Emily Frager | Communications and PR are Having a Moment

0:00Emily Frager:The CMO Confidential podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHeareEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO, Mike Linton.

0:41Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former CMO of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guest, Emily Frager. Today's topic, communications and PR are having a moment. Now, Emily is the chief client officer for Fleischman Hillard, a company she has worked with for over 25 years of her career.

1:20She took a mid-career move to work as the CMO of Lenar Ventures and is also a board member of the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations. Full disclosure, we've known each other for a number of years. Welcome, Em. Thank you, Mike. Great to be here. And it's an absolute honor to be, I believe, your first comms guest. You are. You're our first PR comms guest, but a worthy one. So we are excited for the show. I think you've done dozens, if not hundreds of episodes. So I hope we can kick PR into the game. I'm hoping to, but I have no doubt. So let's jump right in. Okay. And you believe communications is having a moment.

2:08Tell us what that means. And then while you're at it, how our listeners should think about comms as a function. Yes. So I think PR has been having a moment for a while. Now I think we're at a tipping point. And there's unbelievable momentum. Just from the numbers alone, the comms and PR has been growing 100 % the last couple of years and is on pace to do so for the next 10. It should double. It's a great time to be in. And when you say numbers, is this money spent in comms or just attempts? Money spent in dollars. Yeah, okay. Like, yeah, dollar spent, agency spent. Got it. It's definitely growing.

2:50And I think there's multiple things that are driving, but it's ultimately shifting from being a channel to being a business function. And it's being looked at very differently. And we are playing in many aspects of business as a business advisor, helping solve problems. We are often at the intersection of when something can go right and when something can go wrong. And what is the role that comms can play in either expediting or amplifying what can go right and minimizing what can go wrong. And I think that is driving so much of our demand. But behind the demand is a need to change how it's worked.

3:34We can talk about that, too. Well, tell me about, because my assessment, and I always thought of PR and comps always at that intersection, because it's, you know, some people call it earned media or whatever, but you're right in the center. And if you go wrong, your brand and your company loses a lot of power. And if you go the right way, you pick up a lot of power. What has changed? And is there more awareness of the outcomes, or is there just more skin in the game? I think there's several different things that have changed. So first of all, the media environment. I mean, and this is what has been the incremental, I would say, growing momentum for.

4:12So starting even with social media and bloggers, that was sort of when we had micro communities and our natural one-to-one relationship building with media quickly transferred to blogs, then influencers. now what is taking it to the next level as it relates to the media environment is LLMs. The algorithms know and value our program to pick up editorial style content. And that is now driving a huge media landscape change. And right now, if you are in any brand and you're not showing up in LLMs, you're cooked you've got a business problem and the way to influence and get into the llms is with earned and editorial style content which is that kind of content that we do and and so that's the media environment alone i also think the next generation of leaders understand reputation they don't necessarily know how to manage or do reputation but i do think they understand that reputation has value and you really can't mess with reputation.

5:26Well, and a number of our guests have said, look, the regular brand work or marketing work you put out is being discounted over time because the large language models are picking up kind of more direct opinion from actual users. Is that true? Yes. So, and that's exactly, I mean, We are influencing TikTok and Reddit, for example. They are influencing the LLM. So we want to be having conversations with all those micro audiences. The other thing I would say, so that was the media landscape. There's two more things that I think are changing. I think consumers are creating their own media ecosystem.

6:12They're picking and choosing what they want in their feeds. They're creating their own media environment. and purchase decisions take 11 different touch by the time you know they have to see it 11 times in a variety of different places for it to register oh you know what i actually might want to transact on that you can't rely on mass media to hit somebody 11 times with at least with the variety of messages and hitting them in your lifestyle i don't think somebody's seen a commercial 11 times that have the same impact. If somebody's seen the same message show up in multiple places in their feed and in their media ecosystem 11 different times, that penetrates very differently.

