The PR Week: 10.29.2026 - Kathy Bloomgarden

0:00This week on the podcast, Rudolf Finn CEO Kathy Bloomgarden, also a PR Week Hall of Famer, joins us to discuss the agency's growth over the last year, how they landed the coveted Wendy's account, how AI is reshaping talent acquisition and training at the firm, and how it successfully navigates geopolitical tensions in China as the market's largest non-Chinese company. independent PR shop. And in the news, Toneo is working with Anthropic on its massive potential IPO. Trillions of dollars we're talking there, listeners. And then we have the key takeaways from Omnicom's Q3 earnings report, big brand activations and PR heavyweights lacing up for the New York Marathon.

0:51The launch of our PR Week reader survey, very important that one, and the official launch of our PR Week sports conference with a stunning keynote. All this and more coming up.

1:11Hello and welcome to the PR Week, PR Week's regular weekly roundup of everything that matters in the worlds of PR and communications. My name's Steve Barrett. I'm the VP Editorial Director of PR Week, and I guide you gently through another show with my new colleague, Julia Walker, Senior Reporter at PR Week, I believe. You were promoted while I was away. I sure was. I would never have allowed that. Yes, I'm only joking. Of course I would. Welcome, Julia. Great to be with you. Nice to be with you, too. It's our first podcast together, the two of us. I know. What took us so long to do this? I don't know, but I am excited.

1:52Yeah, we are as well. And we've got a fantastic guest. We've got Cathy Bloongarden, who's the CEO of legendary PR agency, Ruda Finn. Cathy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. And I love your enthusiasm. Steve, you make us all wake up and get ready for a great discussion. And Julia, great that you're going to be participating. Yeah, we try and keep the upbeat tone on the show and around the office. Isn't that right, Julia? Yep, today is Halloween in the PR week office. It is, and everyone's in costumes, including Julia. I'm wearing black. That's my concession to Halloween. So I kind of, but then I kind of always wear black.

2:32But anyway, whatever. Kathy, obviously, Rudifin, legendary agency, storied, and seemed to be on a bit of a roll at the moment. You grew 7 % last year. I'm not sure how you're doing this year, but you've won some noteworthy clients. You won Wendy's from Ketchum, and you've won some other accounts. How's this year going? There's obviously a lot going on in the industry. Just talk us through where Rudolf Finn's at. Well, first of all, you're absolutely right, Steve. There's a lot going on in the industry, and also a lot going on around us. You know, everything's changing. A lot of transitions, a lot of restructuring, a lot of churn.

3:09people trying to figure out kind of what their ideal strategy is going forward. Well, I'm happy to say that Ritterpin's been on a very steady course. We are expecting double-digit growth again. So over the past five years, we've grown 150%. So we just year over year have been on this very steady, very strong growth curve. And it's, of course, a lot of hard work, a lot of great people. and I think some really smart investments where we've just been very steadfast in terms of what our strategy is. Yeah, and in terms of that growth, that is impressive growth. How much of that would you attribute to acquisitions versus organic growth?

3:54The majority, I have the exact statistics in front of me, but the majority is organic growth. We do do acquisitions, as you know, but they're bolt-ons. They're small. Yeah. And one noteworthy win this year was obviously Wendy's, you know, from Ketchum, which had held the account for 30 years. Talk us through that. How did you win that? What was your sort of pitch to the client? And very interesting, especially in the current climate, that Wendy's went out to an independent shop versus a holding company shop, you know, something we've been discussing. Both formats are great. Both ownership structures are great.

4:30But it does seem that indies are having their time. You know, is that fair to say? Yeah. Well, thanks for bringing up this point and sort of being a voice for making people aware of what the pluses and minuses are. And as you rightly point out, Steve, there are, of course, pluses and minuses in both models. The advantage of the independent agencies right now is that in the midst of all these various pressures we were talking about, But, you know, we can be more resilient and adaptable. So, you know, we haven't had any need to let any employees go. We have been continuing to invest in our technology lab, in our creative studio, so that we've really not been in any way, let's say, hit it all or wavered in the context of external pressures.

5:19I think that some agencies have taken a path where they're going through a moment of change. It's a little bit more intense. And that has caused some of the clients to wonder, especially if there are conflicts that come up in consolidations and so on. So in the wake of that, some companies are looking for alternatives where they might have a more steady partner that wouldn't be affected by some of the consolidations. And that's benefited the independents. Yeah, and I guess one of the driving forces behind something like the Interpublic Group and Omnicom's acquisition of them is to build this big technology data stack that then feeds into all the agencies, not just the PR agencies, all the agencies across the piece.

