.
But finding a way back to the why, as you said that, that to me really is so much of, that's why I really enjoyed having discussions like that. Someone like Ethan.
Steve Halsey: Well, and, and even thinking about communicating with them where they are is a, is a much more challenging question now than it was five years ago.
You have some organizations, um, that everybody is together. They're in one place, they're driving it. Others, you know, a lot of, uh, companies that have industrial manufacturing component. You have this. Divergent workforce, that you've got hourly workers that are coming in every single day to work the machines to create the thing well.
Other people may be coming into corporate or you have other groups that are, are really hybrid. And I guess going back to your conversation that you had with Chrissy [00:10:00] Jones, you know, we got some interesting feedback and some follow up that with questions about this idea of our hybrid structures for the communications function.
Not talking the corporation, but our hybrid structures for communications function is the best approach today to try and achieve both alignment.
Anne Green: Yeah. And you know that alignment and agility, if people go back and listen to that episode, and I'm glad you circled back to it 'cause you brought it up before and it's really germane you had.
Brought that up. That question of how do you have both alignment and agility? If the hypothesis is that having communications folks embedded in business units gives them greater alignment and intense intentionality, or does it give them more agility to move faster 'cause they're closer to the customer?
Or do you have better alignment if you have the centralized structure that's closer to the C-suite? And less agility? Or does that make you more agile? 'cause you're closer to the center of power. And I've been thinking more about this, as you can tell, 'cause there's a [00:11:00] both. And here I do feel in discussing it with Chrisian, with others, that that hybrid structure is probably powerful and it's gonna be different flavors and shades of gray for different companies.
What does it look like as you said. A manufacturer versus a knowledge worker type of organization. It's, it's, it's differently structured, but the idea that you need to think about. You know, again, honoring your construct, Steve, alignment and agility. And it has to be both and in both settings. Alignment with the business unit and the customer's agility to move faster from the field.
Alignment with the C-suite and with the ultimate leaders and agility to get to regulatory legal counsel, make decisions, move fast, especially in a volatile reputation environment. I think, um, that kind of comm structure. With a respected senior leader, close to, close to, if not in the C-suite, is to me [00:12:00] the sweet spot.
Steve Halsey: Yeah. And I, and I think the, uh, conversation you and I are having, uh, with CCOs both here in the states and globally is just really reinforcing that. And, and when I think about and reflect on that concept of the hybrid structure. To me, it just really reinforces how important communications is to the very foundation of just how businesses operate Today.
Gone are the days that corporate communications is we're gonna push out a press release, we're gonna manage a couple key stakeholder. It's really embedded in everything we do.
Anne Green: It is, and you can see how. In larger entities. You know, we work in healthcare, manufacturing so many different fields.
Communications manifests in different ways in different parts of the business, and yet it's so critical across so many levels. So, yeah, I, I think it's a good conversation to have. The pendulum tends to swing back and forth relative to decentralized, decentralized, but if we can embrace that both, and two things being true at once, I think we're gonna [00:13:00] be in a much stronger place.
Steve Halsey: All right, now it's time to have a little fun. Let's go on our way back machine. You remember at the turn of the year we did an episode we called Navigating 2025 essential trends, insights, and checklists. Not much has happened in the world since, uh, January when we threw out our, our prognostication as to what was come.
Uh, but the trends we had identified, they cut across ai societal. Uh, expectation, economic pressure. Never could we have imagined, uh, the daily disruption of the news cycles that we've been dealing, but that's the reality of where we're at. So let's step back and, and reflect and think how are our predictions panning out?
Now we're just coming into, uh, Q4. Are our predictions accurate or not? And how should communicators prioritize? Anything when everything feels so essential at the moment.
Anne Green: All right, I'll, I'll bite first [00:14:00] and I'll hand it back to you. It does feel the way back. Machine. January does feel way, way, way back.
I've been talking to so many people about what does time mean anymore? Just so much happens every day. So. When I reflected back on our predictions, I mean, one thing I think that was very on spot was that this truly was the year that AI within organizations went from more exploration to enablement. Now, there's a lot of debate right now about how that enablement is going at the corporate level, at different sizes, et cetera, but I can see across our agency, across other agencies especially and across many corporates, a huge movement forward and tangible.
Um, leaps, tangible, upskilling, embracing at different levels, not just coming from the top. A lot of peer to peer engagement. A lot of use of tools and we're starting to see more discussion of ROI, which will be defined in many different ways. I see the media even this week. I was reading today in one of the AI [00:15:00] newsletters, like just this hard thing about like, who is defining value in JP Morgan Chase.
Jamie Diamond has come out with some details about that, um, about what they are seeing as ROI already, but I think ROI is gonna look different, but I'm seeing more there. And then the, the other thing I would say is that. Some of what we've been expecting in January when we spoke has been even more intense and acute than we could have anticipated, as you said, and that includes societal and economic pressures.
The landscape. Has put even more of an onus on how we communicate inside and outside our walls. How we're flexible, how we're resilient. So those are the things for me. But now back to you Steve. You set a high bar in January around three branding strategies for 2025. So you could revisit those and share how your predictions are fairing.
Steve Halsey: Yeah, I think like you, I was surprised by how quickly they accelerated. I think as I look back at our predictions, I, I still think we were, uh, we were remarkably on [00:16:00] target for ours, but. I, I've been shocked just by how fast and and conversations that that I've had with our friends at MuckRack and other AI is no longer a future bet.
I mean, the acceleration curve there has been incredible that it's really. Definitely table stakes at, at this point. And we're really seeing a rapid evolution that the leaders are the ones using it to make customer experiences more human, more meaningful, not more, uh, efficient. And if you look at some of the adjacent, uh, spaces to ours, like advertising, things like that, it is incredible the, uh, the amount of personalization that can be done, or even just the ability for large corporations to self create.
Uh, some incredible things, uh, with ai. The, the second one, you know, and I think this one will stay true forever. I kind of joke about, you know, the first cave drawing was the first infographic, right? Water is [00:17:00] good. It will nurture you. Bear is bad. It might eat you, right? Real, real. That was like the original foundation of storytelling.
But we were right that value driven stories matter now and the bar is higher, particularly when you get such chaos, such change. You need to have the receipts. Trust now comes down to really connecting stories directly to Proofpoint and, and progress and it, it is difficult, but you really have to really put everything together from point A to B2C.
And then the last part of the predictions now feels truer than ever that in a year as noisy as this one and as uncertain. Clarity is currency. You know, you, you, the brands that can simplify complexity and make it clear what their path forward is and why. Going to that values thing we just discussed, those are the ones that are gonna emerge.
Um. As well. So I guess taking together, our predictions are still [00:18:00] holding up, but we still have a quarter to go in the year, so, um, we'll see when we get to December, whether we feel like we've got there or not.
Anne Green: I love your point on clarity. Um, I think even within our own group, which encompasses two agencies, we're trying to be.
Very mindful and asking ourselves, what's the most important message we have to share? What's the most important thing we need people to understand or do? How do we strip back some of the stuff they don't have to worry about as much, you know? And so I always feel that our group is a microcosm for experimenting and feeling out how, you know, other things are resonating in organizations far larger than us.
But, um, yeah, I think keeping with the. AI trend though. I wanna turn the tables with you in an episode you did not too long ago, uh, with Lauren King of one of our agencies, Morgan Myers and Matt Zin. They talked to you about what AI is reading now and there's a lot of focus on generative engine [00:19:00] optimization.
Um. One of the questions we got from folks, and I have my notes here, if AI is being trained on digital exhaust, which is citations and links and me mentions, I love that phrase, digital exhaust. Does this create new incentives for content strategies that go beyond traditional earned, owned and paid? So what were some of the things that you think about on that question?
That was a, that was a really thoughtful question.
Steve Halsey: That, that was really good. And I think that the key point from that episode, um, that just hit me, uh, right between the eyes is GEO is no longer optional. I mean, it is the new frontier of earned visibility. And, and that whole episode was based on MuckRack went and they ran a a million inquiries to look at how the different engines chat, Gemini others, how they were processing information.
And what they found was it was incredible and actually incredibly refreshing as a, as a communicator. Based on those million [00:20:00] of inquiries, the data was undeniable. 95%. What the large language models are citing is not paid. That means that journalism, credible research, high authority content, are now the most valuable digital real estate that you can have in your strategy.
So again, going back to that foundation of storytelling. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over time because it is a real shift. You still need advertising. You need paid, but it's that return to the delivery of the story. So every credible mention link citation, really what you're doing is you're teaching the AI brand.
What is a trusted source? What is not? So visibility has literally become, uh. I'll call it algorithmic trust. There's a term for you for today, you know, so welcome to the matrix, right? We're now creating algorithmic trust, and all of this is shifting a little bit how [00:21:00] we need to think about the term of content strategy.
It's no longer just about the audience that we're trying to reach, but it's what are the machines that are reaching them in this zero click environment, right? And zero click environment, as you talked about, is. Hey, I put my query in it. I don't need to go any deeper because you're automatically starting to get those ai uh, summaries coming in there.
So what we need to do is think about how we can create content and stories and facts that are really citation friendly, high authority, timely, really structured. Basically all those things that AI can, uh, can reference and reuse. So I know it's a long answer to a, uh, to, to a quick question, but, but to me this means that our mindset needs to evolve not just coverage for coverage sake, but coverage to earn credibility, which then goes into the data, data sets that shape what people see and believe.
And I thought the other thing that was interesting that Lauren really talked about that. [00:22:00] As you know, we work in industries, I hate to call them niche because they're huge, like advanced manufacturing and healthcare and agribusiness. But since they're not part of a lot of these larger consumer sets, you can really have a much bigger impact on what shows up by being at the right places at the right time with the right credibility.
So there you go. Visibility is, uh, algorithmic trust Now.
Anne Green: I love it. Let's keep coining new language. The language is always evolving and you gotta keep up with it, but I think there's some great points there and it's been exciting to watch our teams digging into GEO or a IO, depending on what you wanna call it, and seeing all of the reverberations of it and everything they can do with it.
Steve Halsey: Well, and you had a, you had a very similar conversation with, uh, with Dan Nessel in your episode where you really talked about, uh, the, I think the term was earned attention, if I remember right. And there's so much talk [00:23:00] about GEO and a IO and whatever acronym you wanna give it in the context of earned media or pr.
But it seems like this has broader implications on all digital marketing on broader. Channel strategy. Why in your discussion did you guys really come to the focus on PR and what's been missing from this conversation?
Anne Green: Yeah, I brought up, Dan and I talked about the earned media implications, and then interestingly, I just did his podcast that hasn't come out yet.
The Trending communicator, and we gotten to this point of the GEO conversation is very focused on what we understand to be public relations and earned media. And it's sort of missing the broader digital marketing and channel strategy. Uh, not entirely, but the bulk of it, I think, has been focused on earned media because of a few things.
One is this feeling of where's the value? Of Vern Media and the broader marketing landscape and the comms landscape. And again, if you go back to what we talked about with comms, [00:24:00] earning a seat at the table for a long time with the advent of digital marketing and also just the preponderance of focus on anthemic campaign based advertising.