6:52And the way to get at that is actually a ground game. It's a media ecosystem ground game, understanding exactly who your audiences are, what their ecosystem looks like and how you navigate yourself to that. So that's a second one, different consumers. So be where the consumers are, not where you want to be and the channels the channels are changing what's the third one that business is so complex and so there's the complexity of business challenges for example a health care company if you are a global health care company and you need you need to have your enterprise brand message you need to have your product brand message and then you need to align with the regulation across every single geography in the world that you operate.

7:43That matrix of what you can go to market with requires such precision and micromanaging, if you will, that that is a level of complexity that favors our way of working. On the flip side of that, which is often counter to complexity, is the ability to move with speed. And there's two aspects to speed. There's speed to being able to know what you should do. So we call it signals, but call it monitoring or just paying attention to what's happening in the world. There's a signal what's either going right or going wrong. Then from that signal is knowing what to do. And whether it's a brand or enterprise needs to know how they can make decisions fast, which often requires really strong governance and strong decision makers and people with authority.

8:35and people that can move with speed are able to really make an impact. And then it's the scale of change. So that at the business level, it's complexity, speed of being able to make decisions, and then the scale of change. And when you press signal, a signal could be anything. A signal could be, we have someone that is out clobbering us for no reason. A bad review. A bad review or an influencer that's gone sideways. or our sales fell off the map. A competitor came out, a government regulation showed up. And our retailer pulled two of your SKUs. And so this says the way you used to maybe react to that is different.

9:19And PR and comms are now as part of how you're going to react to that in the room or driving the change, right? You've given us a bunch of examples or potential things that could go wrong. Tell me how PR sits in there because it used to be the announcing function or the defensive function where you'd send out your no, that wasn't us. We didn't do it that way. And now that that doesn't work. So tell me how it's all changed. Yeah. Well, when you just described as a very downstream where whether it be marketing or corporate organization would have an announcement that they just wanted to amplify and make sure people were aware and informed.

10:00And hopefully we have the relationships to hit the right people who can amplify it with the most influence. Now, it's a totally different game. I mean, kind of back to the point that this is a business function. We are no longer in publicity. We are essentially engineering reputation. It's actually not nearly as sexy as probably it once was because it's so data driven. we are really about data first and everything that we do and so there's data there is we're building a ai agents we are doing programming it is pretty far down our from our end and work the first half of our work is so much engineering and then then we get to the creative part about positioning and messaging and the creative writing but it is that the end-to-end has changed dramatically can we do if i give you a hypothetical like we're launching a new car or we're launching a new snack new food and all the marketing says and all the product people say this is a great new food new car new snack new beverage whatever we launch it out and then the first people that get it, the first reviewers say, this thing is no good.

11:23In fact, it stinks. And that becomes one of the dominating stories. Tell me how comms, we know what would happen. It used to be PR and comms would help with that initial announcement, get all the media lined up. You're saying there's a much bigger effort now. First of all, if PR is getting engaged at that stage that most all of the best practices now the iat has pr squarely in the middle like squarely part of the team so we would be part of the team out of the gate our voice on the iat and as we are working on the goal when you say iat what exactly does that mean integrated integrated advertising team oh that's what i thought okay excellent yeah so usually have someone from the whole marketing discipline part of it.

12:14So we would hopefully be in on the mix before we, in part of the go-to-market, even market shaping. That's actually where we play a big role in market shaping in terms of understanding what the current market landscape is, what the audience already sees. Oh yeah, and I didn't mean to say not that. PR is always in the front of the game, but they're almost always, that's all on offense. How much planning is for things going bad or going sideways or that? Because in the old, you know, if you go back before, surely before AI, but before influencers, it was all outbound and then you'd wait for the inbound because you could kind of predict some of the inbound, but not all of it.

13:00Now you're saying there's a lot more ways to predict some of the inbound and prepare for it, right? Yes. So I would say there's the basic of relationships and knowing who the sphere of influence is in that space and the brand should always be talking to those to that core sphere of influence whether you're launching a product or not so then when the product does land and it doesn't land well you've got third parties that will come in and say give perspective or context to maybe why the decision was made. That's the best practice that's been in play forever. Now what you're saying is, let's say there's a phone that drops and the first product review isn't great.