6:05How do you as an indie compete with that? Because you're not, you know, with the best will in the world, you're not going to be able to put two to three billion behind a tech stack like that or an AI offering. But tell us how you approach that and how you make the case to clients that, you know, you can provide just as good service. So actually, if we look at the evolution of the tech sector, it's not always the biggies. They're doing the best in technology. You know, there's a huge growth of startups that are really the resource for a lot of the innovation. And you see the big tech companies actually buying that innovation in order to continue to become frontier and pioneering in their spaces.

6:47And I think that for us, that's really been a model because we started our tech lab, as you know, several years ago. Tejas, who is our worldwide AI and CTO, he actually is an engineer himself. He's a developer. And we have our developer group both in the U.S., in India and in the Philippines. So we have a global developer team that's quite large and an analytics team. They've been working there for several years. So for us, this is not like a new initiative. But that gives us the ability to actually interact with the startup ecosystem very deeply. And Kyrgyz has been doing that for quite some time.

7:24So we get an advance of kind of what's coming. We get an advance of new tools that we can pilot and test. And sometimes the startups will ask us to actually partner with them to test certain things to see whether they're going to work in the communication and marketing environment. So we really are able to stay really well immersed. So I don't think in this part of our business, it's size that matters. I think it's really the team and the connections, the network, really, and the connections that are really important because it's such a fast-paced, fast-moving technology pace. in some ways, the bigger you are, the slower you are to adapt in some ways.

8:01So for us, we're just at the right sweet spot. We know we're the right size to be resilient and adaptive. And we have been investing. It's one of the benefits of independence over many years now. We haven't in any way halted our investments in our tech capabilities, our analytics and our developer team. and it's really helped us in order to grow our marketing capabilities for tech companies as well. And tell us a bit about how AI is impacting the type of people you might employ or the skills that they're going to require and also the skills that maybe clients are, you know, going to require and how they're changing too and what they're asking of you.

8:41It's a really great question. First of all, I think for our employees, we have a commitment to upskill everybody. from top to bottom. And of course, that requires a bit of a culture change, too, because all of us are human beings who like to do what we were doing the way we were doing it. We don't like to necessarily change. So helping people to practice and test and, you know, whenever you test something, I mean, you and I are certainly good examples. If we got, you know, a presentation of how to use a certain workflow, it might take us one or two times to get that under our belt to do it on our sitting at our computer.

9:16So we have to make people not afraid to test these things and practice and experiment. So we have about this year, we will have invested about 1500 hours of training for our employees. Every employee in our agency is trained. And we have a cascade program where we have tech lab finds the tools. Our AI accelerator works with each practice to determine which tools are best for their clients. And then our AI enthusiasts are embedded, according to them, they're embedded in every group and they help people, they sit with them, they help them to figure out how to use the tool and where, you know, to ask the right questions for what they might be needing, what they might be using.

9:55So that's the internal piece of it. The external piece is all clients are really trying to find a way to improve their skill sets too. So our team, really led by Tejas, has been doing kind of, you know, strategy sessions where we work with very, very many numerous multinationals to take them through all the tools and show them, here's what's available, here's how you can use them. We can walk through what would be of most interest for you and then develop tools that are actually appropriate. We do that, we really, I would say, dozens and dozens of these strategy sessions now. Then we have the accelerator team that's working on new workflows.

10:38That's the input from teams for what they would need. So we have an AI-driven workflow for crisis, for example. So we have one for product launches. We have one for campaign testing. We have one for influencer identification and so on. So all of these look at the inputs, the signals. And by the way, the tools used to find all those signals are changing every day. So this is not static. It's something we have to keep looking at. And then we have to filter it through what's important to that client, what's the knowledge base for that client. And then we have to look at how it's going to affect every single one of the individual stakeholder groups.

11:16Media are different from investors or different from employees or different from consumers and so on. All the messaging is tested individually by each of that. And then finally content is created. All that happens, for example, in a crisis, if we can determine a crisis might be emerging, we can get content, we can filter how to respond to each stakeholder within seconds, 30 seconds. So these tools, they make communication much more powerful. So if people say, you know, are you going to be wiped out? Are you going to be replaced? Or are we seeing this wave of unemployment that's taking over? I think for me it's the reverse.

