Building Brand Gravity Podcast

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Aaron Kwittken: If you're using fewer people and you're using AI, shouldn't I pay less? And my answer is, this is like Disney FastPass. So the experience has to be the same or better, but you're paying us because we just let you cut the line and that should have value. And we invested in that ability to allow you to cut the line and eventually everything's gonna be Disney FastPass.

So it's all gonna kind of like level out eventually. Right.

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

Steve Halsey: I'm Steve Halsey and Anne, can you believe we're here at the start of our fourth season of the podcast, some amazing guests over the last four years, and it's exciting to see the conversation we already have lined up for our listeners this year.

Anne Green: Yeah, I couldn't [00:01:00] agree more, Steve, and we have a really great one today. I would actually call it a must listen. For any leader in marketing communications, whether you're agency side or on the corporate side. But before we transition into today's guest, I wanna hear a little bit about what's been on your mind, what's pulling you into its gravity.

Steve, any news or insights that are top of mind for you this week?

Steve Halsey: You know what's been pulling me in into, uh, the gravity this week is really some, some news and some research that was unveiled at Davos by our friends at Page and the Harris Poll, and they're calling it the 2026 Confidence in Business Index, and it's really focused on what does it take for companies to regain credibility in the gen AI area.

And one of the things, and one of the findings that really jumped out to me was the fact that economic impact for everyone, and this was global survey, so economic impact for everyone is now the number one expectation of businesses [00:02:00] globally, but only about a third of people actually believe that companies will deliver on that.

So this is really creating a big gap between expectation and belief, and this is where we're starting to see trust starting to break down in the corporate standpoint. The research also showed something that we've talked a lot about on this podcast, particularly in the last season, that the confidence curve right now is broken.

I have down here, more than 70% of the public says they don't really see or understand what companies are doing on the issues that matter most to them 70%, which means that good work alone isn't enough anymore. That action has to be visible in a way that can be contextualized and is communicated in the way people are finding it.

And that's really where the AI piece came in in the research. One of the most striking shifts is how search and generative AI tools are rapidly [00:03:00] becoming the most trusted source for learning about companies, especially among younger audiences. So the implications of this is huge for the way that brands show up, how they build authority, how they create credibility.

And we're gonna go into that much deeper, uh. And our, one of our upcoming podcasts, we got our friend Rob Jekielek, the Harris Poll. He's gonna come back to unpack those with us and we can talk about what it means for chief communications officers, CMOs, and corporate leaders just trying to navigate trust and technology this year.

Anne Green: I love that Rob is coming back again. Uh, the research, the page. And the Harris Bowl do together is always so insightful. So I'm looking forward to digging into that more soon. I myself have a copy of it. I'm gonna be checking it out in depth. So from my end, it actually, in terms of what, um, has me in its gravity, I'll speak to another piece of research unveiled at Davos.

It's very timely right now as we record in January, the Edelman Trust Barometer, and [00:04:00] I always give them major kudos for creating and sustaining this property for, I think 25 years. I think it's the 25th anniversary. Um, it's super smart and indeed a barometer that shows a lot of change over the years. So this year, um, interestingly aligned with what you just shared, and I have my notes here, they round, um, they sat, found that 70% of those surveyed are unwilling or hesitant to trust.

Someone who has different values, facts, problem solving approaches or cultural background. So that is seven in 10 with what they call an insular mindset. That's the term they used. So that's one. Um, another top line they shared. And you know, this is all available online. Go check it out. I think it's important for anybody in marketing communications to read this survey.

The majority of those surveyed also believe it is a problem that people in their country distrust those with differences. And this is global as well, so much that they actively try to make things worse for one another. That's, [00:05:00] everybody sees this as a problem. And so there's global recognition of the issue here.

Yet interestingly, not a lot of energy for bridging those divides on a personal level. If you go back to the first stat and then the final top finding they touted was that globally all institutions have a mandate. It kind of goes to your question about are people seeing companies doing good? Do they expect it?

What are they expecting? What do they see? But they have a mandate to bridge divides and facilitate trust building. And employers are best positioned to broker trust as they have the best performance scores. Now, you, like me, Steve may remember way back in the wake of the.com days when the top trusted source in the barometer was a person like me.

Remember those days, right? Yep, yep. And this was during the rise of social media and the democratization of connecting with others online. So I find it crazy to see how far we've come and how much both person to person and overall institutional trust has [00:06:00] fallen. And that employers who are the perennial them and the us versus them, workplace binary, are best positioned to build trust.

Steve Halsey: Well, I mean, it's, it's interesting that it, that it keeps coming down to that. But I, but I guess it, I guess it makes sense when you can't trust the other institutions. You really hope that, uh, that the businesses in your community that you work for are the ones that make a difference. So a lot of interesting parallels between those two studies, which means a lot of opportunities, yet a lot of challenges for the communicators out there.

But I think what you're seeing across both of those studies, and, you know, it's, it's in Edelman's title, trust, is that same signal. Trust isn't just eroding, it's just really fragmenting right now. And businesses are increasingly expected to step in where these institutions are falling short. You know, to me, what feels differently now is a sense of urgency between the economic pressure, the AI [00:07:00] disruption, just sheer information overload.

Companies are being judged right now, not just on what they say. On whether people can find, understand, and believe what they're doing. That's fundamentally different communications challenge than it was even a few years ago, which I know you're gonna get into with Aaron.

Anne Green: Yeah. And, and the AI of it all is core to what we're gonna be talking about, but it has a lot to do with society, business trust, et cetera.

So this is definitely a good segue to move on to today's guest. He is a longtime agency leader. We've known him for years, an AI SaaS pioneer in the comms and marketing space, which it very interesting to hear his observations on that. And now he's back on the consultant slash agency side as a senior innovation and AI leader.

Very interesting role that he stepped into. So I'm speaking to the one and only Aaron Kwittken about this critical time in AI enablement for both agencies and corporate side marketing. There's lots and lots to unpack here folks. Lots of good actionable advice [00:08:00] and some hot takes, which I very much enjoyed.

So without further delay. Here is my conversation with Aaron.

Aaron Kwittken: So I'm delighted today to be joined by an old friend in the industry,

Anne Green: Aaron Kwittken. He has been around. Welcome Aaron. We're glad to have you here today.

Aaron Kwittken: Thanks. I think I take issue with old. That's fine. I am. We are.

Anne Green: We're seasoned. We're seasoned.

Aaron

Aaron Kwittken: seasoned.

Anne Green: So for those that don't know, Aaron has had a huge career in the agency side and then also in the platform SaaS side, and now back in the consultant and agency side from launching his own autonomous firm, Kwittken, back in the day after, you know, a number of agency roles, which became I think KWT Global sold that.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. Did.

Anne Green: Then launched PRophet, which I think may have the distinction of being the first AI powered SaaS platform in our industry. Is that right Aaron?

Aaron Kwittken: Yep. You got my Venmo. Thank you for saying that. I appreciate it.

Anne Green: Thank you.

Aaron Kwittken: You can flex for me, yes.

Anne Green: Thank you for the prom payment. I appreciate

Aaron Kwittken: that.

Anne Green: Yeah,

Aaron Kwittken: it's painful.

It being first is actually [00:09:00] not good. I learned. And we can talk about why, but, uh, it's extraordinarily painful if you're too soon or too early in something, especially with tech.

Anne Green: Yeah, I mean, being the pioneer, it sounds great, but it, it comes with some knocks and trying to, you know, open that territory that's never been open before in the mindset too.

And now having a very big AI and innovation role at FGS Global, and that's just a few months in. So, you know, welcome again. And I think that what might be interesting to get started, because we're gonna cover a lot of these things, is I've given the stats, right, that you can see on LinkedIn, but tell me about the arc of your journey.

Why moving, first of all, that entrepreneurial spirit to launch your own firm, but then that even deeper entrepreneurial spirit to break new ground, like you said, te, tell us a little bit about how you interpret that arc.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah, I mean, I've been in the business for more than 30 years. I guess I'm going in my 33rd year.