Back in the day, all you know, think about Mad Men. You know, there was a real focus on like the big ad campaign. What was the ROI that was gonna drive and then. Digital marketing, it kind of was like, oh look, we, we cracked the code, we've got all this data, we've got click data, and this data and audience data and time on site.
And you know, there was just this cascade of numbers that are very different from the kind of metrics that earned media produce and there's been so much anxiety about that. So I think that with GEO, we always knew with SEO. That there were high authority sites and that media outlets tended to be high authority sites.
So this is not a completely new thing, and SEO has not gone away that way. People are kind of talking about what's the relationship with SEO and GEO, but I think right now there's also when you combine that with the trend of sort of the [00:25:00] pressure on journalism, whether it's, you know, an uneasy relationship, to put it lightly with the current administration, with journalism or just consolidation, loss of jobs.
You know, compressing of outlets, loss of outlets. You know, there's this fear also about where's journalism going because we need it. In a society like ours, a democracy like ours needs are free and unruly and, and loud and boisterous, and diverse press. So you've put these two things together where, wow, journalism is doubling down on its authority relative to what large language models are looking at, and not just.
Media sites, but also, you know, owned and other types of channels. And then you look at the fact of, wow, this is another evidence of how powerful this kind of work is relative to earning attention through earning media. I think there's a big conversation to be had here. So we can't miss though the fact that you're on page strategy, how you develop websites, how you build metadata, [00:26:00] and then the digital marketing, how you're marketing through different channels.
That also has tremendous impact with GEO. So we, we need to bring our arms around all of it. We are integrated marketing communications. That's what most of our clients are doing as well. We have to look at all pieces of the GEO puzzle, and I've been really proud of our teams because they've been looking at it through those three pillars.
Earned media, kind of digital marketing, and then that on page. Development side.
Steve Halsey: Well, and you, you mentioned something I think that's really important. The, uh, making sure we have a free, robust and, and boisterous press, which has become more difficult with news consolidation, the shrinking of the, the newspapers.
One of the downsides about AI is it's writing a lot of local journalism right now, pulling from box sports for kids scores, things like that in, in sports. And there's also the challenge of. Just the heavier topics of trust and societal expectation and some of [00:27:00] those things that you talked about. And in some cases it's a little bit disheartening to hear from some fellow professionals, uh, even some professional groups that are like, Hey, the answer to this challenge is don't use the term.
If you don't use the term. It's not an issue. Don't say ESG. Just say, Hey. We like the earth, like things like that. But earlier this summer, I mean, you and Cheryl battles what an, what an incredible professional, what an amazing career Cheryl's had. But you guys really wade into some very, um, heady and important stuff on your Beyond acronyms, renaming, DEI and the title of the episode really challenged on.
Just that the challenge of anachronism and the over reliance in, in the case of de and I on the literal letters, de and I as the root of the problem, but isn't the real issue, those that are working to deliberately misrepresent the concept both for and against big [00:28:00] issues like this?
Anne Green: Yeah, I mean, I feel that.
And it was, it was funny. One of the little, in terms of this reframing of DEI, we, we use the header, um, from acronyms to acrimony. You know, there's a lot of intensity around this, and I have a lot of feelings about this. I'm very open about what I feel is the tremendous business value of what I call the principles and the practices of diversity, of equity, of inclusion, of belonging, of, of a set of tools.
A set of lenses through which to look at the world. And I, I always say to our people, part of this work is really becoming better managers. What's interfering between a manager and a manager? What are those things that are layered? Where do we misunderstand each other? Where does the idea of cultural competence across generations, across race, across gender, across every geography, all kinds of things, right?
So, you know, Cheryl and I really got into the fact that. That there's real, real [00:29:00] practices here, real business value. But what we discussed, and you kind of hit on it with the ESG thing, humans love acronyms. We love acronyms. We just make them up all the time. It makes life easier. However, that shorthand is a double-edged sword.
When you say ESG, environmental social governance, probably everybody listening here to us in the fields we're in knows. Those three areas encompass a universe of different needs and practices and areas. Now there's reasons why they were combined from a reporting and a stewardship perspective. And it has a lot to do with board governance, right?
DEI. There's reasons why these practices have been grouped and there's reasons why we went from just diversity, higher diverse folks, representation, oh wait, we have to also add equity. Wait. We should also add inclusion and belonging. I know why these acronyms grow, but the heart of that discussion and I really invite people to listen to 'cause I love to hear their feedback.[00:30:00]
Is when you reduce things to acronyms and you're not fully clear with people on the why, going back to what you said, Steve, why are we doing this? And it's not about taking something from one person to give it to another. And it's not about disadvantaging, it's actually about trying to say, I. How do we have people bring all their talent and represent the fullness of our customer base, of our employee base?
How do we get better? How do we build trust? How do we remove friction? How do we fly? How do we create flourishing and abundance rather than lack and taking away? And it's sad to see how negative it's become, but I love again that we have this kind of platform to talk about the fact that. AI is another one.
AI is a billion different things. So if we just say ai, ai, ai, are we really defining the why behind it and the usefulness of it? And I think as communicators we need to guard against acronym laziness, right? I mean, what do you think?
Steve Halsey: Yeah. Uh, a a hundred percent it, it becomes. It [00:31:00] becomes really easy to get, to get caught up in that.
And then it also becomes really easy to say, well just change the acronym, just change the term and, and what I thought was interesting about, and what you're talking about, the Y was when I talked to Rob and Elliot, I referenced that earlier. You know, I. It was really, that episode was about research that they did that showed only one in four still trust business to lead.
And really the core insight that we really talked about is action alone isn't enough. Just taking an action isn't enough. But when companies explain their why confidence in business. More than doubles from 26% to something like 53%. That's a difference between action and and accountability. And so when you think about that, you know, trust used to be earned in moments of crisis.
Everybody talks about, okay, well Tylenol the crisis, they dealt with this. This is great. Well now Tylenol is a whole different crisis that that, that they're dealing with. Uh, that's a subject of a whole separate episode. But [00:32:00] when we think about the topic of trust, now, it's maintained through that pattern of proof.
And ironically, when you, when we talk about GEO and the large language model, you've gotta do that constant pattern. It just can't be, I address it once and then I don't worry about it. And the other thing we, we saw based on that research that we talked about is we really are seeing. The impact of different generational lenses and what those generations are signaling.
And again, one of the bigger ones coming through is younger audiences expect transparency to be table stakes. They'll forgive your mistakes, but not mixed motives. So that really comes to a point that you were talking earlier about what are those corporate values? What are those directions? Let's be, let's be clear about that because I think that's what's going to be key, is really marrying together.
Consistency and courage, and that's not easy.
Anne Green: I love that. I think that's such a great build on what I talked about with Cheryl and I, I think this, that's an interesting [00:33:00] point for giving mistakes, but not motives. Understanding what motivates you, even if it's hard and nuanced. But the fact is, I find younger people, they're up for that discussion.
You know, give them that grace and, and get into the nuances, you know, the shades of gray matter.
Steve Halsey: So I guess going back to, uh, where we started on our predictions for 2025 and where we're at, I mean, 2025 has, uh, has been an exceptional year, I guess I should say. And I guess my question is, has, has 2025 been more about managing risk and uncertainties?
Or is it about seizing opportunities and how should communicators strike a balance on, on those? And where do we go from here? I mean, I wake up every day. It's like those are the, the key questions that, and from my my perspective, it's really been a year of dual reality. I mean, risk management and reinvention, you've gotta do both simultaneously.
Um, which is a, which is a unique challenge, but it's also, in some ways it's very exciting to [00:34:00] think about the need to deal with both, because particularly those of us in the agency world, but anybody in communications, you'd. If you didn't get into this career to show up and do the same thing every day, stamping that envelope.
And you said something really interesting in that January discussion that the most effective leaders are the one you said are optimistic realist or realist, optimistic. It was was one of those, but those that are really clear-eyed about the volatility ahead. They're still moving forward with intentionality.
And so I guess when I bundle this all together, and my advice to all our fellow communicators out there is uncertainty itself isn't the enemy, but ambiguity without direction is, and what we need to do is we need to be forward looking. Pick a path ahead and we've gotta move. We just can't stand still.
Anne Green: Yeah. You're reminding me in in terms of how I build on that just today, I really love Kara Swisher and her podcast on, she also has [00:35:00] Pivot, but on is where she's interviewing, you know, one or a few people and she's just one of the strongest journalists working to, she's very strong in a lot of ways, but she had Brene Brown on the legendary, you know, leadership guru, right?
So they were talking about leadership. I think Brene has a new book coming out that I need to check out, but it's a lot about. What she's learning from high functioning leaders in this moment, which is different than maybe the leadership. When you and I were coming up eighties, nineties, like other times of leadership and who would say, oh, who's like the legendary CEOs?
She said one of the biggest things people have to build as a leadership skill set is embracing paradox. Humans, again, are not really set to embrace nuance. We tend to move toward. Trying to clarify something and, and tends to be more binary thinking or zero sum thinking. Is it this or is it this? We rationally understand that two things can be true at once and often are.
Sometimes and when we kind of know that things may stay ambiguous and we have [00:36:00] to make the best call we can, but this is not a natural state for people, especially at the emotional level. There's a distinctive difference between how we grasp something rationally and how we feel it in our bodies and how we manifest it, right?
So in addition to embracing paradox, which is a leadership skill, you need to practice and it is that like two things are true at once. She discussed the importance of systems thinking. Which I really appreciate, and she's like, I don't know why systems thinking fell outta style. And you can define it different ways, but it's a lot about in the midst of the churn, you have to step back and train yourself to try to look for larger patterns and systems at play, which also relates to DEI.
So these are two pieces of advice, like living in the paradox and letting. Yourself, be comfortable with that and saying, Kara actually said, yeah, she's like, people ask me what's gonna happen. She's, I don't know yet. I guess we'll find out. And then looking at the systems, and those are two pieces of advice.
I'm definitely gonna continue to embrace,
Steve Halsey: uh, systems thinking. You certainly had me there and [00:37:00] anybody who knows me knows I love a good model. So gimme a four square, a Venn diagram, even a napkin to sketch on. And, and I'm, I'm in my happy. Place. And, but what I like about that is, you know, models, models help us make sense of complexity.
You know, they give us a system, a mental framework where we can see connections, where we may otherwise miss and, and kind of make, make decisions from there. And so I guess as we're getting ready to wrap, and I think about, you know, some of the through lines of the seasons, so far every topic we've explored, you know, ai, trust de and I, brand leadership.
It's all part of this larger ecosystem that's just constantly shifting and changing. But the more we understand those connections and the better we can think where the linkages are. I think the more effectively we can move with focus, with proof, with clarity, to really do what we need to do, which is build trust and really have reputation [00:38:00] be a be a business asset for our clients and for ourselves.
Anne Green: Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the name of this podcast, going back to the idea of brand Gravity. What is pulling you in? You know, what is bringing you to an idea? An organization, a leader. And how you create that through credibility and culture and clarity and how that builds resiliency in times of uncertainty.
So I wanna thank our listeners for joining us on this special Mailbag edition. Mailbag. Yeah. Go back and check out the episodes we mentioned, if you miss them, share what's on your mind and keep sending us your questions and ideas. So thank you again. I'm Anne Green for building Brand Gravity.
Steve Halsey: And I'm Steve Halsey.
Have a great day.

