AI can synthesize your data. It can't tell you what matters.

0:00A report is delivered after work is done. It describes what happens. The audience, they can accept it, they can question it, they can ignore it, but the decisions, they've already been made. The treaty itself is negotiated before the work begins. Both parties agree on what that success looks like and what will be measured and how the results will be interpreted. That agreement changes everything. It changes the communications team isn't defending its numbers after the fact. It's actually reporting against the definition of success that the business leadership co-authored. Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd.

0:36Jason Mudd: Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations. Today, our special guest is Jessica Barber-Scott. Jessica is a senior communication professional and independent consultant with 15 years of experience across regulated financial services, state government, and higher education. She's a PRSA Silver Anvil Award winner for crisis communication and has advised C-suite leaders at organizations including TIAA, CoreBridge Financial, and EverBank. Her work expands communication governance, executive positioning, and measurement frameworks built to survive contact with a CFO.

1:15Jason Mudd: And that's why we're here today to talk about PR PR Measurement and AI. Jessica, welcome to On Top of PR. Hey, thanks, Jason. It's nice to be with you. Yeah, I'm glad to be here, too. I'm really glad that we're able to do this, and we appreciate our mutual friend Chris making the introduction today. Yeah, well, this is one of my favorite topics, PR Measurement and AI. I think that I'm excited because I know our focus for our time together is going to be on measurement, and then we'll talk about how AI changes it. I think this is a really good conversation. And as we were talking before we press record, we're both actively publishing on LinkedIn with these similar topics.

1:53Jason Mudd: And I'm just going to take a leap and say pet peeves, you know, about how people don't think the right way about measurement. And I don't know about you, but my LinkedIn feed is always full of people kind of boasting about impressions and the number of impressions that they've earned or created. And I'm just, you know, it's hard to kind of just keep scrolling when you see that because you're like, impressions don't tell you anything or much meaningful and it's not the full picture and what happened next. But I just hold back my tongue. I hold back my keyboard and I just keep scrolling. So hopefully today someone will benefit from this conversation and kind of rethink how they're measuring, how they're reporting, and we can elevate the profession and give back to the profession today by making everybody better and thinking differently about measurement.

2:39Jason Mudd: In our episode notes, which you'll find it on top of PR.com slash Jessica dash Scott, you will find links to other episodes where measurement was a topic. And I think our audience will really benefit from that. So Jessica, let's talk, let's just cut right to it and tear off the band-aid, advertising value equivalency. I'm glad to say that's a word I haven't heard much lately, maybe even not at all this calendar year, but it's come up recently partially because I've been really pushing back, like I said earlier on, some visibility and impression posts that I've seen where it just seems like the only thing they're measuring is impressions.

3:18Jason Mudd: And to me, I'm like, that's about as savvy as only measuring ABEs. And sometimes I wonder if AVEs might be slightly or equally as ridiculous. So yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think I've probably not heard AVE as much as I've heard impressions, but AVE, when you're specifically talking to folks in finance, they see that as an equivalent. You know, people who are not practitioners, who aren't digging around in, you know, media hits and tracking it. So they see that value and they think, okay, these are equitable. They're not. We know that. And, you know, most practitioners do know that somewhere in the back of their heads.

3:59But we know, I don't know about you, Jason, but I know that like it's the industry declared AVE, you know, dead in like 2010. But it's still showing up on board decks. And I think the reason that those comms leaders reach for it, I mean, because it shows a dollar value. And oftentimes, you know, when you're in there in the room with a C-suite executive, particularly with your finance guy, they want to know, well, what does this mean for our bottom line? Well, ABE doesn't say that. ABE says this is how much it would cost if we ran an ad, which we all know earned. That's not the same thing. I don't know about you, but I don't go looking at news outlets for an ad to specifically read about.

4:40Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, like the reason that it came up for me, look, I inherited a reporting deck where AVE was the headline metric. And this was years ago. And it was this big font on the very first slide. And at first, you know, I had kind of that same reaction you do when you're scrolling, right? Like, I kind of want to fight back about this. But instead, I took a second and said, you know what, I'm not going to fight this directly. Instead, I started adding a second slide like right underneath it where I translated into outcomes language rather than AVE. I think the same thing can happen there with impressions, right?

5:19You start adding in the language that you really want to use. So this is a relationship management. You're speaking the same language, but you've got to first teach the language. So, you know, a couple of quarters in, there was someone in leadership who kind of pushed back and asked why the AVE number had gone down. We know that was an opening for me to talk about how it hadn't actually gone down. It'd never been a real number, right? Like that, it's just what it would have cost. So I was able in that instance to retire the A-B slate. I was able to eventually retire that A-B-E slide entirely. Right.

5:57Nobody noticed it was gone, you know, and that silence actually speaks volumes for what real work that number was ever doing.