Started off in Public Affairs in Crisis in DC back in the early nineties. [00:10:00] And it's interesting when you start in crisis, especially if you're an adrenaline junkie, it's not quite like the pit, but it's a little bit like the pit for pr. You, you just kinda get hooked on it, right? And if you start from the perspective of how do I stop a reporter, um, or try to neutralize our journalist from writing something or balance something, it puts everything in perspective.

It's actually easier to then be proactive when you're pitching. So like many of us, I came from that, that earned media world. Um, and uh, you know, I always wanted to start my own agency. So, you know, I really learned quite a bit from others. Every large agency you can think of from starting at what's now, MS&L was Manning Selvage & Lee all the way through, um, to GCI group. And I've had some incredible mentors along the way, which I just wanted to mention because. Without real humans, and I hope that number goes away. None of us can grow, none of us can be enriched. And then sadly, going back to the age thing, um, you know, as we get older, sometimes we, we lose some of our mentors as well, and [00:11:00] it, it actually helps you reflect and appreciate what you have.

So yeah, I started my own agency actually, almost exactly 20 years ago, a little more than 20 years ago. And, um, anybody who wants to start an agency, never name it after yourself because you soon realize every email that goes out has your name on it. Um, and not everybody necessarily is good, right? You're gonna have good mediocre and you're gonna make some mistakes.

So anyhow, we did change it to KWT Global. Um, I ended up just having my own thing for like five years. I sold it to a company called MDC Partners. Uh, and the reason why I sold it, this is important so quickly, is because back in 2010. Uh, social, uh, and digital. We weren't calling 'em influencers yet, was kind of on the rise.

And if you recall, there was like this fight between kind of the ad and creative shops and then the PR shops who's gonna own social. And because PR agencies, firms are so resilient and we are so agile, I, I'd like to say that we won, we pretty much won. Um, and I think it was easier for us because we saw, uh, a front of the house [00:12:00] opportunity to monetize social and to grow our practices and really be like the, the, the, the pointy end of that spear for integration, right?

Integrated campaigns. And, uh, we're actually at that moment again now, but this time it's called AI and it's both front and back of the house. Um, and I'll talk a little bit about why it's more complicated. So, you know, I stayed at the agency, which most people don't for a number of years after selling it all the way up through, um, in my agency role until 2021.

Uh, and we grew it, we scaled it. It was amazing. Um, we embedded ourselves originally inside of a creative shop on purpose, um, because we wanted to be a little non-linear in how we're thinking. My background is B2B and corporate, and that was called Kirshenbaum & Bond. And, um, back in 2019, I was kind of ready to leave MDC, admittedly, and also publicly was having a lot of problems, liquidity.

And long story short is they ended up merging with Stagwell, which was founded by a guy named Mark Penn. Um, I was ready to leave Mark's like, "Hmm, hang out, you know, we need. Um, some [00:13:00] bright minds." Uh, I don't know who he was talking about at the time. And, uh, to stick around and, you know, ultimately what Stagwell's mantra was, how do we transform, how do they transform marketing through technology?

So I was kind of intrigued by that. And at the time I'd been working with a company called Dataminr. Dataminr, um, is now, I guess 15, 16 years old. I think they were really the OG around. Mm-hmm. Triangulating social media feeds to validate what was happening in the digital world, in the physical world through digital feeds, uh, but the un being kind of their main, uh, client and then public sector, financial services and media organizations.

Uh, and they originally were actually, uh, 10% owned by Twitter now X. Um, and, uh, I learned and met all these people who are like these brilliant data scientists that are doing this thing called ai. This is back in 2016, 2017. And I'd always thought in the back of my mind, because there's so much repeatability, uh, to what we do.

When you, when you think about ai and its, and its core promise of, you know, learning, um, and [00:14:00] especially repeatable things, looking back, look ahead and, and kind of recommendation engines, stakeholders, journalists in particular kind of follow patterns. Why can't we look back at past coverage, predict future interests?

So, um, in, I was, uh, you know, I decided to stay and, uh, I was lucky enough to have Stagwell invest in a company that we called PRophet. Um, and it was back in 2019. So pre COVID, uh, you know, um, and, uh, pre-Chat GPT, which came about in 2022. And we built prototypes. And it was, not only was it hard building it as somebody who had nothing to, didn't know any about anything about coding and UX and UI and user stories and data science and whatnot, but it was very hard to sell into a market that, uh, was by, by, by design.

We as PR people were skeptical or cynical or trained to find fault. All the good things, especially you're a crisis person. Um, I'm inherently a pathological optimist. Um, and I had a couple of, and, and actually your firm was [00:15:00] one later on, uh, some really great early users. Uh, P&G was one of them and helped us kind of grow it.

And it wasn't that headwind that we had didn't turn into a tailwind until chat GPT came into the market. Even though we weren't doing generative, we're doing predictive AI. You know, how do I know which stakeholder's gonna, um, be interested in my narrative? We then made generative part of it. How do I make that narrative more interesting?

So the stakeholder engaged in my content, and, um, the reason why I did it is because in 2019, 2020, I had this holy shit, real deep existential moment where I literally thought, I absolutely believed that we were facing the beginning of extinction, or at least major transformation as agency people, because I thought AI had the power to fully commodify.

What we do, or at least up to 80% of it. And that people who are always nipping at our heels are competitors that aren't real our, our day-to-day competitors, but consultancies and ad agencies, in particular media [00:16:00] shops, they would use this to further commoditize what we do and then kind of creep into our scope.

So I thought it was gonna be very DIY, I thought SaaS was gonna take over, and it did for a small while. And then I realized, um, having competed against, you know, Meltwater and Muck Rack incision, these people are just salespeople. Um, at the end of the day, um, the technologies that I was using. Would eventually be accessible and ubiquitous and available to all of us.

And the major moment over the last year that I think shifted the power from SaaS to service to us the consultants, is ag agentic and the ag agentic revolution. And the fact that the unit cost of actually building infrastructure, whether you're gonna, you know, roll the dice and use deeps seek from China or a different LLM, it's all gonna come down.

And you don't have to be a technologist necessarily, or a developer or coder anymore to be able to build AI into your workflow. And actually, instead of having a username and password for decisions and MuckRack [00:17:00] and Meltwater and I don't know, um, you know, peak metrics and blackbirds of the world. Um, we're, we're, you're either gonna be buying their agent and it's gonna live in your work environment, or you're gonna be buying data from them.

It's either API or agent. It's no longer gonna be username and password. That's all gonna go away. Um, and you're gonna see this precipitous kind of reckoning, um, when it comes to pr, SaaS platforms. They're either gonna get bought, they're gonna get shut down, um, or they're gonna change their business models.

Um, so I joined FGS Global five months ago 'cause I saw a great opportunity to work with, I think some of the brightest minds when it comes to high stake stakeholder comms, right? Uh, lobbying public policy, government relations, crisis m and a. Um, you know, um, you, you name it. It's kind of that the farm. No consumer, it's all, you know, uh, corporate B2B globally.

Um, and, and they had already started building, uh, their own model back in 2023. They call it Fergus now. We call it Fergus, but nobody knew about it because it's not, it's not kind of in our genetics [00:18:00] to like peacock, like a large agency would. Um, so the opportunity was to continue to build that out, make it agentic, and also build point solutions with our developers, uh, which I think is another shift you're gonna see inside of firms, the right firms who can, who can afford it, who can think about it.

Um, you know, our, our business is gonna change, where we're also gonna be developing point solutions and hiring, uh, people who do have data and technology backgrounds for our clients in addition to communications programs and counseling and, and whatnot. So, I'll, I'll stop there because there's probably a lot there to unpack, but that's kind of the journey.