11:54It's like I think we have a chance to be much more important to our clients if we can adopt these new tools in a really smart way. And your question about hiring, we've hired this year, we've increased our employee base about 8.5%. So we're continuing to actually hire. And I find the young people are really so important and so resourceful in this new world. They are so AI native. You can sit with a young person, go over a tool or something you're trying to create. And amazingly, they are so adept at actually adopting it and really working with it. It takes a few of us, like you and me, no longer.

12:34Yeah, that's good to hear because, you know, there is also, sometimes you get a feeling that young people are anti-AI, you know, and they're not engaging. So that is good to hear. Can you give us a flavor of how you sort of approach Wendy's, for example, and a new client like that, a big consumer client, can you give us a little flavor of how that that's a big win for you you know and and it's a big consumer win you seem to be having some nice consumer wins yeah so give us a flavor of what's what i think it's really i think it's a great combination of you know expertise in the industry um that's you know table stakes you really have to understand what the pressures are and who the customers are and what the accepted norms are and challenges but it's a marrying of what i was talking about with regard to technology.

13:25So we can use our technology to show that we really are at the forefront, are able to serve them better in terms of, you know, identifying crises. I mean, we know everyone has a crisis these days, anticipating franchising needs, looking at their website and how we can further empower it. You know, all the technology that we have in-house actually is really helpful, but it's also married with the creative because for consumer brands, Studio is very important. And, you know, we can adopt some of these new tools that are coming forward, animation, AI characters, etc. The studio can do that in really rapid time.

14:06Yeah. Now, you are an early pioneer in Asia and you I believe you speak Mandarin fluently and you've been there for decades. Talk to us about that and just explain for those who don't know, you know, why you were a pioneer and how you got into it and how that's impacted the growth of Rudolfinn and how it does today. Because obviously Asia changes a lot as well, as well as everywhere else. Well, first of all, what's so fantastic about our very large base in China, and as you know, we're the largest independent and mostly actually non-Chinese agency in China. although we don't have anybody in the agency in China who is not Chinese.

14:51So we don't bring in our U.S. people to tell China what to do. That might be the secret to your success over there. The other route has been tried many times, hasn't it? And the thing that's so amazing is the innovation in China. I mean, it's incredible. The online e-commerce, the luxury brand market, which, of course, is a little bit soft now, but it's been for many years really robust. The automotive industry, the rise of robotics, all these things that we're working on in China, we gain a really deep insight early because of what the work is in China. And our China team is very close and very connected to the entire global operation, constantly going back and forth, sharing clients, sharing insights.

15:38In fact, I'm off to China tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And I think for me, it's just really a great opportunity to spend time in China and to really get that insight for kind of what is innovating there, what's working in China, because we can bring it back and have a lot of key learnings. And we try to swap people also to have some of our Chinese colleagues come here and some of our U.S. team spend some time in China to learn that as well. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And what about whether there's obviously a macro geopolitical relationship that changes over the decades and over the years? How is that impacting at the moment, you know, with those kind of tension, but there's also actually friendship, you know, at the top of the current administration?

16:23Yeah. So, you know, it's really sharing the successes is really what's key and being sensitive to cultural differences and needs, the political needs of each environment. You know, you really just have to keep your ear to the ground and be thoughtful about what people are concerned about in each environment. And I remember a few years ago when there was a problem with one of the toy companies manufacturing in China and China was blamed for poor manufacturing. The Chinese felt that the designs that were given to them were actually faulty. So, you know, whenever you look at a problem that crosses these boundaries, you have to look at it from both sides.

17:02and you have to really understand from each end what's going on. And we know that as communication people, that's our sweet spot. It's actually being able to bridge and to bring people together and to listen carefully. I think that's what's needed in this environment. And hopefully things are getting slightly better and we won't have that macro tension. Yeah, actually there's an interesting crisis this week with Kylian Mbappe, the French soccer player, plays for Real Madrid. But he, I think inadvertently, but has upset the Chinese and he's lost his brand endorsements with three Chinese brands.

17:37I think they've stopped broadcasting La Liga, which is the Spanish soccer league in China, probably temporarily. But I don't know if you've been following that, but that seems like an example of not, you know, just a cultural misunderstanding. But it's been very serious, right? Yes, it is. I mean, you know, and you have to apologize, too, for, you know, inadvertent insensitivity, which can happen, as you're pointing out. But I think that basic underlying principles, people have to believe that each respects each other. That sometimes doesn't come across. Yeah, and it feels like that hopefully that will be resolved.