6:07Jason Mudd: I always hear people say, well, you know, my CEO, my CFO wants to see the advertising value equivalency. But I also think that sometimes that may or may not be the full honest answer. It might be just that's what they're used to seeing. So that's what they want to see. You know, so I'll just share my story. When I was earlier in my career, I started Axie almost 25 years ago. And I believed in AVEs. And when I heard people get pushback back in 2000, 2002-ish or 2003-ish, I felt at the time I didn't really understand why they would push back. But I also knew that the practitioners who heard that and held on to that were often the ones who I felt like were not generating much AVE number, a very high AVE number.

6:53Jason Mudd: A, B, number. And just to spell it out, I think these people were not getting much earned media coverage for their client. And so then they were like, well, let's not look at advertising value equivalency because that's not a meaningful measure. And so I looked at it at first. My instinct was, okay, you're just using that as a crutch. You're parroting back a phrase you heard someone else say, when how else are you going to measure PR? Now, 2002, we'll call it, the world has changed a lot since then, as far as attribution, technology, tracking, you know, I'm not even sure if Google analytics was a thing back then, right?

7:30Jason Mudd: I'm not even sure that Google was the, you know, 800 pound gorilla yet, although it was an up and comer for sure. So my point is to say that times have changed significantly and, you know, I'm glad it has. We have case studies on our website today that talk about ABE still because it's a little dated, but it's still really good work and campaigns that we did. We've got case studies on our website today that talk about impressions, because as you and I talked about before we press record, there's a lot of environments where it's really hard to go deeper, whether that's control, whether that's technology, whether that's just overall business savviness and willingness of a corporation to give access even to their own marketing department, much less to an outside agency.

8:13Jason Mudd: So we've got a lot to work with here, Jessica. You're right. We do. We are in an environment that is rich with data, right? It's just having access to the data. And part of that is a trust build, right? That you've got good relationships across departments, that you've got good relationships with the people, the keepers of the data and building that out and showing them the value of that shared data. It benefits everybody. And I mean, as you think about it, what we're reporting out when we start talking about earned media and impressions. Sure, we can talk about these big, huge, we have 1.5 billion impressions.

8:51Great. What did that actually do? And that's where I actually, and I'm sure you do this too, where you start thinking about, okay, well, rather than just the impressions, what is, what does that three-tier climb look like, right? The outputs, the outcomes, the impact, what does it actually look like? And I think one of the things that practitioners get a little scared, a little nervous about is that as you go through those, that number gets smaller. But as the number gets smaller, the work gets more credible, right? I think about this retirement equity campaign I did a while back. And I was trying to tell this story about impact.

9:26And I actually had a choice between sharing a Today Show placement, like Today Show. And then there was a smaller piece in a parenting publication by a well-known economist writer. Now, most people would go, oh, the Today Show was the obvious output win, right? I mean, of course. But I chose the smaller placement to tell the story because it reached women at the exact life stage where retirement planning decisions get deferred or skipped. The outcome level thinking there over the output level reach, it changed the conversation. And so, you know, I full, full transparency, I didn't have the impact layer data to like close the loop on that one.

10:10And that is where that gap is kind of part of the point of this conversation, at least is that most communicators aren't even getting that far. And so thinking about that measurement, especially when you're telling the story, because listen, we are storytellers, right? We're using the data, we're using it to tell the story of what we're doing, and what, how it's impacting our organizations. You got to have the data to be able to tell the story. So, yeah.

10:36Jason Mudd: Yeah, yeah. Well, I like how you're describing basically using discernment and a little bit of, you know, like a strategy to approach your media relations. Because this is another thing that kind of gets me on my soapbox is this idea of like explaining to a client or a leader the difference between a publicist and a media relations professional or a trusted advisor, right? So publicist is looking to be anywhere, everywhere all the time and probably subscribes to there's no such thing as bad publicity. And there's no such thing as overexposure where, you know, frankly, I disagree. And so, you know, I like to ask jokingly those individuals.

11:14Jason Mudd: OK, so you want to make sure you're getting the most media coverage you can. I'm like, well, then let's go mess something up really bad. Or the CEO is like, we need much more visibility and we need guaranteed media coverage. I'm like, okay, so you can jump off a building or you can shoot somebody or you could steal some money or something and, you know, rob a bank or get arrested. That's the kind of thing I can guarantee you headlong. Absolutely. And I know that's not what they want, but I try to use a little humor to break the tension and then try to express to them that, you know, there are other ways we can go about doing it.

11:48Jason Mudd: And the idea and the bigger challenges, you know, is that a lot of companies and even the companies, for example, that you worked at, they're never going to be as newsworthy as Coca-Cola, Disney, Nike, et cetera. And there's probably wasn't a beat writer waiting for you guys to post something on the wire. Like I've seen other people work at a big company. They're like, oh, you just, if you want media coverage, you just write a news release and you throw it on the wire and the phone rings. I'm like, yeah, that works great if you're a Fortune 100. But anybody else in that, you got to do it. There's more work involved here.