So I basically. Thought that it was going one way and I realized quickly, oh shit, I need to make a big U-turn. And who better to u-turn with than FGS, which is also backed by one of the world's largest PE firms. KKR.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's, there's so much there. And, and it's really interesting to hear, you know, that vision shifting over time and what your assumptions are, but also willing to make a bet behind it.

One thing I wanted to [00:19:00] backtrack too, 'cause there is a lot to unpack there. I love, I love hearing the story 'cause I was watching you from a distance for some of this and then got to know you a little bit better later. 'cause I'm a, I'm over 30 years in this game too, on the agency side. So watching with great interest is when you go back to media, your skin looks a

Aaron Kwittken: lot better than mine though.

You're, you're, you glow. I do not.

Anne Green: It's the light. You know, we've, we've got, it's the light. We've got, we've got, uh, stuff that helps us here. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta have your podcast situation going as you know.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah.

Anne Green: But I, I think what's interesting about you reflecting on the social media moment, 'cause I've been spending a lot of time thinking about that moment of disruptive change, and it was even prior to social media.

It's really about writing to the web, that moment of WordPress and Typepad where you didn't need to know HTML code. I mean, that was really the first thing versus today, but. Talking about what's the competitive step, who's gonna own something quote unquote. And I think one thing that's been very interesting about our field versus some of the other companion groups within marketing, and obviously a lot of our firms are very integrated now, is we've [00:20:00] always been in a multi-stakeholder mindset.

And that was really critical for organic social and paid social to see all the stakeholders, the full corporate narrative, the ways in which that shifts, depending on the audience, versus a more of a campaign mindset where it's like, well, we're gonna do this thing at this time to this one audience. And I, I've been thinking about that today too, because the AI of it all.

And, and all the pieces that will peel back in this conversation. You know, like you said, where is the data sets that are most relevant that help you create things? You know, what, where are those audiences? What are those channels? How discovery is changing. I think it's a huge moment for us. And like you, I've been spending time asking myself, how existential is this?

I think it's pretty existential, but it's also then like you, that's why I wanted to talk today. What is that advantage we can have and how do we think about things like Htic and others in ways that are gonna be productive moving forward? So it is interesting to, to hear that trajectory to start, you know?

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. No, [00:21:00] no, I, I agree.

Anne Green: A little while ago when you and I were talking, maybe like two years ago or something, you talked a lot about the bets PRophet was making on predictive ai and then the rise of generative. With chat GPT and at the time, um, and this is a while ago now, you were very much like there's a real difference here.

Predictive is more of the thing and we need to spend more time. And that generative obviously blotted out the sun because it's like a magic trick. But to me it was indicative of the fact, and you've heard me talk about this, that there's such a flattening of AI and such a lack of precision and speaking about it and what are we talking about?

So when you think about different types of artificial intelligence and machine learning, how are you thinking about that today?

Aaron Kwittken: Uh, I feel better about the generative in part, again, going back to agentic. And the reason why is because the reason why generative was so, was so sloppy and, and created so much slop and blotted out the sun.

I love that. I'm like, I'm gonna have to steal that.

Steve Halsey: Yeah.

Aaron Kwittken: Um, at first this was like a weird kind of magic trick type thing where everybody was [00:22:00] like, wow. There was like novel. Uh, and then we're very curious. But then not many people really converted. They're still kind of playing around with it. I think this is the year of enterprise ai.

I think this is the year of, uh, ROI, if anything. Finally. And, um, I even have a chart that I've started in 2022 that I have not changed that would show that this is the year and this is the year just saying. Um, but uh, I think because agentic was just pulling from LLMs and also if you remember, backdated web material.

Anne Green: Yes, very much so. I mean, that was very outta date. It's quite different now, you know?

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. It's so different. And the reason why I was hallucinating is because there were so many voids, right? But because you can now deploy agents to go out and get multiple sources across the entire web, not just from one LLM, but to potentially seven or eight LLMs and different sources.

And you can even wait, Hey, put more weight on BBC, or Factiva, or S&P or [00:23:00] AlphaSense, right? You can wait them now because you can do that. You have less hallucination, you have the greater fidelity of your data and greater facts. Right? Greater validation of what you're doing. Um, and because you have memory and reasoning, now it's learning Anne Green, after you use it enough, it is literally learning how Anne Green thinks.

It's going to eventually be like, I know what Anne's gonna ask next. It's kinda like that spouse who's you've been married to for 30 years. She's not next to me right now, but she was earlier. You know, they know like you can actually have the conversation back and forth. It's gonna be like that. Right? And you know, for us at FGS, we built this platform where eventually, I was just on a firm wide call yesterday and I said, this is your second screen.

If we all work in two screens, Fergus is your second screen. And the fact that you can actually talk to this agent and give it six or seven different things as opposed to one thing by one thing, and it's gonna actually go back and forth and then it does its thing while you do other things. That [00:24:00] is.

That's not incremental. That's, that is I think, the single greatest, um, development and probably the most consequential that we've seen since the invention or the, the, uh, at least the, um, the mainstreaming of chat. GPTI

Anne Green: could not agree more. And I think what's interesting is. It's a mental switch too, for people.

Right. So I've always said that to me, and I'm interested in your point of view on this too. I think one of the biggest challenges of adoption and upskilling, first of all, as a society, we talk about upskilling all the time. We do a terrible job at it. We don't really invest in it at all. I mean, it's Asra Kline talks about this.

Many people talk about it, right? So we can say upskilling, but what does that mean? But I think one of the biggest challenges I'm seeing right now to adoption on a broader level, and I'm talking about like within an agency environment or a client environment, et cetera, is, um, just people being able to interrupt their own workflow and sort of thinking about things in a new way and asking themselves, is there a new way to [00:25:00] do this?

And this idea of using it as, I like the idea of a second screen. I wrote that down. I'll steal that from you in terms of a constant thought partner and a constant generator. And asking multiple things and letting it churn on it and go back to it again and again. So to me it's that issue of the human saying, I've done this, especially for those that have been in the business for a while.

I've done it this way for a while. How do you even think to interrupt yourself and what are the, the repetitions or the frequencies or the examples or those moment of exposure or I've been using the old mobile term, what's the killer app that gets you excited? Right? What do you see right now? Like, what does that bring up for you in terms of where the drag is and you know, what is it that turns that light on for people to recognize and also like, get hands on with it the way you're talking about it as that second screen.

Aaron Kwittken: This sounds very dated, I'm sure, but I like to operate on the fear greed continuum. People operate mostly out of fear or greed or g fear,

Anne Green: greed. Uh,

Aaron Kwittken: [00:26:00] yeah. It's, it, it's, it's real though. It's, it's very human. It's very humanistic. What I've experienced more recently is I've been tapping into greed. Um, so, you know, how can you grow your revenue faster than your headcount?

Um, how can you, um, better utilize your associates' time, um, to actually, uh, train them like you, to be critical thinkers and strategists and problem solvers versus just doing mundane research and tasks and things like that, right? So I think that if you can at least create the ROI for people, especially senior people, but even more junior people, I mean, if you're talking to a more junior person, um, these are skills that they need to have, that have to be native and, and, and, and innate, right?

Um, you know, and then the fear thing really, um, I think we're past that, but I'm not entirely [00:27:00] sure we're past that. Um, I think we were there for a while. I don't call it upskilling anymore, just so you know, because I a hundred percent agree with you. Uh, I call it updo. Updo means just fucking do it. Just start playing around and it stop whining.

And by the way, you know, if you really wanna force it, you don't get it. It's part of your performance review, right? It's part, uh, it's part of your compensation review. Um, it is, uh, very much part of our apprenticeship program. Like if AI and workflow optimization needs to be as much a, uh, carrier for culture as every, all of your other values that you have or don't have, or say you have inside of your firm or your department inside of a brand.

Um, so for us, you know, we look at adoption, we look at usage, um, and we look at first weekly average users. And that's very generous. By the way, once a week. [00:28:00] How many times, and then we're moving to daily. Right. But I think if you really want to, you know, you have to, you have to have carrot and stick. Um, uh, sometimes it's kind of like parenting in some ways.