18:16But a good lesson, you know, and a good example. Just to finish up, I think, is it 15 years since you guys kind of went out on your own as Ruder Finn and Finn Partners went out on their own and both of you seem to have prospered and then you've got RF Binder still going in the background or that wasn't really involved in that incident. What are your reflections on that looking back? Because you're both now$200 million agencies, whereas I think Rudifin back then was$70 million. So it seems like it's been good for both parties. But I mean, I'd love to hear what you think. Absolutely. Yeah, I think you just said it.

19:02I mean, I think the numbers prove the point. and it was a strategically wise move because each crew and flourished and I think it was just really the right moment to do it and working hard makes all these things work. Yeah, it was interesting at the time. I remember writing a couple of blogs about it and I'm sure you're not going to give us any insights into the behind the scenes, although we might love to hear them, But it does seem like both parties have prospered. So, you know, that's good to see. And like I say, historic names. And you were named a Hall of Famer, PR Week Hall of Famer last year.

19:47Thank you for it, yes. That was good to see. All right. Well, it's great to chat, Cathy. And we'll get your input on some of the big stories of the week. Healthcare marketing is changing fast. So why are we still doing conferences the same old way? I'm bored. Enter MMM Transform, a declaration against the status quo. On March 30th, MMM Transform takes over Philadelphia's National Constitution Center for a bigger, bolder healthcare marketing festival packed with bold ideas, interactive experiences, live demos, and candid conversations. And here's the best part. In-house pharma marketers can attend for free.

20:20MMM Transform, March 30th in Philly. Register now at MMMTransform.com. Over to you, Julia. The Anthropic IPO, that is one of the biggest IPOs ever, I think, if not the biggest. So talk us through it and who's working to help them with it. Yeah, it's a big story for big tech this week. Anthropic announced plans to go public on Monday and selected Tenio for financial comm support and capital markets advisory services ahead of its IPO, which is slated for the week of November 16th. And the IPO could value Anthropic between$1.5 trillion and$2 trillion. And in its filing, Anthropic forecasted sales, marketing, and partnership expenses to increase as the company drives adoption and expanded use of AI models.

21:08Yeah, Kathy, those numbers are like eye-watering, aren't they? And the valuations just put every other company in the world into perspective. You know, Procter & Gamble have been going for decades and Coca-Cola and all the rest of it. What do you think? You know, the rise of these companies, the big seven tech companies, it's almost like they're taking over the world, isn't it? But there's also opportunities, I guess, for agencies to support them, too. Look, we're looking at a macro level. Well, I think, you know, watch the pros and cons of the pro voices and the naysayers about, you know, what this means for evaluation of the stock market.

21:51You know, a concern that maybe just a few companies are holding the value of the stock market and what direction it will go in. So I think that in a disproportionate way, really. Yeah, exactly. If something happens to one of these companies, you know, what would that mean for the stock market as a whole? And also for financing, there's been quite a lot of articles written about how we look at spreadsheets, how we look at and evaluate financing options. And you see that Broadcom actually had to intervene in order to get bank financing on this. Again, just to make the point that it's hard for the banks to evaluate what the opportunities are to and what the liabilities might be.

22:33So I think that it's interesting to watch in the perspective of what this means to the macroeconomic environment. But, you know, for the individual companies, I think a lot of the discussion also about the risks of governance, security outbreaks and other kinds of things, which you know, have written about, you know, are things that are going to be part of the, you know, perspectives about, you know, risk evaluation as well. And since there hasn't been any legal restrictions yet put on or any kind of legislation, any kind of, you know, security breaches could be liabilities for these companies.

23:11So I think there's a lot to unpack here. And I think it just opened up dialogue for what does this mean for some of the other big companies of an AI not being far behind, although they seem to have paused, which we'll see where that goes in terms of timing. Yeah, I mean, even the leaders of those companies, I think, have acknowledged that we need a bit of regulation here or we need to slow down a little bit. So, yeah, points well made. And it was interesting to see one of the big seven, Microsoft, you know, not laying off 60 ,000 people, which is a quarter of their workforce, but actually saying to them, here's the opportunity to take a buyout.