13:44That is a very common scenario for us to be in. It's a pretty straightforward playbook in terms of getting one-on-one with that reviewer and trying to understand what drove their perception one way the other and giving them access. And then there's a reality of their opinion is if that's their opinion, but then I think it's up to the brand to either address it. I would say the good brands and the good products would, would be able to address it, um, either one-on-one or take that feedback in. I think if it's a total miss, um, and there is a large volume of feedback coming from the market. And that's a case of where a brand, they can choose to listen or not.

14:35And then when you listen, you know what to do. It's just you have the gumption to do what you need to do. How about those edge cases where you put out something where in general, it's good. You get a lot of negative. how do you sort through all the messaging is it all math that you're getting in here but i'll give you a lot of times you're gonna things are gonna emerge from nowhere a little group and well you know this and it will be they will be really positive or negative for you and you didn't you there's no way you could have seen it coming how do you measure that and track it and then evaluate its real impact yeah that's a data game totally you take that um that you can usually tell through data is leading the voice is the leading voice i would say like in an example of a product launch going awry and there are comments it's usually five percent of the people that are driving 95 % of the conversation.

15:42Right. So you can pinpoint who those 5 % are, and then you can look at their reach and you can see how big is their volume and how big is their. And then what report do you get to look at that? Cause there's so many influencers, so many channels. Like, what do you, is that you guys have your scan at all and your point? Yeah. There's data feeds that, and there's third party subscriptions. We have 14 different subscription feeds that we have as part of our tool stack. People have a dashboard and you can see anything from, you know, what the stories that are being placed, who the people are, what type of content they're putting out, how the content's performing, the influence of the person.

16:27we can take a person and use a data source that will tell us who that specific person gets their primary information from. So name a politician. You can put a politician's name into this particular tool. And I'll say, these are the 10 sources of media that they read most frequently. so you can get information both ways of how is your information being pushed out but then also the people that are receiving the information who is their what is their ecosystem so back to your point about when a client's product is getting negative feedback or there's a lot of chatter a lot of what we do is putting it into context and understanding here are the real people here's the true group or the set of people that are driving this conversation, are they influential to your target audience?

17:32If they are, action is this. If they're not, action is this. Hey, so you've just laid out, and I believe fundamentally that math and also when sometimes you get a lot of good, better than you expected, you can lean into it if you have the right math. if I'm sitting out there as one of the CMO Confidential listeners, how do I evaluate my current state of communications? And what are some Hall of Fame best practices, if I'm good, I should be doing, and some Hall of Fame worst practices where I can look and go, oh, man, this is no good. Give us your take since you've seen a lot of it. Well, I think it's changed.

18:08I think what I would have said a couple of years, you know, a dozen or so months ago, first of all, I would say today is different because of LON. I think you always have to be building relationships. You need to know who your core audience set is and who are the key voices that are influencing them. That has never changed. I think what has really changed is making sure that as a communication function, you are organized to win. And organized to win means you have the governance and the permission to be able to act with speed. because when things are going right, you want to be able to fuel the fire and add more and keep going without layers and layers of permission

18:54Emily Frager:or just somebody who is a competent decision maker. When things are going wrong, you need to be able to move with speed. And this is classic crisis preparation 101 with the ability to move with speed. But if you take a plane incident, for example, like a couple of years ago, there was a plane that had issues and caught fire at, doesn't really matter, but San Francisco Airport. It was 11 seconds from the time that the passenger was in the experience himself and posted to YouTube. It was more than 24 hours before the company responded. That gap of time is unbearable for a reputation. So companies and brands need to be able to know what their values are and know what their permissions and governance are so they can move at the speed of consumers.

19:55And how do I do that? That is set up of who makes the decision and then how many voters there are. And then what happens if the key decision maker is on a plane or off the grid or anything else? And if you don't run water through those pipes when you need them, they're not going to work. Is that what you're saying? Well, the core problem is that too many companies put mid-level people running PR and cons. It needs to be a senior level, confident decision maker that has the trust of executives so they can have autonomy to make decisions at these moments. That's the difference. So either I give my director or my VP the power to make the call and live with it, or I know exactly how to escalate this at speed and who is the backup decision maker if prime decision maker is unavailable, right?