Like, you know, uh, you don't know what you're missing. You don't know what's good for you. If you're trying to get them, you know, try new food, whatever. You can wait for them to learn on their own, but you might have to accelerate it. And sure, the world is terrible at upskilling and professional development.

I think agencies in general are horrible at it. I'm no better having run, having built my own, run my own. I'm always like, yes, we're gonna focus on professional development. Then it's like, oh, we've got this client thing. Oh, we have this new business pitch. Oh, I, you know, they're taking a vacation. All, all three really good important things.

Professional development o always falls the to the flow. So instead of just, you know, develop people, you know, as you go, um, don't, and, and of course, you know, we have office hours, so. Um, we allow people every week we have multiple times a week where we have technologists and then people from [00:29:00] our AI and innovation team just dial into a team just like this.

And, uh, you know, I wish it was just dead air and I could reclaim that hour or two back. Actually, I'm glad I don't. People just dial in, they ask us anything, their AMAs basically. And, um, and it really, and some people wanna just do one-on-one, but we also just kind of invite people because the more and more kind of schools or structure we do, we'll do roadshows with offices and things like that.

But really it's just about, um, forcing it on the review and compensation side and just getting people and, and, and it making sure also that senior people, when they're asking for new hires, you have to push on them and say, okay, but explain to me how you are actually, uh, servicing and staffing your business on the, on the, and this goes, this is true also internally.

And how are you using technology to better optimize what you're doing?

Anne Green: Yeah, and you'd said it earlier, back of house and front of house. I mean, it's, it's, it's going to touch all areas of our business for sure.

Aaron Kwittken: Yeah. And, and the reason why I say [00:30:00] back in front is because historically comms people are really good at front of the house opportunities.

It's just who we are. We're really bad at the details about the back of the house. Very few of us are good operators or like care about the back of the house, the pipes and the plumbing, and we're like, eh, and we like kinda leave it, right? It's a little messy. Now we have to care about both and that's uncomfortable for a lot of us in this business.

Anne Green: Well, yeah, especially data integrity, data storage structure. You know where it's coming from, how you're pulling from it, or else it's not. I mean, last year we spent a lot of time working on that just so we could maximize what we can actually do in this new world. But, but you're right. It's not sexy, but it's really, really critical to getting rubber on the road here I think.

Aaron Kwittken: Totally, totally.

Anne Green: So you said something that I enjoyed, which is naming things that you have a little chart that you've named. So, um, I think it's important sometimes for our teams, especially with a change as big as this and I have a lot of compassion for whelming. This can feel, especially with the big workforce discussion out in the world, it [00:31:00] just feels very overwhelming.

And, and the AGI of it all, like having to have a portion of your brain wondering if Sam Altman's gonna find like artificial general intelligence that's gonna turn to this topic. Like that's not the easiest thing for people, but we try to make it legible year to year, you know, so we call 2024 the year of AI exploration.

2025 year of AI enablement and this year we're calling it AI Standardization and acceleration. So part of our job is to create what we're calling standard operating procedures or SOPs for different types of accounts. So if you're standing up this type of account, whether it's marketing or earns media, et cetera, you should be running these types of agents, these kinds of workflow standard.

This is how the younger people are orchestrators of it. And we're deep in that process now, and I think it's gonna be really helpful. But you know, as you look at 2026, you said just a minute ago that is this the moment of enterprise AI is the moment of of ROI. So yet, tell me what you think is [00:32:00] this year for both agencies and corporates and what's the make or break right now for you, Aaron, in the next 12 months

Aaron Kwittken: on the agency side?

Uh, we'll start there. Um, I think that agencies have to decide. I, I don't know what. What you guys are doing. I can tell you that we went the path of, you know, building our own platform and then having it sit on multiple models. So that requires having, you know, uh, we have a labs division and there are 50 to 60 developers, front end background, ui, ux, you know, qa, uh, data scientists, all, and, and we had to build kind of infrastructure.

That same team also builds point solutions for clients. They pay for themselves, honestly. Um, but still, uh, they, their large, their large, uh, role in this world is contribution margin. It's optimizing our workforce and making us do things faster, better, um, better, faster. And, um, the make or break for me [00:33:00] actually is making sure that, 'cause we're very.

Um, disclosed very transparent with our clients when we use our systems, 'cause we use our systems for everything. And the make or break for me is the moment that a client comes to us, and this goes for everybody. It's cold comfort and says, well, if you're using fewer people and you're using ai, shouldn't I pay less?

And my answer is, um, this is like Disney FastPass. So the experience has to be the same or better, but you're paying us because we just let you cut the line and that should have value. And we invested in that ability to make, to allow you to cut the line. Um, and eventually everything's gonna be Disney FastPass.

So it's all gonna kind of like level out eventually, right? But why in the world were clients paying us or anybody by the hour to do things to take a long way? So the make or break is moving from hourly to fixed fee from outputs to outcomes. That's the make or break, whether we like it or not. That is where it's going.[00:34:00]

And instead of waiting for it to come, we need to get out ahead of it. And that's definitely what we're doing. I think a lot of firms are doing the same thing. It still requires people enter their time, by the way, it doesn't mean time entry 'cause you still have to know where they're spending their time.

You need to know your cost basis. But what's really fascinating for me is then figuring out, um, you're able to now actually put of value on the agents that are working alongside of your colleagues to help them be better and faster at what they do. So that's the make or break. I think it's interesting that some larger firms like Weber for example, they're, they're probably like, they had a holy shit moment, I'm sure you know, and they're part of this big, mega, mega thing, right?

Mm-hmm. Now the IPG on the come thing right now just on Theum and they're like, holy shit Nick, what do we do? And they're like, we're just going to, I think it's an easy way out. I don't think it's the best way out. We're just gonna partner with Google and we're just gonna have Google do everything. That's great, except that you know, Google's not native to your business and it still requires a lot of work on their part because they're not purpose built for pr.

Um, [00:35:00] and, uh, it's only one model. It's Gemini, which is by the way, a great fucking model, but it's just one model. The best agencies, well, sorry, the agencies that are gonna optimize AI the best, I should say in the best way, we're going to sit on top of multiple models, be ag agentic, move to fixed fee, um, that is very make or break and hold the line when it comes to pricing, because I could feel procurement breathing down our necks right now.

I could, I, I know it's gonna happen. I know it because that's their job and it's misinformed and misguided. So it's becoming upon us to empower our clients. And then the other, the second make or break is what, how will companies use this and what will they decide to keep in-house versus, uh, send out of house to us?

So we like to whine about media monitoring, right? It's annoying, but we still make money on it. Um, whether or not we're it's AI enabled or human enabled, or it has to be a little bit of both. But, you know, if you're, you know, head of comms for a [00:36:00] big corporate Caterpillar just making, using the example, they're not a client, right?

Can I say them? I'm just making them up. Um, uh, you know, does it make sense to just, you know, do that in-house and hire, you know, have a, a young person just manage it for you instead of five people doing it at an agency, whatever, it would be less. So there are certain things that. There might be take back moments that come out of our scope, which might be perfectly fine.

There are also other moments where, um, you know, if I'm a brand, I'm like, yeah, I don't really wanna build this myself anyway. There's certain things, uh, that my company's gonna be doing that I'm gonna probably be plugging into 'cause I have to deal with it now. Um, and that takes a long time and it doesn't really know our business so that they're gonna be slowed down by it, which is our opportunity to say, actually let us do this for you.

We'll optimize it. Um, and we'll be able to work faster for you. So that's gonna be a make or break. I don't know where, where we're headed. It's gonna be a little bit of a mixed bag. And on the client side, I don't, I, they're not quite there yet. They're not ahead of us yet. But [00:37:00] if we don't continue to move fast and at least have these open discussions with them, they're gonna, the conversation isn't gonna be, you know, we're looking at a different agency or sometimes we just need a change.