23:52You know, that's extraordinary, really, when you think about it. one in four of their staff. So yeah, more to come on that one, I'm sure. Julia, we've got some new comms leads at some West Coast companies, Levi Strauss and ServiceNow. Yes. So we have that Levi Strauss appointed former Lyft Chief Comms Officer Tara Carmichael as SVP and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. She'll start December 2nd. She was with Lyft for over two years. And when Lyft And when PR Week reached out, Lyft told us they're starting the search for a new chief comms officer. Carmichael's appointment comes six months after Levi's chief comms officer, Kelly McGinnis, retired.

24:32And she was there for 12 years. Yep. And Kelly was on the podcast a few weeks ago. Very entertaining she was. And then ServiceNow also has a new comms lead. Yes. ServiceNow hired Cheryl Saclemente as chief comms officer, and she joined on October 26 in reports to CMO Simon Moyal, she told PR Week. Okey-doke. Good luck to them. And talking about the new generation of CCOs, there are two of them. And let's get on to the Omnicom Q3 earnings, Julia. What did you think? I think it was huge news, at least in our office chatter this week. Omnicom Public Relations posted its Q3 revenue of$678.3 million, which marks a 79.8 rise from the same period last year.

25:28And PR comprised 11.3 % of Omnicom's core operations revenue of$6 billion for the 2026 period, marking a 7.2 % organic revenue growth. and alongside those numbers, CEO John Wren said that headwinds from last year's IPT merger were substantially done and he also commented on recent layoffs and executive resignations by saying everybody's replaceable, which is what we've at least been talking about on our PR Week team. Yeah, it was quite a stunning statement and he included himself in that, didn't he? And we saw Troy Rihannon leaving and another very senior executives. And, you know, that happens when you have a merger.

26:17Well, this wasn't a merger. It was an acquisition. And you've got to save, well,$1.5 billion a year. I think they said they were on target to save$900 million. So still more cuts to go, I guess. But, Cathy, a couple of things jump out of that. One is the PR is 11 % of the pie. It's probably always been around there, hasn't it? Although I would say that earned media is probably now part of the other bits of the pie as well. And that's where the action is kind of moving towards, isn't it? So it's probably whilst their PR businesses might only take up that much, I think earned media probably takes up a lot more.

26:56I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And then, you know, when you get a big deal like this, it does take a few years to get ducks fully in a row. We saw that with Hilton and Burson and Conan Wolfe back in the day. You know, these deals don't just sort of click into place overnight. And I'm sure you saw that when you both split off as separate agencies as well, right? We were fortunate in that there was more of a natural split. So when you combine things, you have that problem that you're talking about right now. You're trying to figure out who's the one that gets the spot, who's in charge of this unit, who's the practice leader, who's going to really manage the XYZ client.

27:35Because there's a doubling of people. Although I would say, I don't want to criticize anybody, but people are not spendable in our universe. Everybody's important. We build our success and our growth actually on working as a team. and every time someone leaves I feel very sad you know because they're part of our family. It was a pretty to the point statement wasn't it? Maybe he had to say that though you know as you said because he's got to reach a number he has to work toward a goal so again not to reflect on that environment but just to say in our environment that doesn't work but I think you're very right to say how the industry has evolved because you know you were talking a little bit maybe you're coming to this about sports investments and the use of sports actually in some of communications and large events and some of the you know more high level influencers and celebrities who are you know very highly visible what's happened as we see it as integrated marketing and comms that have merged together is that these nano influencers the grassroots work that really is precision targeting people to people just like them people they can listen to which requires a different kind skill set, by the way.

28:47So to find these people, to match them to the assignment, to the brands, to the campaigns, you know, to the communities is really, you know, something we use. That's where we use our AI workflows too. So you want to build community and participation. You don't want to share information. You want to build community around, you know, the brand, the product, the campaign that you're actually working on. So I think that rather than, and earned media is a part of that, but it's not actually the only part of it. The social channels, you know, as we all know, they keep growing. You know, for a long time, for example, LinkedIn wasn't something people paid attention to because it didn't get into the LLMs.

29:26Now that's changed. Reddit wasn't used quite so much as it is today. Now Reddit's actually a high source for many LLM searches. So, you know, again, this is not a static environment. This is something that's changing quite rapidly. Always you have to be on top of it. Definitely is. Yeah, I mean, you're right about Reddit. I will be interviewing someone from Reddit at the AI Deciphered Conference. And you mentioned sports. We launched our sports conference today. And Julia will tell us all about that later in the pod. So, yeah, good observations. Talking about sporty things, Julia, it's the New York Marathon on Sunday.