20:48But I would say people fear communication more so than they fear if you communicate wrong. And that fear gets in the way and I would say slows down your recovery. So when you say fear communication, I fear I'd rather do nothing. I fear I'm going to say the wrong thing so I don't do anything or I take too long. And in that time that you've wasted, you've actually made your risk much higher. well and if you have strong people if you have strong comms people on your team that are well equipped with data well equipped with governance and they're strong decision makers in the heat of the moment i think that's the thing is the ability to have people who are confident decision makers and putting decision makers in comms roles not people who are sharing information or making well yeah then you have to go yet you have to get the ceo and then you have to get the general manager and then you have to get the lawyer and then it's too late yeah comms and legal should have a really strong relationship where they trust each other and they know how what their governance and share responsibilities are you can get those two lined up, you can move fast.

22:05But speed, speed is key to reputation, especially in eroding reputation. So if I'm structuring this, and I think the, you know, running water through the pipes in terms of who is actually making this decision and who gets a vote, and especially what happens if it happens, because it almost always happens when everyone's not in the office. So how are you going to make vote when all the voters aren't there you need a you need a plan for that is there advice on how to structure this um with your agency and are there differences in i'm sure there's got to be differences in size of company and b2b and b2c and type of company like if i'm running a nuclear reactor firm it's probably i probably got to be really really good at this yeah um give us some best practices on how you look at how to structure this based on what type of industry you are?

23:01Well, I would say the fundamentals are really the same. And I wouldn't over-index on those variances. I would say that the consistencies of data, being informed by data, having governance, and knowing your chain of command so you can move. I would say the variances come, I think, by size. So I'm going to maybe answer this in a different way of thinking. But right now with AI adoption, the large Fortune 500 companies, they have the means, the resources, the infrastructure, where they are custom building what they need for AI. The small companies, they can take what's off the shelf. That probably works for them.

23:56It's the middle companies who kind of fall in between. And they're too small to do a custom build and they're too big to take what's off the shelf. So they kind of get lost. If anything, they could fall behind. I would say the same thing could apply here where the large enterprises, they have the instruments, the infrastructure. It's how well they use it and how well they are willing to make a decision. I mean, I go back to what I said a minute ago. It's not hard to know what to do. It's hard to do what you should do. Yeah. And I think the implications, the bigger the company you are, the bigger that decision is and the fear of that decision, but all the more reason to plan.

24:50And then I think it just scales from there. I think the sense of responsibility and the sense of risk and the sense of impact and the wave of the impact scales to the size of the company. But how you make decisions and how you know what to do is the same if you're a small company. Yeah, I agree with this. Hey, so if I'm in the if I'm out there in listener land, what should I expect from my agency? I think. There are there's a handful of things, I think. And it's. You need a partner. Let's about expect. And it's you need to find some partner that is a true business partner that you can have honest conversations with.

25:40Again, if we're sitting at the intersection of what's what could go really right and what could go really wrong. Those are real time decision making. Your agency should be bringing you data based decisions. they should be helping you bringing you tools ai tools data-driven tools that help you get to decision points faster not necessarily efficiency and the whole end end spectrum but you should get efficiency to how fast we're at a point where we can make a decision together and then that you can have a consultative conversation make a decision or help them make a real good decision internally.

26:21We ultimately want our clients to look good in their meetings. They're in meetings all day. Our job is to put good thinking in their back pocket so they show up well for the function and for themselves and can keep things moving. But also implied in this though is that the team, the comms team, the agency team understands the business in its entirety. That's a given. Like that is a given. They have to be able to read the financial statements. They have to be able understand the pressures on the company. They have to understand the internal org. And if they don't understand those things, they're going to lose weight every time they come in the room.

27:01Well, and that's absolutely the difference between a comms consulting agency like us and a publicity firm that is driving an event's awareness forward. And I think kind of going back to that PR is no longer publicity. We are a business function that's helping businesses hopefully make better decisions, moving faster in a very complex. So wrapped up in here, if I'm taking your public ideas, is what you should expect from your agency if they're a partner is they understand the business enough that they can join a business meeting and talk about it. and then put the comms lens on top of it versus just come in with the comms lens and make you put it on top of the business.