Um, or, you know, we're gonna go into review. Actually, the competition could be. We're gonna, we're gonna take this in-house right now. They've said that before, but now they might have more impetus to say that that might be the mandate inside. I just don't know. That is kind of a scary moment.

Anne Green: Yeah, and I think that that is something we all need to be thinking about really seriously, because I do see a lot of corporate teams, you know, really digging in and making progress.

You and I, and, and our peers are circulating in similar venues and talking to CMOs and CCOs and I, I do think that this question of the internal activation where there's legal, regulatory, it, there's a lot of layers there. But I really liked what you said, Erin, about. How can you be, how can you build a structure, however you approach it, that's a bit agnostic about which models you're gonna use?

You know, one of the things you and I have [00:38:00] both seen, and you know this from the SaaS side too, is whenever there's new developments and technology and platforms, the pricing is challenging. You know, for agencies over time, they're expensive. There's a proliferation of competitors. You know, there tends to be an arm race around dollars.

And for some reason that doesn't usually lower the price point in our sector. I don't, I don't understand how supply and demand work in our sector, but it's, it's challenging. And so then you have this proliferation of models, which do you access? How are you paying for them? And I think it's been very interesting for both client side.

Agency side. And then you have the ones like the Microsoft environment that's more protected, but is it advanced? As advanced as some of the others. And it's been exciting to see, you know, you talked about coding earlier, you see Claude code and you see what the seismic impact that's making where you hear the incredible results around Gemini three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think this question of how do we [00:39:00] as business owners and leaders, um, and you know, you've and I've sat in similar seats, how do you figure out, position yourself to take advantage of the best data out there in the best way? And that does come back to this HN tech question. So you've been doing some great writing, you've got a newsletter on LinkedIn.

You know, I've been checking out some of your pieces and one of the things you talked about is your new agentic colleagues are here. That was one of your 2026 predictions. We've all been talking about agents and agentic AI for a while now, but it sounds like you're feeling really bullish that this is the year that we're gonna see.

Leaps forward there. And how are you thinking about that? You know, maybe dig into that a little bit more.

Aaron Kwittken: Well, uh, I think about it in a couple ways. I, I'm, I'm, I've been thinking a little bit about what makes us different when we're sitting with a client. Um, I was sitting with a very large global healthcare company not long ago, and, um, the clients are now, now have people at the table who aren't just, you know, public affairs or [00:40:00] crisis, but there, there, there are software engineers sitting now in the room and, uh, if nobody's experienced that yet, then I'd like to know how and why and what world you're living in.

But that's never happened. I'm only starting to see that happen the last year, year and a half now that I'm back in the, the game on the consulting side. Um, to me, that gives me a lot of comfort. I have no problem with them in the room. I prefer them in the room. Um, because the, 'cause the, the conversation always goes back to data.

Um, and where are you ingesting your data and how can it backstop your instinct? Um, so the what I, the, the, the asks I'm seeing and we're getting are, you know, we're big corporate, we can't move so quickly overnight because of all the restraints that you just talked about, right? Uh, we've worked inside a Microsoft environment.

We have these IT people, we, the InfoSec people, whatever. But, um, can you help us with, with the right permissioning, take all this data that we're, that's coming in and make sense of it, not in some stupid [00:41:00] PowerPoint where you have a designer, but literally build an ID graph, ingest all this data, and then give us the ability to slice and dice it, look at it different ways to help inform our comm strategy.

Um, to me that's super exciting. I think that's where consultants can be very powerful, but it does require an investment in technologists or tech partner. So if you're a smaller firm. And you don't wanna hire people who do that. You need to partner with another firm that's a technology firm and like do some sort of revenue split.

And I think that's fine. That's what I would've done if I was a smaller agency. Um, and, and the moat for us, all of us, uh, just agencies is what I call adoption velocity. It is not the technology itself because it's becoming pretty ubiquitous and pretty accessible. It's how quickly are you adopting it and deploying it?

How are you staying on it? Um, you know, there are, there's, [00:42:00] there are agents that you can put into your environment, agents that will help you with, you know, GEO or a IO, whatever you wanna call it. I call it GEO. There are agents that you can build for around threat detection that are different than media monitoring.

Um, and, uh, it's okay if you have a dependency on an outside company for that agent. That's okay. The real value is how you deploy it and integrate it into your workflow. And your spend might actually be the same as what it was before, but it's different. It's just not username and password. It's controlled in your environment and you're directing it.

So, um, I think what we're looking at is making sure it's seamless and frictionless and it truly is inside of your environment as opposed to having to have to, to log into six or seven different apps or websites to get what you need. Um, so that's what I mean by that. The second screen, everything should be there for you.

Um, and then, um, how do you deploy that [00:43:00] for a client or how do you build that for a client? Um, and I think that we need to start thinking like a little bit more like an Accenture. Uh, the agencies of the future are ones that are both service, but also we can actually build things like Accenture can build things.

You actually need to start having, uh, real engineers, software engineers on staff or through a partnership.

Anne Green: Yeah, I think you make some good points there. I mean, you talked in your predictions article that you put out recently about. What does it mean to move from an emerging technology to a fundamental infrastructure?

And I do think that, if I'm interpreting it right, is very key to what you're saying. That it becomes that. We've been talking about Steve Halsey, one of my partners has talked about he is the metaphor of corporate narrative as an operating system. You know, where, and, and I think this idea, idea of an operating system, understanding where the data's coming from, what you can do with it, what channels you're using, what the, what the audience mixes, what you're trying to do with it.

I think the other piece is also where the council and the true expertise of humans comes in on [00:44:00] top of that to interpret and share. But when you talk about fundamental infrastructure, am I interpreting that right? When I, when I hear you discussing this, this change that's happening?

Aaron Kwittken: You, you, you are hearing me.

Absolutely right. And, um, four or five years ago, I, I didn't even know what age agentic was. I didn't know that this was coming. I didn't think it was possible. Um. And we know we can threat, we can thank, uh, Anthropic or Claude or Anthropic really for it because they created the MCP protocol. They created literally the pipes that allow all these apps and everybody to kind of exchange information with each other.

It's pretty incredible. I just didn't see it coming. Um, what I, what I don't know, and it doesn't keep me up at night because it also kind of excites me, is what's that next aha moment? So we saw GEO, uh, we saw agents, we saw GEO because that has to do with discoverability. We care about how our clients show up, right?

That's part of our job and showing up right in the right places. [00:45:00] Um, we, you and I talked about this offline a little bit because I don't have an answer for it. I hate to address things. I don't have an answer for at least thoughts on

that.

Anne Green: I, I think it's fun to do that right now at this moment. So go for

Aaron Kwittken: it.

Well, let's do it. So, um, data visualization. AI data visualization that is out of our control and what that means for brands and reputation. So again, they keep coming back to Gemini. Gemini is the first, but not the only, uh, the rest are gonna follow. Where now, search queries, they're gonna start building charts and graphics and doing like these little infographics around your search query, which basically could replace a website.

Um, so will people, people aren't gonna go to websites anymore. There certainly aren't, but it doesn't mean you don't need it. 'cause this needs to be your single source of truth. And then how does that rank ahead of, or at least alongside of a Reddit or Wikipedia, which also indexes very high across LLMs.

So it's going to help, it's gonna force us all to rethink what's the value of a website? Where does design that we own, sit [00:46:00] inside the world of reputation and brand and narratives and and whatnot. And, um, how do we take control or at least participate. That conversation with these LLMs to make sure they're representing us in a way that maintains our integrity.

Right. I, I don't have an answer yet. I, I, I, I'm not sure I know yet. Um, but that is like scary. Uh, no one's talking about it. No one's really talking about it in the way that we're talking about it right now.

Anne Green: Yeah. I, I feel like it's an emerging discussion, but I'm hearing it more and tell me if you feel this is true, you hear it more on the side of sort of, um, zero click search and traffic Armageddon for publishers and what this will mean, and then how can Cloud Flare help and et cetera, et cetera, and how do we get them to pay?