12:19I'd even push back and say that even in the Fortune 100 these days with the state of media, if you think about it, it is so they are operating on such limited resource, limited bandwidth. Right. So the fact that there are still beats is kind of amazing. But even then, I feel like it's not necessarily just the silver bullet of, oh, put it on the wire and we'll get the calls. And I've always joked, like, you have those folks who come to you and say, oh, just put it on the press release and they'll call you. Or can't you just pick up the phone and call, like, the New York Times? And I'm like, you really don't want me to do that.

12:55That's not a thing that you want me to do. And here's why. And so I'd even say we just have to be strategic whenever we're, you know, thinking about placements. And really it is about impact and being able to show, hey, this doesn't, from the outside, might not look like a huge win, right? The Today Show, wow, that's huge. It is huge. But how much did you see an impact in your business? Never, you know, compared to that smaller, more targeted publication, because we were targeting that audience. That's who we wanted. Yeah, they were both probably watching that there was overlap, but where's the impact to your bottom line?

13:33Yeah.

13:34Jason Mudd: So Jessica, I'm eager to jump into the next step, which is talking about what we're calling here a three-tier climb of outputs, outcomes, and impact. Before we go further, let's define that for this three-tier climb for our audience. Let's use examples to make an example, pick one example and walk through that for our audience so we're all on the same page. Yeah. So if you think about it, most dashboards stop at outputs and then they kind of dress them up with font size, right? Big number, bold, typeface, slide one, done. Outputs are real. They're impressions, placements, it's reach. They measure something, right?

14:12But they don't measure whether anything happened because of the communication. So that's outcomes. But outcomes aren't the same as asking, did the organization's situation actually change? That is impact. So outputs, which was your first question. Explain the difference. Outputs, what we produced. In my example, the Today Show segment, 2.4 million impressions, 47 placements, outcomes, what shifted in the audience, awareness, consideration, intent, behavior, impact, what changed for the organization as a result, right? Cost avoidance, market position, public trust. And when you're thinking about a conversation with the CFO, those are the things that actually track.

14:53So I know I gave you the example of that retirement equity campaign. Yeah. And I really lean on that just because having a big, a big show like the Today Show versus the smaller publication that are so, it's so targeted and it is not the one that people reach for, right? They look for those massive reaches. Well, if we were only going to talk about outcomes, if we're only going to talk about outputs. Sure, that today show is where we would stop. We'd stop at the outputs, actually. We wouldn't even get to the outcomes because it would be implied. When we're starting to talk about impact, we want to look at those more targeted placements.

15:29We want to look at what it actually looks like on the bottom line, right? Like that's what your CFO, when you're in the room with the CFO, they want to know, hey, okay, so 47 placements. Great. Two million people saw this. Excellent. How many of them came to the website? How many of them called an advisor? How many of them opened an account, like what does that look like? Because all they care about is money, right? Like the bottom line, the impact of the business, what it looks like. When you're thinking about outcome over output, you know, it's a harder argument to make in the room. And it actually really requires you to understand the audience that a campaign is trying to move to reach, not just the one that's going to look impressive.

16:10So I'm not sure if women who read the piece opened a retirement account, right? That I don't have that information. And that's kind of one of the reasons I started writing about this was because I find in my career that having a really good relationship and understanding of a campaign and then understanding of what the bottom line looks like down the line, it helps me tell that story, right? Because it's not the whole story. There's a gap. It's real. It is not unusual. And so we don't often get to the impact layer as communicators, right? Sometimes the data isn't there. Sometimes the relationship with the team tracking it isn't there.

16:47Oftentimes it's because we don't ask for it. So knowing why you made the call, being honest about what you can and can't measure, it's still better measurement than a slide full of impressions at a 72 point font. And that's kind of where this whole idea started, right? It's not, it's not a bug. The numbers are getting smaller as the work gets credible,

17:07Jason Mudd: right it's not a bug or it's like a workflow right you start at the top with maybe the impressions right so you're gonna get a lot of impressions at the top level and then as the funnel moves down you're gonna have people that didn't click through that didn't say you know that didn't click follow or subscribe or you know engage with your company beyond hitting the home page you're gonna see other people who might have dug in a little bit about your services or your product maybe they even added some of the card, but then they abandon the card or they don't come back. So, I mean, I think that's the simplest way to explain it to our audience here.

17:41Jason Mudd: And I think at the end of the day, what's important is that they realize that, and this is my other soapbox, is getting media coverage is not a result. And a lot of people will post about, man, I got this great result for this client. And it's typically, I see it on LinkedIn where, you know, I think they have the best of intentions of promoting the good work they do. And they're excited about the good work that they've done, but getting your client in a article or a feature story or a mention or a quote is not a result. It's an output of the work and the effort that you made. And it's a good start to the campaign.