Matt Dzugan: [00:00:00] Chat GPT has over half of the content coming from the last year, and in fact, if you look at what is the single most likely day to have content published from, if I were to run a query today and I were to look at all the links that it cites or I were to run a hundred queries today and look at all the links that it cites, if you were a betting man, the most likely publication date you would see in any of those contents is.

Yesterday, it's always, the single day before is the most likely day that you're going to see content from, to your point, is a huge kind of wake up call. We have to make sure we have a steady stream of news press out there about our brand, because if it's not recent, it may not be seen.

Steve Halsey: Welcome to Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: And I'm Anne Green here at G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group. We're [00:01:00] so glad you joined us today.

Steve Halsey: Well, Anne, we've got a great episode for us today. Um, I'm kind of joking these days that in the sixties you had the summer of love, but, uh, here in 2025, we have the summer of the large language models, and this has been one of the biggest shifts really facing communications and marketing.

Teams right now. Um, this rise of generative engine optimization or GEO, which is the acronym that you see out there, but it really isn't just a theoretical trend. I mean, it's happening right now in real time. Every time you pick up your smartphone, every time you do a search on your computer, and it's changing how brand visibility is fundamentally working.

Anne Green: I couldn't agree more, Steve. I mean, we've moved from a world where people are very focused on optimizing for search, you know, search engines with links and keywords, and now they have to understand, um, how that is changing with AI models like chat, GPT, or Claude or Gemini, how they're searching and [00:02:00] creating discoveries.

Summarizing your brand story, deciding which content gets amplified as our recent primer on generative engine optimization, or GEO put it. LLMs of the new gatekeepers. I'd also refer our listeners back to an episode that just, um, was up, you know, and being promoted with Dan Nestle. The focus was on earned attention, not just earned media.

And I think Dan said it really well, which is you have to be thinking about ai, especially the large language models as another stakeholder.

Steve Halsey: Yeah, and I think, I think that's a very important insight in that, you know, where a lot of us started traditional PR gave us that credibility through trusted journalists, the earned coverage.

All of those things really, uh, really bolstered brands. Now, AI itself is acting like a little bit of a reputation system where it's scanning for credible structured recent content, and then it's shaping answers from it. So, you know. [00:03:00] What's, what's interesting to me is, is how it's evolving. SEO used to be around, Hey, let's get in like the top 10 links.

Now. It's really about this intersection of earned media credibility and digital market precision.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's so true. It's really that zero click search environment that is, uh, quite in impactful for publishers especially. But if you wanna see the data behind this. You know, everyone needs to check out Muck Rack's new study.

What is AI reading? They analyzed over a million citations from top LLMs and found that 89% of them come from earned media. Their definition of earned media is interesting. I really encourage people to check out that pie chart and dig into it. Um, there's a lot of good data in there, but the takeaway is credibility and that authority, measures of authority still rules, but the algorithms from the LLMs are really now in charge of surfacing them.

That's, that's material for many of the folks in our field and really any organization out there,

Steve Halsey: as you mentioned, like [00:04:00] really moving into this age of, uh, of a zero click environment. That's really why, as you know, we're, we're urging our clients to really rethink visibility in terms of an answer first.

Context, right? And so the GEO uh, uh, playbook that we put together really put together what I would call kind of four non-negotiables, which is recency. You know, AI really does favor content from the last 12 months, in some cases from the last day, which really requires you to think about your content strategy or even your crisis and issue strategy very differently.

The structure of it structure is still important. Having those digital experts to understand semantic, HTML, how to do the schema markup behind the scenes, but even how to structure the data with FAQs is, is key for how the AI starts to parse that. So recency structure, and then you get the two Cs.

Consistency and credibility, right? Consistency is, you've gotta tell your [00:05:00] story across all different, uh, media across earned, owned, social, paid, they all need to be aligned 'cause that's always getting pulled together. And then end of the day, the credibility is. You're seeing a little bit of, I'll call it a renaissance, but it never went away, but, but the journalistic validation still carries as much, if not more weight than it ever did.

Anne Green: And that's so powerful with journalism under such pressure. And we've seen that now just increasing year after year. So quite an interesting moment, especially for trade publications, as you said, that are in more specialized spaces. But we can't forget social media as well. So it's not just about engagement anymore, it's also about feeding the large language models.

So social posts, influencer content, you know, comment threads. Really starting to act as relevance signals. I think that's a great way to think about it. There's been a lot of discussion about the power of platforms like Reddit. You know, these things are really critical and if your message isn't reinforced or you're not engaging on those platforms that are at the very least not [00:06:00] aware of the kinds of ways in which the topics that are relevant to your, your organization or your organization itself for being discussed, you know, you may find the content that matters to you is filtered out or just.

Just not on the radar at all,

Steve Halsey: and I love that context. Relevant signals. And we're gonna, we're gonna be joined today by our guest, Matt Dugan. He is, uh, the head of Data of Muck Rack. He's gonna talk about this latest research that they did where they looked at more than a million queries by far the most, uh, in-depth research that's been made public.

And they're giving us the opportunity to get the first run at that data. So excited to be talking to Matt, and we have our own Lauren King with us. Who's one of our AI and GEO strategists here at GNS to really bring that context of what does this all mean from the client perspectives in the industries we serve.

Anne Green: Yeah. Together they're gonna help us break down the different models, you know, chat, GPT versus Claude versus Gemini. How they evaluate sources, how comms and content gets [00:07:00] cited and, and truly in terms of rubber on the road. What folks in our sector in integrated marketing communications, no matter where you sit in those fields, you know how you can make sure your brand shows up when AI generates the answer.

And I, I can say that this is a hot, hot topic of conversation across everyone we're working with with. Within our walls and also within our client walls.

Steve Halsey: Well, I'm, I'm excited to, uh, to get into the conversation, so let's get going. Today we have a very exciting and timely topic to talk through what AI is reading, the new Rules of Earned Media and GEO.

What if I told you that 95% of what AI sites isn't paid and that journalism might just be the most valuable digital real estate in your strategy? Today we're gonna break down some exciting new research on how large language models decide what to say and who cite. So with me today is Matt [00:08:00] Dugan, head of Data for Muck Rack.

Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Dzugan: Yep. Thanks for having me. Super glad to talk about this, uh, important, exciting topic. Um. Very happy to be here.

Steve Halsey: And we also have Lauren King, digital marketing supervisors, AI and insights at Morgan Myers at GNS Agency. Lauren, welcome to the show.

Loren King: Thanks for having me back. I think AI's on top of all our brains right now.

Steve Halsey: Yeah. You know, in the sixties they had the Summer of love. Uh, you know, this year seems to be the summers of the large language models. There we go. We kept it in the, kept it in the Ls. So we're here to unpack Muck Rack's landmark survey and, and analysis of over 1 million citations from Chat, GPT, Claude and Gemini, and what it tells us about brand visibility, GEO, and earned media.

Matt, I guess we'll start with you. There's so much data, data to unpack what are, what are some of the highlights?

Matt Dzugan: Yeah, well you touched on it in the, in the intro, absolutely. But, um, I think the highlights. Are that it's a great time to be in [00:09:00] pr. It's a great time to be in communications. Um, it's no coincidence that the things that PR pros have known for a long time that credibility matters.

You know, recency matters. Um, those, those same things are important to the ai. Of course, we'll dive into it a little bit further, but AI is really relying on credible recent data, and we can see that, uh, plain as day in, in, in our analysis that we did.

Steve Halsey: Now when, when you did your analysis, I wanted to spend just a little bit of time up front talking that, so more than 1 million link.

And I thought it was interesting. When you look through U US, you assigned a number of categories. So can categories were like journalistic, which were new sites, journalists coverage, corporate blogs and content, own media, press releases, academic and research, government, NGO, paid, advertorial, social. User generated content aggregators and encyclopedia.

So you, you had a really nice breakdown of that. Why don't you tell us a little bit what, what [00:10:00] kinda led you to really run this study? And then, then how does that, how did that breakdown really inform the, the really interesting results that you guys found?

Matt Dzugan: Yeah, of course. So, you know, as Muck Rack, of course, we, uh, deal with PR pros every day and this kind of.

Um, question of, you know, what, what should I be doing? Uh, what should I be doing to impact these? Ais has started to come up, obviously getting your word out in the media and then, you know, even more recently, social media. I think, you know, in general we find that our, our customers at mock rack. Paths for that.

They, so it's sort of a well understood path, but there's this new thing, oh my gosh, all of a sudden these robots are talking about my brand. They have no idea what they're saying. Have no idea where they're getting it from. Um, and so we just kind of wanted to work that backwards. We wanted to say, yeah, okay, if we're gonna advocate for the PR professional, if we're gonna [00:11:00] advocate for, here's how you can get your message out there in the ai.

The question just becomes, well, what are they reading? So that's exactly why we titled the study. What is AI reading? I mean, that's the exact question that we had. Of course, you know, somewhat selfs servingly. We wanna help PR pros focus on the areas that matter. So. We did a tiny, tiny version of this study first to just see, you know, what are the types of stuff Reddit shows up there, LinkedIn, you know, Reuters Financial, to just kind of catch a quick glimpse of what's out there.

And then that's how we decided we need these categories. Oh, holy smokes. The different types of prompts that you ask. It matter. So once we had seen just a little snippet of the data, we kind of created a more rigorous analysis that we wanted to do, like you said, a million times.

Steve Halsey: And so, so Lauren, from where, where you sit, is it good, is it bad?

Should we be, we be concerned that the large language models are thinking more and more like humans in terms of how they search [00:12:00] and, and process. Process data. What, well, and we'll get into numbers here in a little bit, but, but what's your take about just the speed of the evolution and, and the, the real, I guess I would call it natural language processing, that that is happening with the large language models?

Loren King: Yeah, so there's a few, uh, caveats in there. It's positive on my side, but it also takes some rethinking on the benefits that you're gonna get and even how your users are interacting with your pr, but starting at the top. We're basically seeing, uh, like Matt was talking about this validation of trust and authority in a way that hadn't really been able to be showcased as easily, uh, in the past.

So if you think about an, a large language model that's behind something like chat GPT, it does two things when it's searching. So it references the knowledge it was trained on, and then it reviews what's out there for today. So if you're asking for a recent topic on crop protection, it's gonna go through recent stories, but it's gonna compare those to what it's already knowing.

So if you have a strong basis in pr, you've been putting things out for years, you've got this trust and authority already built in, then [00:13:00] you're gonna be compared to what's out there, and you're more likely to show up in these results over time. So beneficial, but a completely different approach that you have to consider.

Also, keeping in mind that your users are less likely to go directly to your site now, and they're more likely to ask a complex query maybe. Comparing as a company, your PR results to a competitor and seeing what comes out. So you have to reframe everything entirely. Uh, change the way the language that you're using is positioned, changing and incorporating SEO in an even stronger but slightly different, uh, approach than before.

And having a good basis in how these models just select stories in the first place.

Matt Dzugan: That's great. And actually I want to, I want to add one, just one short thought on top of what you said. Um, I love that you called out the fact that there's kind of two approaches that these models take. They reference their training data and then, um, they'll look at what, you know, what sort of recent news is out there today, as you called it.