And now we're seeing the announcement that chat GPT will start to include advertising or some, somewhere, I forget where the, or is it Gemini? One of them. I mean this is coming obviously [00:47:00] OpenAI 'cause they're looking for monies, looking for the business model. So, but I, I do think is sort of, um. A lot of times I feel in these conversations it feels like an existential loop or the snake is eating its tail because they need content to ingest, to continue to evolve and to just to operate in the way they do today.

The LLMs and everything that is come is cascading off of them. That content needs to be out on the web largely. There's, they've, they've pulled in all the other corpus of data that they probably can at this point. Maybe then if you have a situation where the websites are star of the journalists that write for them, et cetera, et cetera, not every journalist can support them.

So I'm, I'm going down the journalist route as one example. So, right. Not every journalist can support themselves on a substack. So does this start to degrade that web environment? Are you left with only corporate sites? I mean that the implications of this spin off in a lot of different ways and it's really interesting to contemplate, even if we [00:48:00] don't really have the crystal ball right now to know which way it's gonna go.

Aaron Kwittken: Well and, uh, you know, if, if, if. News consumption, even online is on the decline. And social and news influencers are on the rise, and most people get their information from TikTok X, Reddit, uh, YouTube is all post literate Postscript world. Um, and that's where the audience is, that's where the LMS are gonna pull from.

Not necessarily high authority news outlets, even though LLM seemed to favor journalistic content, but we don't really know if that's true. Um, it is a little bit of the wilds right now. Uh, and it reminds me back to the days of the internet when the internet was just starting and then internet was a bubble.

It burst, but it didn't go away. This is gonna burst too. This will crack, but it's not gonna go away. This is here forever. Forever.

Anne Green: And I think too, that when we, people think back to those days of the.com bubble, those who weren't sort of there plenty, plenty of us were. Forget that it's not the internet that bursts it's [00:49:00] pets.com, you know, it's, it's entities that did not have.

The business to match the speculative valuation. And there's plenty of that example here right now, but this idea of, um, what is it training on and what does that mean for, and, and, you know, I try to say to everybody too, we're getting a little philosophical here, but I invite everyone always to think about this on multiple levels.

There's the ground level, you know, your daily use, et cetera. There's that middle level, which is workflow transformation, and how are we changing business models. But the a hundred thousand foot level is what does it mean to be human? What is happening to our society? How does this net positive or net negative?

And that, that's a much bigger picture. I think actually this is a good time to bring humans back into the discussion here. I, I really appreciated in one of your pieces, there's a header, humans Powered by Machines. It's definitely my vibe. That's what I seek to see. Um, and I really do believe that we have to have a vision for the future and decide how we're gonna drive to it.

Um, not just because, oh, that'd be good [00:50:00] for us, but because we have a real. Vision and a bet we wanna make. But you talked about betting on a different future, I've gotta hear one word. Technology, ables and amplifies human expertise rather attempting to replace it. And you would talk about, you know, what is that human corpus of like knowledge and expertise and, and, and like you said, training the pipeline of younger people on how to be those orchestrators and experts and grow supported by that technology backbone and that operating system.

But, you know, what do you see as, as the path we need to take to keep the human in balance with the machine and, and have it be supported by that intelligence not taken over by it entirely?

Aaron Kwittken: I think, um, there, there's this weird, isn't it called the Javins principle? I can't remember, but this law where actually, uh, anytime you introduce a new technology, it actually helps elevate humans.

And, um, if anything in this world, I think that our time as consultants is gonna be [00:51:00] valued at a higher rate. Than ever before. Um, I think where I worry and what you touch on again, second time I don't have an answer for this, is the way we were kind of raised in this business is through mirroring good, good and bad behavior.

Like we saw everything, but, um, we, we definitely learned by doing. And sometimes we were just kind of literally per verbally thrown into the water, thrown off the deep end. And, um, I worry about the shortcuts that AI will enable for young people. And, um, some people will call that upskilling. It's not actually, uh, it's enablement and it is, um, it's, it's kind of like, you know, driving your kid to school every day when they could walk and then they don't really know what the school is when they have to, when you're not there.

Um, because, you know, they've been so, they're so co you know, so dependent. I mean, I mean, most kids don't know how to read a map because they have ways or Google maps, whereas we had. Physical maps. I used to remember going on AAA and having to like, [00:52:00] um, actually I had to call them to send me, what are those called?

Trip things, whatever. And then somebody,

 

Anne Green: yeah, they would do a little, they would create one for you. It was physical. You talked to them to get it done.

Aaron Kwittken: They would come in the mail and they did used this thing, a highlighter, and they literally highlighted how you would drive from Jacksonville, Florida to Buffalo, New York.

Right. And you would either pull over, you would look at it, or your person next to you would tell, tell you where to go. So, um, I I, I, I do wonder what learning is like, if is, is it, it's definitely not the same. Is it as powerful and does it give you the same level of critical thinking that scar tissue is important?

AI does not create scar tissue, um, that you need in order to be a good counselor. 'cause you don't have that expertise. Or you might have fleeting expertise, but you don't have the experience. So how do we create those experiences for people that we learned in an analog world that now has an increase and become a digital world?

I just don't know. I'm not sure.

Um, I haven't figured that out and that, that worries me. That scares me.

Anne Green: I think it's the [00:53:00] essential question, and it's coming up all the time. I just did some mentoring at my alma mater this weekend for sophomores. It's an annual program I've done for like nine years and so many questions about AI and what that entry level is gonna be and what, what does it look like to be a younger person?

And I do talk about the fact of like multiple tools. And it's not just the LLMs, it's our whole tech stack. You know, how we look at AI embedded in all the kinds of tools we use. Creative tools are a great example. Adobe Firefly, that's, that's an obvious one, right? That's supercharging creative teams. But how do you become the orchestrator of many things?

But I think one thing, and I love your idea of upskilling versus enablement. I just wrote that down 'cause it's a really good question. I think to take it one step farther. In in the, what you're wrestling with? 'cause I am too is this question of, yes, I have this vision of helping all of our generations of people be orchestrators of technology and allow those to go out, create tasks and like take workflows, et [00:54:00] cetera, et cetera.

Everything we're talking about. However, there comes a point where a human needs to look at it and say, is this good or is this garbage? Or is this somewhere in between? And does this, like for example, our agency does a lot of work in very complex industries. Agriculture is one of them. Like our creative team and our, you know, what we call market communicators, you know the, the Comm sci folks, they can look at row crops like corn and they understand whether that row is correct, how it's sewn, its stage of growing, if there's a certain kind of blight or pester disease, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, over time, AI will get better at that, but. If you, and that's just one very specific example, but there's also, you talked about crisis comms, those, those years you spent in the trenches as a younger person going through it with the more senior people in the firm and the clients and you hone your instinct and your knowledge by watching it go down.[00:55:00]

And so, you know, when we're bringing people in, I think we have to be really attentive to mentoring and a lot of storytelling and a lot of explaining so that they can then take their own discernment and look at a product that's come through an hn, took workflow and be able to judge and say, wow, this is great in these five dimensions, but these other four, they need to be adjusted more.

I mean, do you resonate with what I'm saying here, Aaron?

Aaron Kwittken: The area that's probably hallowed ground that ai, at least in the next three, four years, cannot. Place or replace is in crisis comms because there's so, there's so much variability when, when you, I just think back, you know, when you get that call from a reporter that says, you know, start with, you know, a source tells me, or I hear whatever.

AI can't tell you whether or not you're falling into a trap. And that actually if you comment, you're giving them the story. Whereas if you don't comment on the record, they might not have a story. So here's [00:56:00] kind of like the cat and mouse game. You need to play with that reporter. AI can't tell you that my experience of 30 years of having been there, done that, getting burned, having some success, that's what's gonna tell me how to do it.