18:14Jason Mudd: But like you said, what happens next? What did that audience do? What did they learn? What did they do? And did they support your organization? And in fairness, it may not be an action that they took that same day. They may not even take an action that month, but it's planting a seed of the long term. And that's honestly what makes it so hard to measure, especially something like PR is the impression you make. And this story just popped in my head. So I'm going to share it real quick. A client we have today, literally 15 years ago, called me one day and said, hey, I'd like to take you to lunch.

18:46Jason Mudd: You've got a great reputation, you know, whatever. And so we went to lunch and he told me, he's like, look, I'm an executive vice president of this company. One day I'm going to be in a position where I can hire a PR firm. And I wanted to get to know you because you've caught my eye and I'm thinking about you and your PR firm, you know, when I get in that position. And I said, great. We went to lunch. It was a great conversation. We're about the same age. I enjoyed the conversation and just kind of moved on with my life. And, you know, many years later, 15 years or however long it was later, I get a call from his marketing chief or vice president.

19:20Jason Mudd: And she says, hey, this guy has great thoughts about you. We're looking for a PR firm. He wanted to make sure we got connected. And so talk to her, connected with him. We started a whole process of seeing how we might do business together. And it happened. And, you know, this is a pretty big billion dollar corporation. And when I tell people this story, they're like, well, surely, Jason, surely you followed up with him. Surely you kept in touch and stayed top of mind. And no, I really didn't. You know, like I wasn't sure if he was ever going to be in a position to be able to hire us. I meant no disrespect by it.

19:54Jason Mudd: I just simply was like, hey, if he's ready, he'll contact us. And at the end of the day, that's not how most people think, right? Most people like, oh, I've got to lead. I've got to stay on top of it or whatever. But what I focused on was just building a strong brand and great reputation for myself and my agency. And I think I was able to stay top of mind because this person was invested in our organization and our content and the things I was saying. And I think there was an element of also that we were demonstrating what we say we do, right? We do a great job of getting our own PR. One compliment I've received from a total stranger who called our PR firm wanting to hire us is he said, either I see you guys everywhere is what he said.

20:30Jason Mudd: So either you're really good at what you do, or you have a lot of free time on your hands and you need another client. And I said, yes, yes to both, right? We're really good at what we do and we'd love another client. So at the end of the day, I think that's the long-term viewpoint that people need to consider is that PR is a long-term business strategy. And I say that all the time. It's not an overnight big shotgun effect that you can have those moments, right? I call them the moment of PR. But what we really need is an ongoing situation where to our buyer we feel, or to the buyer we feel omnipresent.

21:08Jason Mudd: Just like in real estate, right? It's location, location, location. In PR, in marketing, in advertising, I say it's frequency, frequency, frequency. So I can tell you from experience that if you stay out of the radar of organizations, they will forget about you. And so thank goodness we're in this modern era where we have a lot of technology and a lot of capabilities at our fingertips. It's a blessing and a curse because you can easily misstep and overwhelm your audience. But as we're walking through this three-tier climb of outputs, outcomes, and impacts, I think a funnel is a good way to look at it.

21:43Jason Mudd: And that explains why the numbers get smaller as the work gets more valuable, credible, and meaningful. And I think, as you said earlier, and I think you said this very well, it's really important that you educate the CFO or the CEO. and they may be using levers and measurements or factors that aren't as relevant, aren't as solid as they once thought or someone previously impressed them by or looked at. And while we're talking about it, if I'm giving advice here to our audience, the one thing I would say is measure PR quarter over quarter and year over year to avoid the seasonality of the slow month, perhaps of December, or maybe it's a slow season in December or January for your business.

22:23Jason Mudd: And instead, just look at it quarter over quarter, because like I said, PR is a long-term business strategy. I tell our clients all the time, if you're not looking to do this for at least a year, then let's have a conversation about why you're not willing to do it for at least a year and why maybe we shouldn't do this at all. Now, that doesn't mean I want to lock them into a one-year contract, right? In fact, it's quite the opposite. I don't mind giving them a 90-day out at any time for any reason. What I'm looking though is to make sure they understand that in the reputation building business, Warren Buffett said it takes 10 years to build a reputation and a few minutes to lose it, right?

23:01Absolutely. Absolutely. You and I both know that from experience, I'm sure.

23:06Jason Mudd: So you're doing a great job. You're doing such a good job. You're transitioning a little ahead of us, which I like. And you mentioned build the framework backwards, right? And so it's a common measurement mistake, you've said, with pulling information and working forward. So tell us more. I mean, I think you said start with the business objective, right, and let the metric earn its place. I'm a big believer, and this is a common thing I'm sure you see, Jessica, a comm department, a PR department, marketing department. They're like measuring their own stuff that no one else is measuring, that no one else is paying attention to, and no one else cares.