I, I really wanna underline that because what I found, you know, since we launched that study, that second piece, I think a lot [00:14:00] of people. Don't even realize that second piece because when chat GBT first came out, you know, feels like it's been here for a while now, but I guess it was only three years. Three years or so, everyone, everyone had that experience.

I mean, everyone is used to that thing where it said like, Ooh, I can't comment on that because my training data only goes up to, you know, blah, blah, blah year. But like, just to be very clear, like what Lauren and I are saying here is. It doesn't really work like that anymore. They, they, they got burned by that.

Obviously. They're a business. They're trying to make money, they're trying to be credible. And so what they said is, wow, we need a way around this. So they now have this sort of two-pronged approach. Yes, they rely on their training data and it's useful. And as you said, if you've had years of positive coverage, you've got a nice foundation.

But in addition to that. It is surfing the web in real time after you make your query. And that's kind of the crux of this study that we did here at Muck Rack, what we're calling these [00:15:00] citations.

Steve Halsey: Well, and, and what I think is fascinating is, um, and of course you, we all had that experience. I had the same thing too.

And they're like, oh my gosh, when I first started experiment, this is great. And it's like, yeah, but we can only get you data from two to three years ago, which is of only so much value, but, but. But what it can do now, particularly with the recency and, and the sourcing, but, but here's some really cool stats from this.

Like I said at the opening of the show, 95% of the links that are cited by ai, um, in this study are from non-paid sources. And so we gave you what those categories are. 89% of the citation comes from. PR driven sources. So that's journalism, the blogs, uh, different things like that. And then to me, what really gets interesting is then when you overlay the lens of recency, nearly 50% of the citation are from, from journalistic in, in nature.

And to me, I saw that stat and that was pretty revolutionary to me, max. So, so can you, can you just [00:16:00] talk a little bit about, uh, about. About those stats and, and, and what that, what that means and how we should think about, uh, comms in light of that.

Matt Dzugan: Yes. And so I love that that one was eye-opening for you. I guess it can.

Open your eyes even further, raise your eyebrows even further because it's, it's about 50% of the links that are cited. But if you think about it, each time you're asking an AI one of these questions, it's actually citing multiple links. So odds are, I don't have the exact number, but it's something, you know, like.

70% or 80% if you're asking a time sensitive question or an opinion question, something about recency more likely than not, you know, 70, 80% that at least one of those links, at least one of the multiple ones will be, uh, you know, journalistic sort of major media outlet. Um. Or niche media outlet, uh, type type, uh, type of link.

So yes, absolutely 50% overall, but also most of the queries, the vast majority of the queries are gonna come back with at least one [00:17:00] of those. And so, abs, I mean, you know, to your point, it's just, uh, a very important piece of that pie.

Steve Halsey: So, so Lauren, what, what does this, what does this mean for the enduring value of, of media?

You see, I, I grew, I grew up where, you know, my first job was, um, you know. I had a list of reporters said, get on the, get on the phone and, uh, get your client in Newsweek. Get your client in bus Businessweek, get 'em on the, uh, front page of the Chicago Tribune. That really shaped a lot of my approach to storytelling and what you needed to do and how you prove relevance to, to media.

Now we're seeing. That, you know, the enduring value of media continues to come through as part of the comms mix. I mean, what, what's, what's, what's your take on that from somebody whose background is more digital in nature versus somebody like me who really grew up in the process of working with and, and proving value to media on a daily basis?

Loren King: Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind out of that is, as I was reviewing the [00:18:00] Muck Rack data as well, what was really jumping out at me is how different some of the sources were, some of the companies that were being pulled from and the niche news organizations. And so you gotta rethink where you're trying to get your yourself showcased, essentially, and make sure that it's actually a.

The places that you, when your audience is searching, that's the sources that are gonna show up for them. So there's a real customization aspect here that probably involves doing a deeper dive into your audience's digital preferences. Are they using Claude? Are they using chat? GPT? What's their preferred AI tool?

And a lot of that's still emerging. I mean, this is. Still very, very new for the majority of consumers and for those who are adapting and trying these different tools. So there's not gonna be full answers yet. It's gonna take some experimentation, but once you've got a grasp on that, that gives you a better handle on the targeting you should be doing for those stories, because you really do wanna the specialized, you know, I know that tech radar is one that comes up quite a bit across a lot of different LLMs, and so from a technology background, if they weren't in consideration before.

They're [00:19:00] now basically gonna be preferred when it comes to any kind of technology product, uh, as long as a review is showing up.

Steve Halsey: Well, one of the things I, I think is interesting then to weigh, and I hadn't really thought of that until you mentioned it, Lauren, is, you know, I think a lot of us by nature default to the tool that we use.

So if you use chat all the time, you're defaulting. To chat if you're using Gemini. Similar thing, Claude. But what you bring up is a really interesting point that when we're putting together programs as communicators or as agency professionals, as we're counseling clients, we really not need to think about not large language models as this ubiquitous thing, but, but I guess.

You know, Matt, kind of from this, you're, you're basically saying they each have their own a little bit of a style that needs to be taken in account.

Matt Dzugan: Yeah, they, they absolutely do. I mean, I think even, uh, a couple times I've been chatting with folks, you know, and I've even called it like a personality. They do, they behave differently even in, in, of course, in the way that [00:20:00] they.

Talk, uh, to, to use that word, but like in the way that they, you know, create sentences, but also in the content that they read, which is I think what's most important here. In fact, we actually see that, um, even, even just the quantity of content that they read and the quantity of contents that they cite.

They'll even have different patterns. Some of the tools will cite articles that res that, um, that sort of map to their entire response. Some of the tools will just cite one article for like one sentence at a time. And this is something that's changing over time too. To add another, add, another dimension to it is these different tools are maturing and growing and changing.

So I definitely agree, uh, with Lauren's kind of overall point, which is like. The best way that you can sort of approach this is to just do a little bit of reflection on what's your audience, what are, how are they thinking of that? What tools are they using? And just kind of optimize [00:21:00] for that.

Steve Halsey: So, Lauren, my, my question for you is, you know, you, you counsel a lot on.

What I'll call niche audience. I hate to call 'em niche 'cause they're pretty big, but, uh, but agriculture, advanced manufacturing, uh, highly complex B2B supply chain based companies. How does that kind of, um, niche focus play out in, in what communicators need to think about when they're, when they're not going for tech radar, when they're not going for raid, uh, Reuters or Bloomberg?

Loren King: It does go back to understanding consumer preference or audience preference. You know, if you take my dad for example, he's a corn and soybean farmer in Michigan. Most of his interactions with the internet are on his phone. He's not using a desktop, but 99% of the time he's gonna be using his phone, looking up very technical information around crops, around crop protection tools, around markets for the day.

And so his behavior as a farmer is going to be dictated by that. It's also gonna be dictated by the type of phone he has. [00:22:00] You know, there's been some reporting recently that Apple wants to maybe look at using Google Gemini as the background for Siri. So if you're just making the assumption that your iPhone users are gonna use a certain app, you need to be aware that.

If their behavior is actually gonna be dictated partially by a Google based ai, which is going to show completely different links than if it was say, open AI that had built that partnership around Siri. So it's multifaceted. Uh, if you were to go more towards, say, our veterinarians or some of our other technical industry specialists, there's a chance that they're gonna be more on desktop and they're gonna be choosing the type of tool they might use.

They might move more towards perplexity 'cause of that deep. Research need. In that case, you're also gonna have to consider a completely different platform for sourcing. And so deep audience knowledge is very, very important. There's room here to help using ai, you know, just even, uh, going into AI tools and asking those types of questions to simulate where maybe a veterinarian might look on their own.

But you have to think very omnichannel [00:23:00] and you have to think with constant, uh, audience preferences in mind.

Steve Halsey: So let's, so let's talk a little bit about recency and, uh, this is the part where, uh, I remem remind our listeners that I'm actually a dinosaur. That like, when I started, uh, in this industry, the process was I would call up a, uh, reporter or an editor and say, Hey, I got something really cool.

I'm gonna be sending it to you. Then I would put it in this thing called the US Mail. So I'd have to wait three to five days. Then I would follow up and say, Hey, did you get that thing I sent you? And then let's talk about it. Facilitate the process of interviews, cover all that. And so typically the lead times we were working with, if you, if you were dealing with a trade publication, was about three months from when we started the pitch to where the, where the story was placed.

Obviously if you're dealing with tv, uh, radio or daily news, the cycle was a lot more compressed. But, but it had a certain cycle to it. Right. And then as, uh, the 24 news hour cycle shrunk to by the [00:24:00] hour, to by the minute to now by the second, you know, you saw a lot of things like really revolutionary moments like on the Arab Spring where you saw reporting starting from.

Smart phones off of social media sites that then led to feed, that led then led to breaking reporting, then led to longer form reporting. I guess that's a long ways to say the speed of this gets faster. So I guess, Matt, what's gonna be interesting to me is. Recency rules right now. So a, when we were talking earlier, you were saying like open ai, like favors articles from around the past 12 months.

Claude may go a little bit deeper, so I want you to talk a little bit about that, but do you think we're going to enter the same cycle of speed? That's happened in other parts of the media consumption get translated into, uh, how the large language models start pulling, uh, their information.

Matt Dzugan: Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a good question.

So, yeah, I'll, I'll start with the first [00:25:00] half of your question, then I'll, and then I'll. Touch on kind of,

Steve Halsey: oh, the part where I'm a dinosaur is that the, oh, yeah. I'm gonna talk, talk about, about the

Matt Dzugan: US Mail if we can. First I'll touch on, you know, like what we saw in the study and then I'll kind of, you know, maybe make a little bit of guess as to where this is going.

Um, but absolutely what we saw in this study is that when these sources, or excuse me, when these AI systems are citing. Uh, sources with dates associated, you know, like a Wikipedia page for example, doesn't really have a publication date in the same way that a, um, in the same way that a news article or even even like a LinkedIn post or YouTube video, I mean, those have clear publication dates.

So for any of the type of content where we're able to discern a clear publication date, it's very clear that stuff in the last 12 months. Get cited more often than stuff, you know, four years ago, five years ago, and again, this is intuitive. Very clearly, the, uh, AI systems have [00:26:00] been, um, built and designed to favor recency.

Um, now what's particularly interesting is that, that, um. How, how could I, how could I call that? Amplification of the stuff from the last 12 months over stuff from four or five months ago is even stronger in chat GPT than it is the other tools. Actually chat. GPT has over half of the content coming from the last year, and in fact, if you look at what is the single most likely day to have content.

Published from, so like example, if I, you know, if I were to run a query today, um. And I were to look at all the links that it cites or I were to run a hundred queries today and look at all the links that it cites. If you were a betting man, the most likely publication date you would see in any of those contents is yesterday.

Um, it's always, the single day before is the most likely day that you're going to see [00:27:00] content from, which I think, uh, to your point, is a huge kind of wake up call of like, wow, we gotta make sure. I know, easier said than done. We have to make sure we have a steady stream of, uh, news press out there about our brand because if it's not recent, it may not be seen.

Steve Halsey: That is amazing that the recency is really, really day before and the, the implications of that are are pretty, pretty significant. And, um, Lauren, so, so how do you, how do you process that in, in like the difference between dealing with. Kind of breaking trending things versus maybe some, some more cyclical industries where you're not gonna have necessarily that, that flow of like the daily news.