And that that, that to me, uh, is a great example of experience that can't be replicated. Um, on the other hand, there are, especially let's say even in the m and a world, um, most m and a transactions are repeatable. Um, they're more similar than they're different with the exception of some content that's different that actually.

Can be, um, you know, uh, put into a little bit of an operating system, a communications operating system, uh, where, uh, a lot of it can be done for you. Um, you're still orchestrating, like you said, but there's not as much kind of back and forth unless of course you have an activist shareholder that's different, that it becomes more of a crisis m and a situation, right?

So I still think there are co we have to define as an industry, what are those places that [00:57:00] still require lobbying, networking, access, um, influence. Um, all those things I think are still very much human endeavors. Even media training and coaching. Yes, I can create a synthetic audience now. I still need to look.

Uh, I could, I still need to. Oversee and guide what that q and A is. I still need to coach that person. You know, we, early days, I partnered with a, um, and they've gotten a little bit of, uh, a little bit of, uh. Actually, I can name them, it's fine. Usually, they've gotten, um, a little bit of attention and traction in the market.

I think they partner with Weber and others. And then of course all these big agencies rebrand stuff, but they say it's theirs, you know? Um, sonar is, is not, um, really built by Burson. I know who's behind Sonar. It's all, you know, might label stuff and I have no problem saying that. Um, Uley is really cool, but it doesn't replace the need for a counselor and a senior [00:58:00] advisor to media train someone and doesn't catch everything.

Um, and it doesn't catch if you repeat it a negative necessarily. It, it's, it's, it's not, still not good at nuance and things like that. So it's an interesting starter starting point. Um, it's great for sales, but like we, you still need us, I guess is my point. I guess I'm blathering on, but you know what I mean, we're still very important.

Anne Green: Yeah, no, I agree. So this has been an amazing conversation just to put a capper on it. I love to hear. A little speed round. What's your advice for both sides of the house? First agency leaders and second, the corporate side?

Aaron Kwittken: Well, uh, I'm gonna start the second, um, on the corporate side. Um, I think you need to find a way to work outside of it, but be friends of it, because that's gonna be your biggest gating factors is to success around AI optimization.

And outside of that, lean on a really smart, uh, technology forward, technology powered [00:59:00] agency partner or firm partner who can help you with, you know, what your, you know, your discoverability issues on the web. Um, figuring out how you can, um, harden your threat intelligence capabilities and, uh, reach hard to reach audiences, not just gen pop audiences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, and that, that's my advice there over time. Um, you will need to probably hire your own tech person to deal with it so you can get what you actually want. Otherwise, you're going to be subject to the generic kind of AI optimization operating system that everybody else in the company uses. That's, and, and we are, we are special.

We need to be fit for purpose. We, we can't fit into just the general ai ai optimization system inside of our corporate environment. We're different. Um, on the agency side. It depends on your size and, and your, I guess your, your, um, your constitution, your, your level for, uh, your appetite for, for [01:00:00] investment.

Um, I think it's important if you can't hire people who have technology backgrounds. Um, and not, I don't mean just hiring people who are like in data and analytics and insights. Those are important people to have. And hopefully if you don't have them, you should. I mean, people who have developer type backgrounds, people who can build things, you only need really one person and then they can contract out to other firms around the world.

There's so many talented people. It's especially nice to be able to support people who are in, uh, countries that have conflict like Ukraine. They're incredible programmers there who need work. Um, they're happy to. So you need to have at least that one person. And then, um, either a partner with a tech, tech firm or ha partner contractors.

Every firm should have its own, uh, communications operating system, whatever your, your partner calls it. Um, for us, we call it Fergus. Um, and then you have to decide what is it that's most important in an operating system. Is it content generation? Is it your thought partner? [01:01:00] Uh, is it to, is it, do you want it to be more predictive?

Do you want it to be generative? It depends on your business. And where those pain points are. You can start with pain points and then work from work from there.

Anne Green: This is great, great advice. Really practical. I mean, definitely a lot of food for thought. I think we're both on the same page. That 2026 is a critical year for our industry.

It's for the whole industry, both sides of the house. But um, I am excited you talked to us today, Aaron. I love having gotten to know you over the years and I love picking your brain on this kind of stuff. So thank you for being a guest today on Building Brand Gravity. I really appreciate it.

Aaron Kwittken: Well, I appreciate you having me on, and I, I value our friendship just as, just as much.

And, uh, I can't wait to be on a panel with you again. I think we need to have our own event, our own special event.

Anne Green: I Please, hey, world, you've heard it. Ask us back. Yeah, we, we have a good, uh,

Aaron Kwittken: with good lighting F with good lighting,

Anne Green: exactly. All right. Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Kwittken: Thanks, [01:02:00] Anne.

Anne Green: [00:00:00] I will say lean hard into the human aspects of this transformation, and in doing so, be open. Encourage your teams to speak about and hold the paradox of AI upsides and downsides that exist simultaneously. And I think that speaking to the nuances and the realities here is more likely to help catalyze change than.

Sweeping all that complexity and the stuff that's inconvenient under the rug.

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

Steve Halsey: I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: Steve, happy 2026. It's January

Steve Halsey: already, already. The new year is upon us with excitement and I guess for some maybe a little trepidation,

Anne Green: I am still reeling at how fast 2025 went. That was somehow the longest and shortest year that I've experienced in a long time, but it is January.

And predictions are [00:01:00] everywhere, and we wouldn't be good podcasters if we didn't have our own. So I think we have to get into it today.

Steve Halsey: Yeah, I think you know what we should do today is let's start with each of our predictions, but rather than going through them one by one, by one by one. Maybe we can, uh, can spend a little time talking about the broader trends and the things that are impacting that drove us each to come up with those predictions and really talk about how they're shaping the way that brands operate, communicate, and even the way leaders need to lead here in 2026.

Anne Green: Yeah, and as you and I were comparing notes before this recording and sharing our personal predictions, we each came up with six of them interestingly. So that's a nice parallel. Um, some really clear through lines emerged and the five of them were AI surprise, um, trust pressure. People and also something close to our heart, Steve narrative.

So it's exciting. We can unpack these piece by piece. So I'll start and let me [00:02:00] give you my six without a lot of detail. I'll just give you the top line and then I know you can do the same, Steve. So my first one's going to be AI standardization. And also acceleration. We talked about 2024 is the year of AI exploration.

We dubbed it this year, or 2025. It actually been the year of ai, um, acceleration, and now we're getting into AI standardization. So that'll be okay. I have to, we're gonna have to cut that. Let me do that part again. We dubbed 2024 as the year of AI exploration. 2025 was the year of AI enablement, and now we're getting into AI standardization and acceleration.

My second one is going to be intensifying stressors on the healthcare sector. No surprise, not the only sector under stress, but a big one. My next one is an interesting one that I've started to see pop up, which is rehiring. Which we'll talk about that more a little bit later. Another is [00:03:00] GLP-1s shaping and reshaping literally everything.

A very interesting and exciting topic. My fifth is a pair, cyber and slop. And by the way, slop is the Merriam Webster word of the year for 2025. And then the final one for me is the rise of the counselor.

Steve Halsey: Well, that's a, that's a really interesting, uh, list that you have there. And, uh, you know, I think for me it really captures kind of both the human and system pressures that we're seeing that so many organizations are feeling right now.

But I also think there's some really interesting things in there, like the rehiring, the. You know, there are some really good signs of a positive movement as we come into 2026 that, that I think are, are good to make sure we capture and talk about. So here's my list. My first one is this idea that corporate narrative becomes an operating system.

So I'm excited to get into that one GEO and narrative intelligence move from nice [00:04:00] to have to absolute, must have to any well-managed corporation. Here's a new one I'm coining this year: The trust crisis of synthetic reality. What is reality? What isn't? It just gets harder and harder every year. The compressed news cycle is really forcing us to be always on.