23:41Jason Mudd: So shout out to AMEC, who is the foundation of communications measurement globally, and they're the organization we follow at our agency. But, you know, I learned early from our involvement with their association that measure what the organization is measuring. Figure out what the CEO and CFO are tracking and then align so that you're talking the same language, speaking the same language and presenting the same content and measures as that audience is doing. And I think that's really the important thing here is you're calling it build the framework backwards. And I like that. We actually start at the beginning by aligning that what are the business objectives, make sure the communication, public relations, marketing, storytelling objectives are the same as what the overall organization is working to forward.

24:29Jason Mudd: So you're in lockstep with every other department and every other organization instead of, you know, whether it's AVEs or impressions, reporting something back. I don't think I've ever heard a CEO on a quarterly earnings call tell shareholders about the, you know, the impressions that they created or the AVE they created. What they want is market share gain, efficiencies and other things like that. and if PR is out there speaking a completely different language, that's why you're not valued as the trusted advisor they're looking for. Yeah, I think I use this term, the terminology about a treaty, right?

25:07Jason Mudd: Like, yes, I like that. Right, framing, because it's an agreement that you're all coming to. It's coming to the same language, using the same language and understanding, hey, we have these same objective, same goals. And I like that you, the way that you said that about making sure you're measuring the same things. It does not make sense not to measure those things, right? Because that's going to show success, especially, especially to folks who aren't in the trenches of communications. When I say building backwards, it means starting with what you're already, your organization's already measuring and not what you think they should care about, right?

25:39Which as PR people, as comms people, we often like, we know what we know. And we, we often, it's very easy for us to go, well, you should really know about this. they don't care about it. They care about the bottom line, right? Like, like you said. So building the bridge from the metrics that they're already using into communications activity, that's, that's the bridge that your framework is, your framework is the bridge. So when you start thinking about that treaty, you know, a report is delivered after work is done, it describes what happens. The audience, they can accept it, they can question it, they can ignore it, but the decisions, they've already been made.

26:22The treaty itself is negotiated before the work begins. Both parties agree on what that success looks like and what will be measured and how the results will be interpreted. That agreement changes everything. It changes the communications team isn't defending its numbers after the fact. It's actually reporting against the definition of success that the business leadership co-authored. So as you kind of go into campaigns or into budget seasons before anyone's invested anything, I feel like that's the first place to start. You know, an example of this is let's say you're in a financial services company and the business objective for the year is increasing retirement plan enrollment among employees who've never contributed, right?

27:03So the CFO tracks enrollment rates by segment. The benefits team tracks it and it shows up in a board reporting. Most comms teams would launch an enrollment awareness campaign and then report, we generated X impressions. Why? Maybe we did this many media placements and we did this many social engagements. Leadership nods. Nobody knows if the campaign works. Building backwards, you sit down with the benefits team and whoever owns that enrollment metric. You do that before the campaign launches and you ask, so what does a successful quarter look like to you? They tell you, okay, yeah, enrollment among never contributors.

27:50We want it up five points in the 35 to 45 age band. Now you have a target that exists in their language and now you work backwards. Okay, great. What does communication have to do to contribute to that movement? Well, it's got to reach that specific segment. not the whole employee population not a broad consumer audience right at a moment when they're open to acting you want them you know during that enrollment period and it's got to drive them to the enrollment tool not just to the content so your measurement framework it's got to track it's got to get reach within the target segment not your total impressions it's got to get click through to the enrollment portal and if you can get the data handoff it's good to know what happened after they clicked.

28:36You're not measuring communications activity anymore. You're measuring communications activity against a business metric that the CFO already owns. And so that's what it means to speak the same language. You're not translating your metrics into business terms after the fact. You're agreeing on those business terms first and then designing measurement to connect them. And it can feel uncomfortable, especially communicators, PR practitioners, You know, that treaty conversation can feel uncomfortable at first because it requires us to commit to something before we really know what the results are going to be.

29:09But that's the point, right? It's also the thing that earns you a seat at the table next time the budget decisions get made.

29:15Jason Mudd: Right, right. Yeah, you're the person who showed up with the shared stakes, not just a slide deck. Yeah, and kind of you're making me think of an uncomfortable truth that I've seen people talk about online. And that is CEOs have a responsibility to maximize profits for shareholders. That's the job of a corporation is to maximize profits for shareholders. Now, some will say, no, a company should do more like be a good corporate citizen and make a quality product and all of those things. But that's the reason why we're talking about a corporation instead of a nonprofit. Right. And so a CEO's role is to they have responsibility, a responsibility, not the responsibility of other responsibilities.

29:57Jason Mudd: but it's ultimately to maximize profits for shareholders. Now, again, some of you won't like that expression, but let's assume that it is true or part of their role. And therefore, if we are public relations practitioners, how do we speak a language that the CEO values how we're helping them maximize profits for shareholders? Well, the best way to do that is not the altruistic, well, we've got a bunch of impressions and people feel good about our organization. It's demonstrating how PR can align with what the CEO needs to not only keep their job, but keep the shareholders happy, which ultimately means a healthy, prosperous, for-profit organization.