What, what, what do you need to think about? Or kind of like what you mentioned the other day, which was like, Hey, you know, this large language model is as good as the others, except when it isn't. And you were just talking about the, the, the lack of information. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that in [00:28:00] some of the more specialty industries.

Loren King: Yeah, so agriculture is, again, a great example of this. There's a huge cyclical nature built in very seasonal. You've got harvest and planting, and so what people are looking for is going to change around that. And you have the ability to plan to some degree, but also you need to have some flexibility into your PR strategy for breaking events.

Like say a report comes out that says. Peach Harvest is gonna be down, and that report all of a sudden has completely changed the conversation around peaches. You were gonna do a press release that was gonna get some attention, but now you're gonna be looped in with all these other stories that are pretty negative.

So you have to stay on top of that, even if you're planning for this seasonality, because you are part of an aggregated mix of media content that an AI is now going to cite and not discern between, unless you're going very, very specialized in the query. Or in the prompt that you're sending. So keeping that top of mind in that you don't wanna probably have this very, very rigid PR plan.

You wanna build in these blocks, but then pay pretty close attention to swap things out, pause or shift as [00:29:00] needed. Obviously if you're delayed by a day or two, uh, it's hopefully not gonna be a huge impact to you, but might completely change the stories. That you're being referenced alongside, which is one way to to think about it, and then also just staying on top of what is most popular in keywords.

Having a strong SEO basis is really, really valuable here because we're still using keywords for search determination, and AI is. Similar to Google in that way, especially if you're using Gemini in that, uh, it's using a lot of the same functions that a traditional 10 blue link page would just disseminate.

It's not everything involved, but it is part, definitely part of the conversation. So if you have seasonal changes in the keywords that are popular, you have to keep that in mind too. But you have to keep an eye on the news, uh, probably at all times. And AI is actually a good tool to do that. Uh, so you're getting some type of real time updates,

Steve Halsey: really thinking about an always on, uh, PR and comm strategy, I think is interesting.

And Matt, the other thing I thought was interesting was, uh, based on, uh, your, your guys' [00:30:00] findings was how different industries sourced a little bit different. Finance and media was very highly journalistic in terms of the citation rates. Healthcare showed a little bit of a stronger representation of government or NGO sources than others.

Um, hospitality, uh, indicated a little more towards owned media. Um, so. I thought that was fascinating too. And, and maybe you could talk a little bit about, is it, is it the queries of nature or, or, or is it the value? What, what creates that change and what are the implications if you're in one of those industries?

Matt Dzugan: What, what we learned, uh, from this study is exactly what we can see from analyzing large amounts of data. So in other words, we, we wrote, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of queries. We analyze millions of links we can. We can make some educated, uh, guesses as to the why behind the scenes. We don't truly know it.

You know, these are obviously highly, highly [00:31:00] guarded and held trade secrets, essentially, of these AI systems. But as someone myself who has, you know, spent time building AI systems, um, I would, uh, place a large, um. Likelihood on the fact that some of this behavior has basically been, um, you know, instructed or steered into the way that the models behave.

For example, you say, you know, healthcare is citing a lot of, um, NGO and government sites. This is, this is true like the, if you ask anything about medicine or healthcare, it's going to cite. Uh, the CDC or it's going to cite, you know, various other, like, at least in the US if you do a query from the US it'll cite these, uh, you know, US government entities.

We've seen especially, you know, don't want to get, uh, too far into these weeds, but we know from everything that's been happening with COVID-19 a couple years ago, people having different [00:32:00] opinions on what's right, what's wrong. You know, I believe this, I believe that, um. Trust me, the AI models want to stay out of that game as much as possible.

They don't want to be seen as having a opinion really. So I do think in some ways, um. For some of these touchier subjects. I do think the AI are trying to almost remove themself of any, uh, any sort of editorial opinion and sort of stick with, stick with the government stance. Uh, so I do think that explains at least some of

Loren King: it.

I know that Sam Altman, uh, uh, from OpenAI has talked about that a bit, that the default state should be this, this neutrality to some degree, uh, for what you're getting. But the expectation is at least for them, uh, with GPT six, 'cause they've already started talking about it. That personalization towards your preferences is going to become the norm very quickly.

And Google's doing this too. You know, you have the option, uh, in certain cases with Gemini to choose preferred media sources. [00:33:00] And it might change things. It's not going to limit the other ones 'cause it'll go beyond your preferred sources as needed. But it's going to prioritize. And that's something that's dictated on the individual level as well.

So, going back to understanding where your audience is looking, what do they prefer? What are their niche sources? What are their companies they're looking at? Assuming that becomes learned behavior. For everybody using these tools, uh, that's gonna become even more important to understand.

Steve Halsey: So Lauren, one of the things you were, you were talking about a little bit earlier, I was, I, I'll just kind of put to, I'll just kind of call citation friendly traits, high authority, timely structured, things like that.

And Matt covered, hey, the most recent thing that you're seeing a lot more, you know, for day was yesterday, which then leads me to ask about, so what about. G'S role in crisis and reputation, right? So the model's gonna process the way it is. How do we need to think about how we start structuring response to what the large language models are going to pull [00:34:00] through generative engine optimization?

What are some of the risk of outdated or absent citations? And, and what do, what do communicators need to think about? In this expanded environment where LLMs are now as much a channel as anything else,

Loren King: I think this is really important and it's going to continue to grow. I mean, you see responses say, so go on X, or go on Facebook and look at the responses around a news story.

Oftentimes somebody will have asked an AI about that news story to get a quick summary of it and then just dropped it as a comment. So people are used to going in and learning about a crisis through an AI tool, whether that's right or wrong, and whether they're actually verifying the information. AI still has pretty high hallucination rates.

I mean, GPT five, they're very proud to get around that 5% mark in most cases, which is still, uh, probably millions and millions of queries a day that are. Presenting something completely false. So with that in mind, I also thought it was important to note that it, while recency is still part of this, there's [00:35:00] nothing stopping a summary from going back in the past and pulling from another crisis you had.

So say you're a business that had two shut down a manufacturing plant last year. Or two years ago, and then you've just had to shut one down. Recently, as people are searching, it is very possible that those prior events will be incorporated into this summary, in addition to what's happening now. So finding ways to make it distinct, you know, to separate what has happened in the past from the present, while maintaining, uh, that GEO perspective of this answer, first query to try and make sure that you're getting prioritized is gonna be pretty important.

If there's still a lot to learn about crisis management in terms of how it's being reflected by ai. 'cause there's no person that. Is going to have any context behind the story at all. This, it's usually not gonna be framed in part of a larger discussion around the economy or competitors facing the same thing unless the, the user is actually asking for it.

So, once again, it gets complicated, it gets layered and it gets nuanced. Um, but I think there are some steps emerging and how to treat it. And Matt might have some ideas there too.

Matt Dzugan: [00:36:00] It's impossible to predict a crisis before it happens, obviously. Um, if we could, if we could do that, we, we know. We, uh, we'd be somewhere else, but, um, content is still gonna be cited from Monday and Sunday and last week and the, and the month prior.

So the more that you can make sure you have sort of a well-rounded approach, most areas of your business, most aspects of your brand covered, um, again, you're nev I'm not telling you to predict every possible crisis and make sure you have a piece that you know counter of, of course, no one can do that.

But you know, at a high level, any major categories of your brand, ma, ma, major categories of your business, even. Maybe stakeholders, your C-suite, maybe your customer. Like if the more you can have a well-rounded PR approach that sort of touches on these various aspects of your business. Just to have some content out there for when it inevitably is gonna go look for it.

When the crisis comes, uh, I think the better.

Steve Halsey: Well, and one thing I thought was, was interesting was the other day, um, I [00:37:00] was working with a group, we're running a workshop, looking at, um. How to quantify reputation for a very large company that is in a. Very complex, very highly regulated, highly politicized industry.

And as we started really mapping where their reputation played, it was, it was with journalists. So who are the journalists that matters? What, what is the earned media? It. It was, um, what is being said on the social channels. What are the things we're seeing there? It was what was coming up in the Google search and SEO as a channel.

Reddit popped up as its own kind of channel in terms of where are employees talking, what are they saying about it, and then interestingly enough, the large language models. Kind of came up as a, as a channel. And there were, there, we didn't have a million queries to look through like our friends at Muck Rack did.

But it was interesting to me that in a surface gloss, how [00:38:00] each of those told a different layer of story based on perspective, based on recency, based on, um, number of queries based on population on that. That, to me, it was really a big eye-opening moment that. There are so many channels that need to be managed for, for reputation, and, and the large language models are, are one of them.

And then I guess Matt, for you guys, the challenge is like traditionally and, and a significant part of your business is really about, you know, connecting those right journalists for the right stories with what they're talking about. So now you've got, you've got now all these different channels, which are channels of opportunities, but.

How do we, how do we mix those together? Or how do we, how do we think about this? 'cause it could also become paralysis of too many channels. So I'll just do what I've always done.

Matt Dzugan: I can tell you a little bit about how, you know, I'm thinking about it. So one of the things that is nice about these [00:39:00] ai, um, these AI opinions, if we wanna call it that, that anthropomorphize it in that way is.

Unlike maybe other sources, like, yeah, okay, maybe our brand is well connected with several journalists. How do I really quantify that? Like you measure you, you mentioned in this workshop you were doing, how do we, how do we really put a, put a value, put a numerical value on that? Well, the nice thing about these AI systems are, you know, for right or for wrong, they have their, their benefits and their, and their downfalls.

But boy, it is easy to to measure them, right? We can, we can just say like, Hey, here's the, here's the a hundred queries that users of our brand are gonna be wondering about, and I'm just gonna go smack those a hundred queries every day and see how often my brand is favored in a positive light. And every single day I can look at my number.

Am I 60%? Am I 70%? Am I 80%? And it's. Of course there's nuance for deep dive. Is it mentioning this aspect of my brand? Is it, is it, is it mentioning this crisis that happened? [00:40:00] But to, to take a look at it at a high level, you know, it is fairly quantifiable, which is nice. Um, I think the other thing that, you know, I tend to like about it is.

As we talked about, it does sort of encompass a lot of the other pieces that you mentioned, that since AI is citing journalists and it is citing Reddit and it is citing social media and it is citing, um, even video content at times, like to some extent you can consider. The AI responses as a little bit of a kind of amalgamation of everything.

Um, combine that with the fact that it is fairly easy to measure, you know, I don't wanna say easy to measure, but it is measurable. Uh, makes it, I think, pretty attractive part of a, of a, of a, of a sort of, you know, reputation management strategy.

Steve Halsey: So, Lauren, how about, how about from your perspective? I know you're dying to get a little bit more into little technical, little on page little [00:41:00] how we should structure things.

Um, 'cause as I said, you know, the, the journalistic component was a significant part of what comes outta here, but also just the way corporate page and corporate news are structured. So maybe. Maybe you can give us like a super high level, um, tutorial, at least of what you're seeing there.

Loren King: Yeah, so from a structure standpoint, you know, we have a few recommendations that we're pursuing with clients right now that are slightly different, uh, than in the past designed to make it easier for AI to read.