30:02Will you be running? I know our colleague Frank Washkooch will be. and he's taking a day off on Monday, which will be well-deserved. But lots of PR pros will be, yeah? Yeah, we have MasterCard Director of Comms, Helena Wade, and Avoc partner, Andrea Halligans, running on Sunday. And this will be Andrea's 15th marathon, which is a pretty big deal. And I think she's on the board for New York Roadrunners as well. So she's heavily involved. Which runs the marathon, yeah? Yes. and we're publishing a more in-depth look at the PR pros running the marathon tomorrow. Well, we're recording on Wednesday and it'll be live on Thursday.

30:42Okay. And in terms of marathon-inspired campaigns in the New York Roadrunners, the New York Roadrunners is currently activating a marathon course simulation in Grand Central Terminal where visitors can win Shake Shack gift cards and New Balance apparel depending on their distance completed and they have replicas from all five boroughs of landmarks that people run through when they're on the actual course of the marathon and we also have a more in-depth look of that on PR Week. Yeah I don't know I'm going to bring producer Fitz in here because he goes through Grand Central have you seen that activation up there?

31:16I have not but my wife also utilizes Grand Central every day so I'm going to have to text her and see and stop in they have a lot of really cool activations. Well, we had our communicator of the year with brilliant activation up there. Humans of New York. Yeah. But I can imagine commuters at Grand Central just rushing through that and destroying it on a busy morning. I don't know. It's just maybe on, but hey, good for them. It looked like a lot of fun. Have you interacted much with the marathon, Kathy, in terms of clients or it's just a big New York thing, isn't it? It is a big miracle thing, and I'm very happy to say that I have not run the marathon.

31:57Have you got folks on your team doing it? Yes. You should get them to let us know because we like to do a roundup of everyone in PR who's running it. Okay, super. Will do. And then we track their times and see how they do and which charities they're working for, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a nice thing to do. It's a nice communal thing. All right. Interesting story here, Julia. Yeah, McDonald's has been a sponsor of the soccer World Cup or as football, as I would call it, for 32 years. But they're ending that run. What's the story there? The run or the deal will end at the end of 2026. They're not going to renew it at the end of the year.

32:38And this year, McDonald's worked with Wyden and Kennedy for its World Cup campaign. but only 24 % of U.S. adults recalled McDonald's ties to this World Cup, which kind of ties into what you were saying, Kathy, about how much is necessary in terms of incorporating with the World Cup and doing official sponsorships. McDonald's chief financial officer said that this year's McDonald's World Cup campaign provided a lift to the business and generated excellent excitement, but it did underperform McDonald's expectations. and he signaled a broader rework of McDonald's marketing model away from relying too heavily on sporting events and entertainment properties, he said.

33:19Yeah, and I believe, am I correct in saying this was broken by Campaign Asia? This story? I know they wrote it. Right. Yeah, good for them, our colleagues, our sister title in Asia. You're probably familiar with them, Cathy, Campaign Asia. They kind of include PR Week in that. What about sponsoring massive sporting events? Because you do get some value out of it. And we saw some, but we did see some interesting things this World Cup, like where the logo got covered up, didn't it? But that became almost like a free publicity for Levi's, wasn't it? The Levi's Stadium. Levi's, Heinz, Gillette. Yeah.

34:02And sometimes I'm sure the official sponsors who pay a fortune for this are thinking, hang on, they're getting more awareness than we are. But on the other hand, there's more to a sponsorship than just awareness. You get a lot of corporate hospitality. You get tickets. You get access to tickets that you can use with your clients, with your partners, stakeholders. And that's quite a big thing. And you can get tickets for the final, which are like gold dust, etc., etc. So that's a big part of it. What are your thoughts, Cathy? Yeah, I think it's what we're seeing in the corporate environment in general and has to do with a lot of the changes you talked about during the past half hour is that there's an increasing pressure for results and business impact and now really, really hard KPIs.