30:40Jason Mudd: And then if you want, and so, you know, the CEO is definitely concerned about reputation. He's definitely concerned about liability or she's concerned about exposure in the marketplace. But a lot of CEOs get promoted from being either in sales or in finance or accounting and their CFOs beforehand. So your CFO and CEO are not two different audiences. They're just looking at this from a different perspective. And in our experience as a PR firm, CFOs typically love us because we try to align with these measures, right? We're not coming to them talking about ABEs and impressions. We're talking about how this helped them save money instead of going about it with a less efficient vehicle like advertising, or in some cases, certain types of marketing that really help us deliver for them the value and show them the efficiency.

31:31Jason Mudd: But if you're not measuring, you can't do that. And so PR moves when you measure it properly and you're successful from a nice to have, right? That, okay, we feel good about this and how we look from a PR standpoint to a must have, right? Into that long-term strategy. One of our longest term clients that we ever signed was wanting to hire us, wanting to hire us, but they couldn't get the approval from the CEO and CFO. Well, this was a global billion dollar corporation. They sponsored a golf tournament. The CEO and CFO golf foursome. They have two of their clients with them or friends. I think it was friends.

32:11Jason Mudd: And they look at the bag, the swag bag, the golf bag from the tournament that our client's logo was on. And at some point during the round of golf, somebody said to the CFO or the CEO, I think it was the CFO, the guest said to him, well, who's this company anyway? I've never heard of. And the CFO is like, I work for that company. Like I, you know, how do you not know the company that I work for? And you're my friend or my neighbor or whatever he was. And immediately after that golf tournament, the marketing or the chief marketing officer got a call saying, whatever that PR firm wanted to charge us, let's hire them.

32:45Jason Mudd: Right. And so that worked out great for me, but I think it's an example of the pain point that you have to have management experience in order for them to see the value of the work that you're doing. So in that particular case, this company was a holding company. They had a lot of brands that were more well-known in a niche, but for lack of a better word, the ego of the leadership team wanted people to know how big of a deal the company was they worked with. Different conversation, right? Like that's a different conversation. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got four moves that change the CFO meeting. I'm probably most excited about this part of our conversation.

33:23Yeah. I mean, listen, these are things that when you say them out loud, they don't sound earth shattering, right? Like you, it feels like common sense, but oftentimes, again, we're PR people. We go in, we walk in either overselling or apologizing. And that's, that's not the dynamic you want when you go into that meeting. So, you know, as I've kind of already said, bring smaller numbers on purpose. It's a smaller defensible number that's going to earn trust more than an inflated one, right? You got to translate to their language before you walk in. You got to reframe in terms of the CFO and what they're already tracking, right?

34:06That cost avoidance, the share of voice. You want to do that instead of leading with those reaches and impressions because that's not their language. You got to show the miss and not just the win, right? You bring a metric that didn't move. Explain why. If you walk in and say, oh, everything is coming up roses. It's all daisies. It's all, you know, it's all good. That doesn't read as honest. In fact, it often either reads as you are purposefully distorting the numbers or just incredibly lucky. And neither of those does anything to build trust, right? And then you want to tie any ask that you have to an outcome and not the department.

34:46This outcome costs this much to sustain, not comms needs more budget. Okay, well, why? Well, if we want to do these things, this is how much it's going to cost. And honestly, bringing those four moves changes the whole dynamic. It's a conversation where you're in partnership, where you are building trust, where you are laying the groundwork for future conversations, where you are sort of putting that trust bank, you know, you're building and depositing into that trust bank so that later, when you want to have a larger campaign, when you want to take a, maybe an experimental leap on something, you've built the trust.

35:33and it also gets you invited to the table and your voice is respected and you've you've got

35:41Jason Mudd: the ear of the people who are writing the checks yeah i actually i really like that uh the way you position that and to be honest i wasn't sure where you were going at first but i think that makes a lot of sense so you're not asking for a department to receive more money you're asking for an investment. And that's the word I like to use is not budget, not, you know, not cost or whatever, but investment. So if I heard you correct, I think what you're saying is you're asking the organization to make an investment in getting a additional outcome value and hopefully a result on behalf of the organization.

36:20Yeah. I mean, you, you are literally saying this outcome, the thing that we're seeing, it costs this much to sustain. So if you want this, we have to invest is the right word. We have to invest to sustain it or to grow it. If, and if that's the case, then you have, you need to come with the numbers or get the numbers to say, okay, if we want to grow this, it's going to cost this much. And oftentimes that's going to be more than it costs to sustain. Not always, but usually it's a little more to grow something.