Obviously, staying up to date is probably the most important. Going off of Matt's point of how quickly this is all being pulled in, recency is foremost and you wanna have your team on top of that using answers and questions. So just being very, very clear of. Doing the answer first, whatever it is. And then putting the question in there as well, trying to align with the, what the queries are.

Defining complex words related to your industry. So going back to that niche side of things, if there are topics or concepts that aren't necessarily well known, or maybe in your own research you've [00:42:00] seen that AI isn't very good at explaining them, well assign that definition yourself because that's gonna demonstrate your knowledge base and it's gonna give it, make it easier for the tool to basically pull that definition into an AI summary.

That's being generated for you. I did briefly want to go back to what Matt was talking about though, 'cause thinking from an overall PR and marketing perspective, what you were both saying around basically operating in sync essentially. You know, it's really important to stay aligned on the messaging being out there across these different groups.

Right now, it's probably gonna be beneficial to have, you know, a key message you wanna share, but then also allow your individual PR, marketing sales teams to modify that message in a way that works best for their audiences. Because then you're gonna be hitting this in very different ways. AI is very relational.

It, I mean, they talk about vibes and the word vibe coating and the words vibe coating. And these vibe things have kind of become a joke. But it is also true in that it's very good at understanding non. [00:43:00] Numerical relationships between things. Uh, and it can, it can grasp that the message being shared around PR, even though it's positioned slightly differently, is similar to the message being positioned by sales.

And so if it's getting it from all these different sources, the odds of it showing up your message that you really wanna have shared, showing up in a recommendation is probably gonna be a bit higher. So. Flexibility, but have a strong core balance, I think is gonna be pretty important moving forward here.

Steve Halsey: So, so Matt, what, what's, what's next? Where can people go to learn more about, uh, what AI is reading, what you guys did in, uh, the generative pulse and, uh. What's, what's next for how you guys are further exploring how, uh, large language model behavior might evolve.

Matt Dzugan: So of course if anyone wants to read more details about what I've been talking about here, you can find it on our website.

Um, it's this a specific sort of. Product within the rack suite. So we call it generative pulse. You can find it@generativepulse.ai. And specifically the report with the statistics we've been talking about on this podcast, um, [00:44:00] are@generativepulse.ai slash report. Um, so you can find that there. Um. As far as what we're doing to kind of keep, keep tabs on this.

Um, absolutely. So for those unfamiliar with Muck Rack, right, we are a kind of all encompassing PR software tool in particular with a phenomenal database of journalists, media outlets, what they write about. And what's cool now, you know, to get on my soapbox a little bit, is that now not only do we know who the journalists are and what they write about.

But we know which journalists are influential, which journalists are, uh, have the ear, so to speak, of ai, the AI whisperers, you could call 'em. Um, so that's kind of like another angle that we're folding into our application to figure out, you know, which journalists have the ear of ai. When you get, uh, you know, maybe you send a pitch through Muck Rack.

Um. Can we see that that pitch has [00:45:00] resulted in earned media? And then can we see that that earned media has been cited by ai? Kind of trying to bring it all full circle to that point we were talking about earlier of really quantifying the value of your, of your PR efforts. Um. As far as like us keeping tabs on the research, we are absolutely doing this.

Um, you know, chat PT just came out recently, which has slightly, uh, different patterns and even still the existing models chat, PT four, Andro, quad Gemini, they're always tweaking what they search. Uh, so, you know, Lauren, Lauren brought this up, but I, I do wanna underscore a little bit like, um. You know, these are huge tech companies that are constantly running little micro experiments and they might realize like, oh, if I throw in more LinkedIn content in here, people are more likely to do X, Y, Z.

Or maybe it's not even that. Maybe it's more subtle. Maybe it's not just if I throw in [00:46:00] link LinkedIn content. Maybe it's, if I throw in LinkedIn content that has a bunch of emojis in it, like, you know, even just little things like that are constantly being experimented on, and so we're absolutely staying on top of this.

You know, selfishly, our business depends on it. So of course we want to be on top of this, and we will continue to publish more research as, as we did here and as we discussed here, to kind of, uh, keep the community informed.

Steve Halsey: Always appreciate it, Matt. And in, in full disclosure, we have been, um, we have worked with Muck Rack for, uh, for a number of years.

Um, Greg Galen, uh, one of the co-founders and, uh, and has been on the show multiple times. Uh, loved. The vision that he has for the industry. And you know, Lauren as well is, uh, is available to anybody to connect. Um, he's one of our digital leaders here in the group and can be found at, uh, Morgan Meyers, a GNS agency.

So let's close this up with, uh, with, with final thoughts. So. Lauren, what does, what does this all mean? So [00:47:00] going back to our title, what AI is reading, the New Rules of Earned Media and GEO, what's, what's your, what's your top takeaway from today?

Loren King: My top takeaway looking at this is that you're gonna need some expertise to really start interacting with ai.

And it's essentially a new medium. It's a new way of. Um, working with the internet, it's, it's a new way of getting the news. It's changing how your audiences respond, and so you need to have a very comprehensive plan that is flexible, that that can res, uh, respond to major events in the same way that you or I just do in our individual lives.

So keeping that in, you know, that core focus, maintaining it, understanding. How these systems actually work. And then being flexible enough to respond to what's changing in the world is probably gonna set you up pretty well.

Steve Halsey: Matt, how, how about you? What's your big takeaway? The

Matt Dzugan: way I've been thinking about this is this is really a, a game to be played.

It has rules, it has players. There are strategies, um, and the [00:48:00] more you can think about what the rules are in your sector, figure out, you know, who the players are in your sector. Um, in your niche, the better. Of course, you know, selfishly at Muck Rack, you know, we're trying to help our users do this with this product that we've built out called Generative Pulse.

Um, but absolutely it's a game to be played and the only way to win it is to realize that you are in fact. Part of this game and to start playing

Steve Halsey: it. And from where I sit, this really reinforces the importance of storytelling and what is that story that we wanna tell? Even just getting back to the title of, you know What This podcast is, how do We Build Brand Gravity, right?

What is that story? What is that thing that attracts people to our brand? And as I reflect on today's conversation, my big takeaway is that generative engine optimization or GEO is no longer optional. It is the new frontier of earned visibility. And the data in [00:49:00] the generative pulse really shows that earned media has never mattered more.

But as you both have said, the rules have changed. So thank you, Matt. Thank you Lauren, for being on the show. I invite all of our listeners to connect with Matt and Lauren to learn a little bit more. Um. Certainly a topic we're gonna continue to cover. Um, and I thank you for joining us on the summer of, as I said before, not Summer of Love.

It's the summer of large language models. Um, please tune back soon to join us for another episode of Building Brand Gravity. I'm Steve Halsey, one of your hosts. Thank you for joining.

Anne Green: [00:00:00] How do we break out of our processes? How do we move faster? Perfect Is the enemy of done. I can see issues where something is going out in a business unit, let's say the C-suite or leadership teams or those that are kind of coming to the center of the organization even understand it. It's out the door.

I mean, do you think that's a danger of things that can happen in that way?

Chrissy Jones: One of the biggest. Risks of decentralization is fragmentation and messaging. You have separate business units telling their own story in their own style and tone, and then your company narrative looks like a patchwork quilt.

Anne Green: Hello and welcome to Building Brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green.

Steve Halsey: And I'm Steve Halsey,

Anne Green: and we're glad to be back together again. Steve, you and I were just together in Raleigh recently. I still, you see, you're still in our office there. I'm back in New York, but it's nice to be back together on the pod.

Steve Halsey: Yep. It's exciting to be, [00:01:00] uh, coming to our listeners from, uh, multiple G&S locations.

Uh, and the Raleigh is certainly a very dynamic city and we've, we've seen the area we're at. When we were first here, none of this was behind me. So it's been an exciting, uh, exciting development to see all the growth and the investment, um, here in the, in the southeast. And, with everything going on in the research triangle here, it's also a really good market for some of the, some of the challenges that you're gonna be talking about in your podcast today with all the investment and the highly regulated industries with just the role of comms.

Anne Green: Yeah. You know, I'm glad for that setup. Thank you. I had. A good conversation with our guest today who I'll bring in in a minute, and it had to do with a really perennial issue in our industry, which is, where is comms sitting in an organization is, how is it structured and related to that, where is its stature and influence?

So more specifically for the conversation that's coming, it was precipitated by [00:02:00] observations of where the pendulum swings from either centralized function or decentralized function. And we particularly saw some interesting articles about Pfizer recently, which is obviously a big. Player in the pharmaceutical space that has decided to, say goodbye to a longtime, really respected comms leader.

To say really respected as an understatement and move more of the comms structure into a decentralized function. So they're embedded within business units and not so much within a central service comms structure, if I'm understanding it correctly. And it's not something we haven't seen before.

It is like that pendulum swing back and forth and it's always interesting 'cause it raises a lot of questions for our industry about. How should comms be structured and given? Sectors or organizations and what are the implications of one model versus another?

Steve Halsey: Yeah, and I, and I think what, what you hear is a lot of that, Hey, we want customer centricity.

Let's be really close to the customer, what that looks like. And at least from my perspective we're seeing a lot of momentum now about [00:03:00] decentralization. 'cause it feels like agility, right? If we're closer, if we're in the market, we can be more agile. But without the alignment back to the mothership, so to speak it quickly becomes noise, you know?

And, and we're, and when you become in a trust fragile world like we're at right now, every word carries a lot of consequences. So from, from my perspective, the tension really becomes clear that if you've got agility without alignment, you're really risking that trust, but alignment without. Agility, risk, relevance.

So how do you find that middle ground? I think it's like, it's like all things that you say yes and right. That's kind of the challenge that we're facing right now.

Anne Green: I love that phrase. You hit me with that the other day about, you know, those two sides of the coin. 'cause I always choke the grass is green and brown on both sides of the fence.

Right. With my guest today, it was really about this question of, it's a very intense risk environment right now, and things move extremely quickly. I think this individual feels that [00:04:00] danger and wanted to have that discussion about what are the risks and the danger of making it too decentralized.

Does that. In some ways you're more agile to the business units and to that customer base, but the agility to the reputational aspects of the corporation as a whole. How quickly are you seeing issues rising up out in the different pieces? Is there enough agility, speed, nimbleness of a team to understand how you respond?

Is there enough cohesion in what that corporate message should be? And not just a crisis comms response, but really any kind of communications response. So. I think there's a lot of tensions in there.

Steve Halsey: There, there are. And, and one of the other things I think is important to keep, uh, central to it as well, and we talked about it on an earlier brand Gravity, uh, episode with Elliot Mizrahi and, uh, Rob Jekielek, uh, as, as most of our listener knows, is with a Page Society.

And Rob is with Harris Poll, and they were really talking about what they called the confidence curve. Public [00:05:00] trust is very uneven. And when you lay generational aspects across it, it adds another dimension to this conversation that there's a lot of skepticism across some generations about leaders' intentions and it's only growing and that that makes a structural misalignment that a company may have even riskier.

So, like you said, it's really about that balancing act that leaders face. I thought that's what's so exciting about, uh, the conversation that, uh, our, you're about to have with Chrissy Jones is that's exactly what she challenges us to think about.

Anne Green: Absolutely. And Chrissy, she has a long career in communications.