34:48With AI, you can understand whether you're increasingly reaching your KPIs and to how much and to what degree and how much is per spend for each of the KPIs that you're actually focusing on. So, you know, in the olden days, you know, just a few years ago, The event and splash and the excitement and the tickets and the connections would have been a measurement in and of itself. But now the measurement has really been enlarged to focus more on what is the business impact, as you've heard the McDonald's CFO saying. It was exciting for its benefit, but it didn't reach their KPI or business goals. So I think that whenever you are looking at a large investment in an event like that, be very clear about what the goal is, what the KPI is, and measure it.

35:37And that will determine to what degree you'll be able to continue to invest in the event itself. Yeah. Looking at Wendy's, it looks like they do more localized sporting associations, maybe with March Madness or with, you know, some NASCAR stuff and what have you or collegiate athletics. How are you mixing that into the Wendy's work or is it a bit early to talk about that? I think it's a bit early to talk more broadly about that strategy. And I think I would turn you over to the Wendy's team to get a little bit more insight. But I do think that it goes to the general trend of community building.

36:15You know, as we said earlier, you know, the trend in the world today is about building participation, community, connection, authenticity, personal relevance, these kind of things, rather than just the excitement itself or the splashiness. Yeah, for sure. All right, Julia, PR Week's put out a reader survey out today as we record. And tell us all about it. Yeah, well, anyone listening who's a subscriber of PR Week, it's your time. Or not, actually. Or not, a reader of PR Week. Anyone can submit their responses. But it's time for you to have your say. Our 2026 reader survey opened for responses.

36:55And we want readers to share which PR channels they use the most, what they'd like to gain from our in-person events, and how PR Week can better suit their overall needs. You can submit your responses until December 2nd, and the survey should only take five to seven minutes. So hopefully everyone can find that amount of time in their day to check out our survey and make sure to share your thoughts with us. Yeah, that's something we've very deliberately decided upon. It's only like 20-odd questions. It's very quick to do because we know people are inundated with survey requests like every time you go to the doctors or every time you buy something and it's like um but it's important we want to know what you hear we what you think and we want to know what we can do more of and what we maybe maybe the things we should sunset you know so we genuinely want to hear what you think and um it's an important process for us we don't do these surveys that often you know i think we've probably done three or four in my time here, 16, 17 years.

37:55So, Kathy, what should we be doing differently and what are we doing fantastically? Just put you on the spot. Well, we all look to you, Steve, for the news of the industry and what's happening. So I think that you have become really, congratulations to you, the real go-to hub for what's going on behind the scenes and also what's the news of the day. So I don't think it's anything that you should sunset, personally. Yeah, okay. Well, that's good to know. Just new launches. Julia's very good at coming up with creative ideas for new launches. So I'm looking forward to hearing those, Julia. We also launched our sports conference, didn't we?

38:32And we've got a really exciting keynote speaker. Yeah. Well, for those who don't know, last year our PR Week sports conference keynote was delivered by Brianna Stewart. And we're keeping that big game momentum going with four-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Janet Evans as our keynote speaker this year. Evans is Chief Athlete Officer for LA28 and was a key player in LA's bid to host the games. So we're excited to hear her talk all about that. And this year's sports conference, speaking of exciting new launches, will also feature the inaugural PR Week Sports Hall of Fame to honor legends of sports communication.

39:09And all of this will happen on April 27th in New York City. Yeah, excited about that, actually. Brilliant keynote and more to come, but also the Hall of Fame. because it's a very specific area, which Cathy actually mentioned earlier. So, yeah, looking forward to your suggestions for any potential Hall of Famers, Cathy, in the sports area. A lot of great people in the industry. I'll certainly put my thinking cap on. Yeah. And then just a quick mention, you'll know more about this next week, but we are going to launch our Talent and Compensation Index, which you might have known as the Salary Survey.

39:46We've revamped it and we're relaunching it. It's actually the 20th year. So we'll have some data with it next week from the last six years. And then when the full survey comes out next March or April, we'll have 20-year data. We'll have the opportunity to buy a special report on that, which is going to have some fascinating insights. So excited about that as well. Listen, Cathy, thank you so much for joining us. It's a real pleasure to have you on and continued success throughout the rest of the year. If you're doing double-digit growth, I think most people would be happy with that in the current environment, to say the least.

40:26So thanks for coming on. We're happy. We're very happy, but never satisfied. There you go. That's the attitude. That's the 2-1-2 degree attitude, isn't it, Julia, that you live by? Yes, going that extra one degree to make steam that powers things. There you go. All right. Thank you, Cathy. Thank you so much for having me, Julia. We'll see you next time on the PR Week.

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