36:54Jason Mudd: Well, it's always more upfront, right? And then, you know, maintenance becomes a little bit easier. So, you know, just like, I don't know, you buy a car, right? You don't expect to have to maintain the car at the higher price than you originally purchased it, unless it's not a new car, then that can certainly happen. But yeah. So, all right. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything. So the four moves that change the CFO meeting, can you walk us through what those are? So bring smaller numbers on purpose, translate into their language before you walk into the meeting, show the miss, not just the win and tie the ask to the outcome, not the department.

37:29Jason Mudd: Okay. Love that. And when you're, when you're talking about show the, show the miss, this is very nuanced or technique driven, but do you lead with the miss first? Cause that's how I do. I do. I think it's always good. I think we want to work with a good feeling and not necessarily with something that didn't move. Not that it's bad. It's just not every metric moves. But having that, it's a juxtaposition, right? Like it's a bitter and a sweet. One makes the other more intense or brings, it sheds more light on it. You get more of an appreciation for it. I think starting with, hey, listen, it didn't work this way.

38:11This didn't do what we thought it was going to do. We tried it. Whatever the metric is, right, that didn't move. And the thorough, not an apology, but an explanation of why. Come in with the data. Not with an apology, with data. And then you move into, but here is what works. And here is why. And again, this can't be all sunshine, daisies, and roses. It's this was planned. This was strategic. This was not luck. We did this intentionally.

38:41Jason Mudd: Yeah, I love that you're talking about daisies and roses, because I think that's really important that, you know, we think that way. Also, I want to just rewind because you're reminding me of this goes back to when I first took our I first did the accreditation and public relations process. When you're writing a strategic plan, which you should be doing for every initiative, you start out with measurable objectives, right? smarter, right? And you take the acronym there, which I might mess up in the moment here, but you know, specific, measurable, attainable, I'm going to forget them right now.

39:11Jason Mudd: But anyway, so, but you set those out, and they should match exactly back to how you're going to measure the program, right? So, and so specific, specific, measurable, or attainable, relevant, time bound, evaluated, or ethical, depending on who you ask, and, and then reported or revised, again, depending on who you ask is what smarter stands for. But ultimately, so if you say we want to grow, share a voice, I'm just making up a number of something. And I don't even know if that's a good smarter objective off the cuff. But if you want to say we want to grow, share a voice by 20%, then when you evaluate the campaign, you have in the evaluation the same exact thing.

39:52Jason Mudd: Did we grow, share a voice by 20 %? If yes or no, what was the total number and what made us able to be successful or what causes to be unsuccessful. So when you're looking at a smarter objective, right, a specific, measurable, obtainable, time bound, ethical, and reported, you know, you want to make sure that that also allows you just to in turn evaluate by the same standards, because if there's a moving target, that's going to cause problems or complications or confusion down the road. Now, again, what do we agree upon? We agreed upon aligning ourselves with the goals of the C-suite and of the leadership and of the organization overall.

40:32Jason Mudd: I'm pretty sure accounting and HR and sales are not going around saying, but we must grow share of voice by 20%, right? That would be the PR person and myself getting in the way of creating our own metrics that no one else cares about. So my corporate clients have aspirations like, you know, we need to grow shareholder value by this percentage. We need to grow our Asia business by this piece of whatever. Sometimes it's behind closed doors. We've got to sell this particular division off by the end of the year because it's hemorrhaging and we can't figure out how to make it better. And sometimes I've seen literally the company's goal is, hey, we just simply want to acquire this major competitor.

41:16Jason Mudd: And in order to do that, we've got to raise revenue. We've got to cut costs So we have some profit margins to be able to acquire that asset. So finding out what that is could be very insightful. And the way I would just drive this home real quick is, you know, when I have, when we have clients that have multiple divisions, you know, they might come to us very privately and quietly and say, hey, stop doing PR for this division because we're trying to dump it, you know? And so we don't want to invest any more money in that division right now, or maybe it's already sold. We just don't close for another 90 days or something like that.

41:49Jason Mudd: And so that's how you get to be the trusted advisor is by, you know, aligning yourself with their goals. So you hear these things and you can react and help manage the company's priorities instead of wondering why you don't have a seat at the table. So I really like your four moves. I'm glad we clarified exactly what those were. And the last piece of our conversation today, Jessica, I think we could just keep talking, is what AI changes in measurement and what it doesn't change. So I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this. Yeah. You know, AI feels like it's everywhere, right? Like there's, there's, it's, it's just in every single, you talked about LinkedIn earlier.

42:25It's in every single LinkedIn post. It feels like somebody's talking about AI and we're hearing about it. Like it's changing the job market. It's changing the way we apply for things. It's changing everything. PR and comms is not different from that, AI can pull faster, right? It can synthesize more broadly. It can find patterns across data at a scale that really no human team can match. But what it can't do is tell you whether you're measuring the right thing in the first place. So framework discipline, that business alignment, the CFO relationship or the C-suite relationship, that's irreducibly human, right?