27:53Yes. And that they're not just looking to the agency to be a downstream execution. We do a lot of that and we should be their bandwidth to some degree, but you also need to have an upstream relationship where you are feeding your client information about their own business. To your point, the comms layer, the competition, and helping them help the company solve the problem. Because CARMS needs to be part of the problem-solving mix, not just the recipient of, this is how we've solved the problem. Now you guys go execute. We have inputs that help make stronger business decisions. And this says, when you're interviewing for this kind of partner, you should expect a lot on the business front in addition to the skillset front.

28:41Yes. You're going to, I mean, you're going to see a lot of data. you're going to see programming, you're going to see custom agents. We even consider agents as part of our team roster. Yeah. So helpful questions for your next RFP. Last little paragraph that we talked about, which is you want a business. If you're going to make this a growth driver, which you should, and a reputation management thing, which you should, you need partners that understand the whole business, not just the comms end of it. And that means the RFP and all the questions you ask should be really crisp around this front because that's, I think, what you're saying is the key, and I would agree with that.

29:26Well, in every RFP response, we interpret the business situation and thread it through the cons line. Yes. This is what you told us is what your need is. We've taken a look at your business. We've thread that need. and this is our point of view and the role that comps can play in that business situation. Helpful advice for your next RFP listeners. So before we get to our traditional last question, what are the biggest communication stories of the year so far and lessons learned from them? So this is an interesting one. I mean, for the last 50 years, it's always global, you know either yeah global wars or politics of course is what always dominates the news i think uh this year artemis 2 was interesting i think that broke through in different ways obviously the world cup it was the nasa launch yeah yes yes um i think the one that's most interesting is actually taylor swift's wedding because what she showed is of course how relevant she is the and that she could create a cultural moment in and of itself.

30:41But her ability to control the story was unbelievable. From where I sit, the number of people that were obviously there and the number of fans that were standing outside, and when you think about real-time capturing, it is unbelievable to me that we still don't know what her dress looked like. Like how well that is under lock and key is something any brand would admire and love to have. And the rigor that went into that. It has a crazy amount of control. I mean, it's nothing, nothing. Well, not that I'm following it very closely, but nothing as far as I can see. I mean, as far as we can tell, played out to the T, it's very impressive.

31:30And the lesson here for brands is what, or marketers is what? Planning and governance. I mean, there's no doubt that she had crystal clear rules and responsibilities and people knew who was in charge. And there also must have been a, here's all the things that can go wrong and how we're going to prevent them from even showing up. That's right. That's right. Of course, her NDAs. But I mean, I've never seen an NDA work so well. Me either. unbelievable it's unbelievable all right well i think this is a great way to get us to our traditional last question it's a two-parter you can take one but you must take at least one funniest story you can share on the air and or practical advice we haven't talked about yet you can pick one or both but you must pick at least one i i'm sorry i'm going to go with the practical advice i'm going to stay true to where i think um is going and i i just cannot reiterate the need for speed and what goes with the need for speed.

32:36And I think it's really easy to know what to do. We all, we are all, we can all judge reputation and we can all judge how people should conduct themselves. But when rubber meets the road and to actually be able to act on is something entirely different. So my advice is to truly set up your function, no matter what size company you are, no matter what size team you are. You don't need to limit yourself if you can get even off the shelf data to know what's happening, to really understand your audience, have relationships and governance. Think about your top 10 scenarios of what can happen and how you want to be able to act in that moment.

33:25And it will expedite your growth and it will protect you greatly when things don't go your way. Okay, I think a great way to end the show and I'll summarize it all for be prepared, be prepared. Yes. So thank you, Em. And thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please like, share and subscribe. You can find all of our more than 175 episodes on Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, which include What Does Social First Mean? And Is It Even Right For You? Colonel Mustard in the study with the job spec, How Poor Design Shortens CMO Lifespans, A Futurist Talks About What's Next for Marketers and Agencies, and Managing the Geopolitical Landscape.