Really senior counselor and practitioner has been in a number of industry sectors, including the pharma sector. And I think it's time to bring her in. So please stay tuned for this conversation with Chrissy Jones. Well, I'm very excited to be joined today by Chrissy Jones. Hi, Chrissy. How are you? Hi, Anne.

I'm well. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Um, just to let our listeners know, [00:06:00] I've got my notes right here. Chrissy is a very seasoned communications leader. More than 15 years of experience in shaping reputation advising executives. I know you do a lot of executive thought leadership and guiding organizations through complex moment of change and she's led strategy for major product launches, thought leadership programs in industry peers in the public sphere.

And I love this one piece of your bio. Chrissy is especially known for her ability to make it make sense. Taking those complex issues from science to strategy. I know you've worked in healthcare, pharma, professional services into clear narratives and, and making it make sense, I think is a part of what we're talking about today.

But, um, did I miss anything in your bio or you think people should know

Chrissy Jones: that at the heart of what communicators do, we make it. Sense? No, I think Thank you for the intro. No, I think that you just about covered it.

Anne Green: That's great. You know, one thing I always like to ask, especially 'cause we've got a wide range of listeners, a lot of them are across sort of integrated marketing communications, but beyond too, I'm [00:07:00] sure some friends and family as well.

How did you first come to communications? I always like to get personal to start, you know, it's not always the most obvious field, especially how we move through it. Where did you get your start in the field?

Chrissy Jones: Yeah, I think probably like most communicators, my path has not been linear. What I am passionate about, what I was passionate about to at my start was writing and reading.

So I was an English major in college and I just wanted to figure out a way to monetize the ability to write and read all day long. Um. So for me, you know, I've been in the industry in corporate comms for almost 20 years. What I have done that has been consistent across that time period is really helping leaders and organizations achieve clarity.

Through very co complex issues and initiatives. So sometimes that has been [00:08:00] strategy, sometimes that's been the science industry. Um, often that has been with very sensitive issues, but I think that. That through line of my career has been connecting those dots so that people can see the bigger picture.

Um, and so that leaders can act with confidence and clarity

Anne Green: and that I love that. And I think, um, that sense of what it means to communicate to right, to connect with others is so at the heart of it still, no matter where we're positioned in this world now I've been agency side, you know, I've been what is considered more client side, so our.

We've seen so much change in the field. You know, me, 30 years, you almost 20 years. What are the things that still excite you about it today? You know, it's, it is a lot of change all the time, but there's also some DNA to it too.

Chrissy Jones: Yes. So, yeah, I have been in-house or, or client side my whole career.

What I really love about communications is that it's the intersection of [00:09:00] art and business strategy. So you really get to use both sides of the brain, translating that complex business strategy into those human terms that really help people relate to the organization and help build the corporate reputation.

So that's the heartbeat of the company, is that reputation. And like you just said, the field has evolved tremendously. I think that. 20, 30 years ago you know, we were very tactical, tactically focused press releases and media pitches. Um, and now we are really a driver of trust and influence.

So I think the pace is just getting faster and faster over time with AI Digital, so for me it's really the challenge of marrying the speed and the substance [00:10:00] and building lasting credibility with our storytelling.

Anne Green: Yeah, I like that. Speed and substance. And also the art and science of it too, you know, and the connection.

And it is amazing to see the change and then ask ourselves what stays the same, because in some ways it's the humans at the center. It's communicating between humans across groups, and the ways in which communication lands or it doesn't, um, multi-stakeholder environment, which I know you're very much used to.

I mean, this to me gets to the heart of what I hope to talk to you about today and why I reached out to you. You know, I, I really enjoy. In real life connection. And we've had some of that, you know, which is great through industry bodies. But I also enjoy the connections that we forge online, especially on platforms like LinkedIn.

You know, I, I do try to spend some time there to see what are people talking about, and I always pay attention when there's moments of sort of. Lightning on LinkedIn or were moments that really light people up and it seems like there's something that is exciting them or they feel really passionately about.

People are sharing a real point of view and that, and what I was excited about is I saw one of those [00:11:00] moments that you sparked in a LinkedIn post that you shared, and the essence of it really had to do with this question of the communications function. Which by the way is not just PR means press release anymore.

Yay. Uh, hopefully people have a deeper understanding, but. This question of how is it organized? And form follows fun, function and form are very related. So this idea of is it centralized, is it decentralized? And what are the tensions there? So maybe catch our listeners up a little bit about the issue that you saw and what you posted, and then we'll get into it more.

Chrissy Jones: Okay. So. What I saw was the, an announcement of a major shift in comm structure at a very large, very well-known, reputable organization. The reaction from industry peers and functional peers was very centered on the leader, um, which. Was absolutely deserved. The accolades are, are well, well deserved.

But I was struck by how [00:12:00] little attention was being put on the structural changes themselves. So structures, send signals, and then this move from a centralized. Communication structure to decentralized is a signal or a statement of how the company values communications as a strategic function. So what I sought to do was to spark a conversation about that, because that's not just.

Isolated to one company that has ripple effects across our function, our industry.

Anne Green: Yeah, and in this case, you know, it was Sally Sussman departing, you know, a major pharma player. She's so well known and so respected, and as you said, deserves all the flowers. Has been such an incredible leader in the sector and incredible leader for the comms function.

Carried companies through some major reputational changes, ups and downs. And, and so this question of that visibility, [00:13:00] but I was struck, you know, as you comment on, on this and, and like you said, that's one data point, but it's really the bigger picture, right? This is happening not just in one sector.

You see this kind of pendulum swing, the pull back and forth. Centralized, decentralized, not just for comms, but it seems to have been. I've noticed this over the years with communications in particular, having worked in so many sectors, but I was noticing the same thing, Chrissy, when I saw your. Post on LinkedIn.

I was like, yes. Why is people not, why are we not talking about this? Like, where is that discussion? Why do you feel that larger backdrop was less acknowledged or discussed in the public sphere? I'm just curious if you have any hypotheses on that.

Chrissy Jones: I mean, it's hard to say for sure. I think part of it is that people naturally gravitate towards the human story.

Sally's legacy was the headline and is so, especially for those of us in comms, especially for those of us in pharma comms, I mean, we, it's [00:14:00] the celebration is so well deserved. So I think that's maybe why the conversation centered there, um, rather than with the organizational structure part of the conversation.

But, you know, I, I, I wanted to make sure that that structural shift wasn't overshadowed by some of the conversation that was happening because the structure really matters. You know, it signals to. Not just comms professionals, but the wider industry. How an organization values communications and whether it sees comms as central to enterprise strategy or if it sees comms as more as an embedded set of support functions.

I think those types of changes are not. Necessarily celebratory or personal. So that could be why folks we're not [00:15:00] speaking about them as much, but the reality is that they are quite consequential for the future of our of our function. And also for. Corporate reputation and reputation management for organizations.

Anne Green: Yeah. And I wanna talk about the implications for reputation and the risk factors involved. 'cause you've talked about this both in your LinkedIn post and also in a article that you did for a trade magazine that I thought, you know, deepen the discussion. That was really excellent and we can put a link to it in our show notes.

I encourage people to check it out, but. This I wanna come back to that, but first and foremost, you're right. Not everybody is really cognizant of the ins and outs of corporate structure. It's not something people study every day. I happen as an organizational leader and a practitioner to be interested in these things, but maybe give folks a sense if, if they're not really familiar with this.

What would be the difference between a communications function? And we're talking tend to be large entities, right? It's not small entities. It's often large, often multinational. [00:16:00] What would it look like to have a centralized comm structure, communications function, whatever its name is, versus a more decentralized structure?

What would that look like? So people can paint a picture in their minds,

Chrissy Jones: Simply. It's a centralized comm structure is one communications team that drives strategy across the enterprise strategy and messaging across the enterprise. Decentralized you'll have communications folks embedded in different business units and they'll be less or no central oversight.

So each of those models, you can dial up and dial down, you know? So it'll look different for every organization, but each of those models separately has their own merits. You know, centralized communications builds consistency. Um, you have a strong enterprise voice, decentralized communications.

You have more agility. [00:17:00] You have comms, folks that have deep knowledge in different areas of the business. Issue or the, the tension is that decentralized model comes with risks, and one of those risks is trading coherence. And alignment on messaging for speed and agility.

Anne Green: Yeah. It's such an interesting balance.

Like you said, there are, I mean, gosh, I feel like we can't ever get away from the word hybrid. It's like, it's like our lives now. Everything is about hybrid still. But there, there are structures obviously, where you have the hub and spoke, you know, you've got the centralized model. And, and, and ideally maybe that's an ideal thing, where then you reach out into business units so you can build that rapport and that affinity and that subject matter expertise.

And you know, I was saying to Chrissy, when you and I are preparing for this, I've seen this sort of tension, let's say in an agency context with earned media relations teams, you have this pullback and forth between, ooh, we need a centralized earned media team because they will own higher level relationships.

They will build those skill sets, you'll [00:18:00] naturally attract that publicist person who's different. But then you worry, do they lack the subject matter expertise of the client sectors? Right? And so then it pulls back to the account teams. But I think what you're saying about. This moment in time, like you talked about this in your LinkedIn post and in your article about the specific dangers and how the risk landscape changes around decentralization when you come into different sort of moments of time.

What about the landscape today, and especially in highly regulated industries, pharma is one of them. What about that landscape makes you feel like that risk profile is a bit higher now for decentralized comms teams?

Chrissy Jones: Yeah. Any highly regulated industry, you're protecting brand reputation, but you're also protecting regulatory credibility.

So inconsistencies that could possibly occur with a decentralized model can create confusion for regulators [00:19:00] in the public. Um, and then once that trust is lost or eroded, it's very hard to rebuild. So that's why I really value that connected, um, centralized model and think it really matters a lot in, in regulated sectors.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause if you play it out. That agility and the speed. This is an, I'm all about the idea of dynamic tensions. Like I'm not a either or person. I'm often both, and like 2, 3, 5 things can be true at one time. I think if you can't think in that way, it's hard to be a leader in today's context.

It's so much happening, but. We want flexibility, nimbleness, agility. I mean, we're talking about that in my organization. How do we break out of our processes? How do we move faster? Perfect is the enemy of done, but I can see issues where something is going out in a business unit and before. Let's say the C-suite or leadership teams or those that are kind of coming to the center of the [00:20:00] organization even understand it, it's out the door.

I mean, do you think that's a danger of things that can happen in that way?

Chrissy Jones: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest risks of decentralization is fragmentation and messaging. Yeah. So you have separate business units telling their own story in their own style and tone, and then your company narrative looks like a patchwork.

Quilt. Yeah. The other risk is duplication. So having. Teams reinventing the wheel because they're not connected, um, and kind of wasting resources in that way. Um, and then related is governance. So if you're not, if you don't have that center you could end up with rogue messaging campaigns that aren't aligned to the corporate strategy or the enterprise strategy.

So while. Decentralization offers a lot of agility and deep subject matter knowledge. There [00:21:00] are risks, right? So what we would love to see, I think what, you know, what communicators would love to see is if we are seeing trend towards slight decentralization. We wanna see that connective tissue continuing to exist or being built in organizations that have decentralized structure, um, so that your, your voice isn't splintered.