43:09That is the human connection and it's what makes it work. In regulated industries especially, there's a gap between what AI can count and what a practitioner can interpret. And it's a line between a useful tool and a liability. So I see all this discussion about, well, AI is going to replace communications people. I mean, listen, if you are relying on an AI, an LLM to write your press releases, your press releases are not going to be great. They're going to be okay, probably, but they're not going to be great. If you're relying on it to advise a C-suite member, a CEO, a CFO, a CMO, it's not going to speak their language which for sure, because it doesn't have the relationship that you do.

44:01It doesn't have the experience that you do. Does it have access to all the data? Absolutely. And it's going to synthesize much faster than these eyes are. Right. But at the end of the day, and I know, I feel like I'm just saying it over and over again, your experience as, as a practitioner, as a seasoned practitioner is so invaluable in this time where we just have to take all this wall of data and make it so that it is consumable and it makes sense. Because honestly, if I walked up to anybody, but like if you walked into a meeting with a C-suite member and said, okay, here's the spreadsheet of all of this data.

44:45Can you imagine? Like that CFO, that C-suite members are going to look at you and go, I don't, what do you want me to do with this? Yes. An AI doing that, it's giving them all the data isn't helpful. You've got to interpret and that's the part that we play.

45:01Jason Mudd: Yeah. I agree with you. I think the other thing that, you know, should be said is the idea of taking your AI tools and training and developing them just like you would an employee. And, you know, the saying we've been saying for about five years now when it comes to AI is garbage in, garbage out. So the idea is that if you can train up your AI tools that you're using, you actually could get a fairly decent news release product out of them. But then what you need is a senior level or an experienced practitioner giving it another review just to make sure it's not gold. So it can be a great first draft, right?

45:38Jason Mudd: There's a chart that we've shared in the past, and I'll ask Ava to insert it into the episode notes here today, but it shows kind of like how to manage, how leaders manage. And it also has been reproduced how to manage AI. And so the first 10 % is investing in the right input, right? The right training, the right input, the right data, but mostly in my experience training. And then just like you said earlier, the maintenance becomes the easy part. So you got to build it first by training it. So you do the first 10 % upfront, and then you let the AI do 80 % of the deep work or the difficult work.

46:14Jason Mudd: And then on the back end, 10 % should go into fact checking and verifying and improving and all that stuff. Now, here's the wrinkle, right? We all know the last 10 % take as long as the first 90%, right, to produce a really good product. But at the end of the day, that's the efficiency of using AI. It's not your receptionist, your intern, or even your founder going into AI and say, create a press release because you're going to get just that, right? But what we've done is we've actually taken the opportunity to say, okay, here are the top performing press releases that we've done. Here's outside performing, top performing news releases that others have done.

46:54Jason Mudd: What is their commonality? Now, we already knew the commonality, but it was fun to put it into AI and see what it said. And then we build rules and we build instructions around it, right? And so then we can have a news release generating AI engine that will help us accomplish just that. But we don't start with, hey, just figure out a news release today, right? We go in and we say, hey, this has happened or this is happening or we want to give commentary on this. Then we've got the tools and equipment to be able to do our very best work very efficiently. Talk about AI as if it's the intern that you're, you know, that you, you start with the intern and you're sort of building them and getting them ready for to eventually become right, right, your, your star player.

47:40And that's the way I talk about it. You wouldn't hand your, a big press release, a media statement. You wouldn't just take whatever the intern gave you and send it on to a local outlet. Right.

47:51Jason Mudd: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've shared that same sentiment as well. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's an entry level employee or an intern by itself. It's been educated, it knows some stuff, but it doesn't really know the practical application nor the ramifications of the work product. So, you know, when I was an intern, I was pretty good, but I didn't know what I didn't know, right? They call that Dunning-Kruger effect, right? The Dunning-Kruger effect. It is one of my favorite things to talk about. Yeah, same, same. So yeah, I mean, I was pretty sharp as an intern, but I was still an intern, right?

48:26Jason Mudd: And a rookie might be a great athlete in the NFL or somewhere else or a freshman in college, but they're still a rookie or a freshman and they need reps and they need wisdom and wisdom comes from experience. So yeah, that's right. Jessica, this has been a great conversation. I'm so glad we got connected. It's such a small world to find out that literally live walking distance from each other and yet did not realize it. But here we are in the small world we call Earth and in the profession we call PR. It was really great to have you. We're gonna post episode notes from this episode at ontopofpr.com slash Jessica-Scott.

49:03Jason Mudd: There you'll see a link to her LinkedIn profile where you can get connected with her. There you'll see the transcript and the episode notes and just some other valuable resources related to what we talked about here today. And so with that, this is Jason Mudd, signing off from On Top of PR and Axia Public Relations, thanking you for the opportunity to share some of our insights with you. And ultimately, we hope that this episode helped you stay on top of PR. And if it did, please take a moment to share it with a colleague or friend who you think would benefit from watching On Top of PR. Be well.

49:37This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and check out past shows at on top of PR dot com.

50:13Thank you.