Anne Green: Yeah. And it's so, it's so funny. I feel like since the admin of social media, this is just one example. When left to its own devices, it being any organization, right? All of its component parts will gravitate toward. We need our own channel, we need our own social channel, we need this. Like I've had so many situations over the years where clients or you know, organizations or peers we're dealing with trying to reel people back in because there's channel proliferation and confusion and I have to say this whole dialogue around ai, which is more than one acronym can encompass, by [00:22:00] the way, I have a pet peeve about people saying AI as if it explains everything. But if we talk about generative, we talk about the large language models, and we talk about the revolution that's happening in search, zero click search environment, generative engine optimization, the role of authority, how discovery is changing.

There's so much. In fact, there's new research from MuckRack, you know, the communications platform vendor out there that we'll be reporting on in another building brand Gravity episode that's did a really deep dive analysis in how AI discovery is being generated. The large language models are getting better at recency, meaning they're pulling in stuff into those AI summaries that are quite recent, which was not the case before.

So boy, you could see how that fragmentation would be a real mess in terms of how AI is representing your organization, right?

Chrissy Jones: Absolutely. And I think that it's real, and it's very exciting that you're doing a podcast on this, and all communicators really should listen to it because. [00:23:00] We are going on a journey to educate our organizations about these changes.

Whereas Mark Marketing had traditionally been sitting in the seat, or, or marcoms had been sitting in the seat of feeding the SEO engine. We are seeing a shift now where traditional communications work is going to be feeding the Gen AI engine. So. We need to educate our stakeholders internally about these changes and how, what an important role communications is gonna play.

Anne Green: I couldn't agree more, and I think it's an exciting moment, but it's a moment to. Re knit together how digital marketing, Marcos communications, stakeholder relations, how it comes together in a more intentional way. Not that SEO goes away, but gen ai, OGEO, whatever we wanna call it. [00:24:00] This is requiring a thoughtfulness regarding content strategy.

Earned owned, the peso model, all the stuff that we've been talking about for years. It's. It really is that next step change and it, I think that theme of where, whether it's more centralized or less centralized, how do you avoid fragmentation and the risk that comes with that. There's a larger question to me.

Because I think you were so right on about the reputational risk issues. Things move so fast and, and if you think about, say, a pharmaceutical context, but it could be anyone in healthcare and you think about, let's say Wall Street as a stakeholder, right? 'cause most of these are publicly traded or larger entities out there, large health systems, whatever.

What is it that this entity is specializing in? Where are the horses they're really riding? Where is that center of gravity that's been identified by the leadership team? Is there so fragment, much fragmentation because every part of the organization wants to feel like their stuff is the most important, that the story [00:25:00] becomes so all over the place, and that's why I really appreciated.

You pointing out sort of the risk of fragmentation, but I think there's a backdrop here, which is, what is the relative stature and empowerment of different functions within an organization and including different leaders. So the C-Suite, which may encompass a chief communications officer, not the same in every organization, doesn't report the same, isn't quite the same, but what is your sense of how that reflects back on where communication sits in organizations?

Chrissy Jones: The debate really never seems to go away for where communication sits in an organization. And maybe part of that is historical, looking back on communications, really being a support function. And it's grown now into a strategic driver. So finance and legal, you never see the same conversation [00:26:00] happening for those functions.

No one, I've never heard anyone ask if the CFO has earned their seat at the table, at the proverbial table. So they've always been seen as indispensable. Comms is still fighting that battle in many organizations. Um, one of the reasons is visibility because. Good comms is invisible. Good comms look seamless which ironically makes it undervalued.

And then when things go wrong, people notice. So leaders in communications are constantly needing to prove their worth, um, in ways that see fos and COOs often don't have to. And then there's the cultural component of it as well. So you have some CEOs who are really attuned to comms. They are storytellers.

They value storytelling and reputation. And then you have some organizations where that is not the case. So. Comms [00:27:00] will be relegated to being a tactical support function. But I think those inconsistencies are why this remains an open question or why this remains a challenge for us in communications.

But the last five or so years have been really, um, critical for communications and I think that. What we've seen is through the pandemic and social justice issues and political polarization, what we have seen is that reputation is strategic, and so the companies that get it right are going to outperform the ones that don't.

And your communications team. Are your reputation drivers?

Anne Green: I think that's so powerfully said. It has been a heck of a few years showing. Um, putting a spotlight on almost every type of [00:28:00] stakeholder group. The pressures on those stakeholder groups. You know, I, it reminds me of a related issue, which is this sort of strange bifurcation that would happen sometimes between internal and external communications.

Like, that is a very old fashioned way of thinking. I think most practitioners I know would agree, but it was so, um, separated for so long. And the fact is those. Employees and colleagues are the first, you know, the drop falls in the pond, the first ring, or your own people before it radiates out. And so I think breaking down those silos and recognizing the pressure on all those stakeholders groups and the fact that reputation has significant impact, it's, it's really like what does reputation do?

It's permission to operate. It's that trust and permission operate. It could be literal permission through regulatory bodies, or it could be just permission through trust. So I think that's really powerful. You said something. That whole thing about earning a seat at the table. Well, comms has to earn its seat at the table.

What do you make, that's such a common phrase we've heard over the years. What do you make of [00:29:00] that? I mean, just what does that bring to mind for you?

Chrissy Jones: I'm tired of, I'm tired of it. Okay. I think it's outdated. I think it's frustrating. We are, as communicators often positioned as less powerful or less impactful than some of our other.

Supporting function or group function, peer groups. Despite the fact that an organization's reputation can swing markets, and we know that, uh, just as much as numbers on a spreadsheet, a social media post can tank your earnings. I. The past couple of years I hope, has really proven that comms not only deserves the seat at the table, but is an integral part of corporate strategy.

I mean, we we're responsible for, for [00:30:00] trust, for leadership impact and executive visibility and for organizational strategy, and those pillars really upholds. Business.

Anne Green: Yeah, I think that's really well said. As we start to wrap up, wrap up today, I'd love to think about, you know, what advice we can give. Who are we?

But let's give advice. We have experience. Let's do it. The first group I'd like to advise. Are those senior executives like CEOs that what? Pick the sector again, decentralization or centralization of the function is happening in many places. It's a pendulum. I think that swings back and forth. It's hitting pharma quite a bit right now, but it's happening elsewhere.

What are, for those that have that most senior level decision making, especially the CEO level, what would you advise them on? What kind of factors do you think that they should be weighing and even more educating themselves on as they, as they weigh this question.

Chrissy Jones: Yeah, I think to uh, position this through the lens of, I [00:31:00] think we are gonna see more hybrid models.

I think we will see a centralized core of communicators for risk and issues management and, and maybe for business strategy. But we're gonna see embedded comms through the business for agility and speed and depth of knowledge. So I would ask CEOs to not look at this as a binary to look to design models that can do both protect.

The enterprise voice and enable speed. So I think the question is not what works now or what's easiest to implement now, but the question that CEOs should ask themselves is what structure is going to protect the company's reputation five years out? So that's more than just the org chart. That's more than just cost efficiencies.

That's really a forward looking. Will [00:32:00] this model provide us with a clear enterprise narrative? Will this model provide us with clear accountability? And does it allow us to manage risks across various stakeholders? I think, the. The CEO could look at communications sort of like an, an operating system.

So you have, you can have multiple apps running. Um, so you can have multiple people embedded in these very specific areas, but you do need a cohesive, unified operating system. Um, at the top. Recognizing that the right reputation and the right structure is a strategic asset. And formatting the comm structure accordingly.

Anne Green: I love the idea of that, the operating system that has multiple apps running, um, multiple programs and, but they come together as a whole. I think [00:33:00] that's a really, I haven't thought of it that way. I think that's a really powerful metaphor. I really like that. So turning to our peers out there, across the industry, comms folks, and, and again, they can be integrated marketing communications as well as comms.

You know, we're all doing many different. Channels and tactics and the more symbiotic, the better of understanding these levers. But for those that are either mid-career and and really growing or more senior folks, what thoughts can we share on the question of what to do relative to raising that stature of communications internally or advocating, pushing for that more cohesive and connective structures that are better in this kind of volatile landscape?

What would you say to our peers?

Chrissy Jones: Yeah, thanks for asking this question because I have gotten, a lot of individuals have approached me and asked what they can do, and it really is very different depending on where you sit in the organization, the structure that's already in place in your organization, how large your [00:34:00] organization is.

There's so many factors that will. Impact and affect the way that you personally can advocate for change in your organization or advocate for the function. But I try to distill it down to something that would be universal for all communicators. And so my advice is to make sure that you are not just running your silo.

So Bills, bridges. Influence outside of your lean. Because corporate reputation does not care about org charts. So we shouldn't either. What we need to do is connect across the business. And the more connected we are, the more bridges that we build, the harder it will be to sideline communications and to position us just as a tactical.

Uh, execute

Anne Green: so much wisdom. I know you've had time to think about this as people have asked you. 'cause that's hard. Like it's amazing for [00:35:00] people to come and ask that question. Corporate reputation does not care about org charts is one of the quotes of the podcast. I couldn't agree more. It's just like.

Consumers encountering a brand, don't care where they're encountering it, it's the brand. Like we've known that in brand strategy for years. I absolutely love that. So to finish up, Chrissy, the name of our show is Building Brand Gravity. So I always like to ask people, what has you in its gravity right now?

What is fun? What's lighting you up? What are you into? However you wanna define that.

Chrissy Jones: Okay, so we're gonna, we're going, I, I'm gonna try to bring this back to communications, but we're gonna go journey I, last night I finally finished K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Anne Green: Have you heard about that? Oh my God, so many people are talking about this.

I was hearing, I was listening to another podcast when there, oh, it was The New York Times was doing like a culture review. But yeah, tell me what your take is, what your hot, well, many people

Chrissy Jones: are talking about it. I have a 9-year-old daughter who is. Obsessed. [00:36:00] So I finally finished watching it with her, and it's it's brilliant because it's a, it's a masterclass in trend spotting.

They have taken. The appetite for K-pop, the appetite for anime, the appetite for what would you even call it, you know, the zombie demons the supernatural crime fighting and somehow put it together into a package that works. I'd, I'd heard yesterday that this has now become in just over two months, the most watched movie in Netflix history.

The music is their earworms. It's just the music is just stuck in my head now. But I think that the, if I'm trying to wrap it up and bring it back to communication, I think, um, communicators can really take a lesson from this by embracing and aligning with the, with. The zeitgeist and the cultural [00:37:00] currents and seek out different ways that combine things that you didn't know, you didn't necessarily think would go together.

But look out into the, into the cultural current and see what you can pull and, and try to. Create something new.

Anne Green: I love that. And that's some great branding. Even the title captures your attention. You're like, what the heck is this? But when I heard the culture critics at the New York Times talking about it, one thing caught my attention talk about marketing is that the K-pop demon hunters, the women in the in the K-pop groups who fight demons, the demons who are guys said to themselves, we have a marketing issue.

We keep getting beaten by these, uh, singers, so maybe we'll form a pop group and it'll be a demon pop group. So there's marketing for you, Chrissy. It's so funny. Well, I so appreciate you being on building Brand Gravity. I encourage. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, check out our other episode. Share this one with your friends, especially in the comms field.

A lot of really important things [00:38:00] to talk about here. And Chrissy Jones, thank you again for joining us.

Chrissy Jones: Thanks for having me in.