Volatility as we're seeing every day in the news remains a baseline, and recovery is uneven across industry. But I also think 2026 is the year where we see a significant shift in even more external influencers becoming core to the go-to market strategy for B2B companies. So those are my six.

Anne Green: I love those.

There's so much good stuff in there. You know, so much of that, Steve, comes back to the idea of trust and also coherence. In an AI mediated world, I, you heard me in 2025, Steve and our other colleagues have heard me talk about making things legible. Are they readable? Can you tell what they are? So there's tons of, um, to unpack here.

So [00:05:00] as we said, instead of going one by one, we're gonna kind of use these 12 predictions as anchors for these key themes. And the first theme we wanna talk about, we're calling it the pressure stack. Which is volatility. Yeah. Pressure. A couple good songs on that front. Some uh, Bowie, some Billy Joel. But the volatility and the sector stress and also the pace of change.

And the intensity of that pace. I mean, the, the way I would think of one of my anchors here, and I mentioned it 'cause it's one of my trends, is the stressors on the overall healthcare system. I think healthcare is a real leading indicator for many parts of our. Society and systems and other industry sectors, it affects everyone.

It has a massive workforce. It has huge interdependencies. It's very linked between the private and public sector, and it's massively impacted by economic pressures, demographic change, just income inequity, everything that we see. And it's also incredibly impacted by technology and advancements. So. [00:06:00] There is not all negative stuff here, but I will say that that sector, I work in that sector a great deal.

We have clients in that sector across many different aspects of the sector, so that's something that's top of mind for me when you talk about the pressure right now.

Steve Halsey: Well, and and, and, and particularly when you think of that, that's also one industry that you have such the overlay of personal emotion.

About yourself, about your loved one, about your, about your friends, um, and, and that, that stress we're seeing play out huge, huge in healthcare, but we're also seeing it, I think, across a lot of other industries. I think as we look ahead at 2026. Recovery is gonna be uneven. I mean, you have industries like healthcare where again, a lot of these different groups are actively competing and trying to restructure what everything looks like.

But in other sectors, we're seeing a lot of uneven recovery. And even where we're seeing rebounds, there's still regulatory uncertainty, geopolitical shocks are happening on a daily basis, [00:07:00] and really AI disruption in terms of what can be and what's going forward. Is really making this environment tough to really know what clarity exists, how to be consistent, like you said, all that stuff, like you said, is just multiple pressure points stacking up at once.

Anne Green: Yeah, it, it is not one big disruption. It's that multiplicity. And I think one thing we've talked about an earlier podcast, one of my quotes was. The fact that humans have a hard time holding paradox and multiple things in our head at one time, and we have to create certainty where we can. But it's not easy.

And that, that's, that's a leadership pressure for sure. But it goes all the way down the chain. So that, that's a good one. I like that first theme, Steve.

Steve Halsey: Nice, simple and easy. The the, the next one I wanna, I wanna talk about, and I, I kind of teed it up there, is the trust crisis of, uh, synthetic reality really hit me the other day when I was just scrolling through my thieves and all of a sudden this thing popped up that says, Hey, [00:08:00] record 22nd of your voice.

Pick any song and you'll sing it. Pitch perfect, "Bohemian Rhapsody", whichever, whichever one you wanna do, do. And it just struck me that at that moment, it used to be deep fakes. Took a lot of effort, took a lot of, lot of, lot of time, took a lot of, uh, of knowhow. But now with the AI tools, being able to create videos, music, videos, all this stuff, once it becomes mainstream, at what point.

Do you know what's real and what doesn't and what isn't? What isn't real? So, so to me, I think that is going to be a huge, huge challenge for us as we think about all this synthetic audio video identity that's just out there in the mainstream. How do companies manage that?

Anne Green: I, I like that idea of synthetic reality.

'cause in some ways this is going to be our reality living in that. What comes to mind for me under this? This anchor of [00:09:00] trust in the synthetic sloppy world is the two sides of the coin, which is cyber. The incredible threats. That are happening on the cybersecurity front with ai, you know, fueling it at scale.

But on the other side, just the proliferation of what people are calling AI slop, which is an ever changing entity in one person's slop, is another person's, you know, Sistine Chapel. I guess maybe not that extreme, but it, it's very much in the eye of the beholder. And I would say like most things humans create, it can be great and it can be awful.

And that's why I do think we have to hold these two things in our hands at one time and in our minds at one time. I think what's most salient to our. Business, our sector, and all of our clients is how that synthetic reality is reshaping and polluting the signals that they try to use to understand their audiences.

So for example, if you look at some of the big news stories on the social side, from 2025, let's say the Cracker Barrel [00:10:00] logo. There was so much media coverage of this outrage on social media, ascribing reality that, oh, these are the customers of Cracker Barrel, or a portion of them who are so angry. What turned out being the case once there was forensic sort of cyber analysis.

It's not that hard to do now. Is that a huge portion of that social traffic was not real. It was bot networks, it was fake, it was AI driven, and there's a lot of social engineering at the societal level happening. There's a lot of outside parties that would like to get. America is just one example. This is happening all over the world.

Get us very riled up. And think that we are the strident voices. We are angry at each other. We are tearing each other down, and that's not always the case. And so whether you're looking at the engagement metrics and what are your customers actually feeling and getting more instrument with them to really know, not just looking at the social channels or organic social.

But also what is the data you're using to look at the effectiveness of your digital ad [00:11:00] campaigns? How much of that, those clicks and engagement is real, and how much is synthetic? So I mean, those are the things that come to mind for me, and they're very top of mind for our clients.

Steve Halsey: And you've got, you've got so much integration of this synthetic world into, uh, into different feeds.

Uh, TikTok, Instagram, things like that. It looks really real that, hey, when you save the bear cub on the side of the road, grizzly mama's gonna come up and give you a hug. I don't think in reality, if you tried that in Yellowstone, that would, uh, would quite work that way. But it's interesting to me that. In some ways, you know, there there's almost celebration with these tools of the synthetic imaginary world we can create.

But the challenge for us as communicators is how do you then prove trust in this world? Right? Because you're not really telling story anymore, you're trying to prove what's real and, and we'll get into that in a little bit. I think that's where it really becomes to. You can't just communicate at one point in time about something.

It's gotta [00:12:00] be that consistency. So you're actually generating authenticity through. That kind of, uh, kind of consistency is something that we're gonna need to think about. You know, and that's also one of the reasons, one of the trends I threw out there was, I think external influencers are going to become even more important in B2B.

And, you know, we've, we've used. What we dubbed influencers for decades. You know, those would be the scientists, the university researcher, you know, the third party expert. But I think, I think what we're seeing, even with the shift that we were talking about earlier, about just how everything's instantaneous and lives in the feed.

In B2B marketing, leveraging more and more this year influencers for really adding that authenticity and becoming more of a go-to discipline. I thought this was interesting. I saw recently in Fortune that this year 75% of enterprise B2B [00:13:00] companies. Plan to increase their budget for influencer relations engagement, uh, particularly around subject matter experts, third party voices.

So I think that's kind of interesting here in, um, an AI powered discovery environment. Buyers are relying on more and more external validations and just trying to find different ways to get into their feed, even in really complex B2B sale. I, I've just found that fascinating.

Anne Green: I, I think it makes total sense.

I'm not, I mean, that's a huge stat. I guess I'm not totally surprised, but it's exciting to hear, and in some ways, as we talked about in a more synthetically created reality, different types of influencers, whether it's the ones you write, Steve, in the communication setting, and in many of the works we've done, we've done this for years.

Whether it's those types of influencers or ones that. Have created a following in different online channels or social channels. There's a sense that they've created trust with their audience and the audience knows who they are and they, [00:14:00] there's a sense of familiarity and, and I, I also feel this ties very tightly to something we're seeing strongly in our sector and in our kind of business, which I'm calling the rise of the counselor.

We need. In this world today to really know who has true expertise. Where do you seek that expertise? And frankly, the AI of it all, and using AI as a thought partner, as a force multiplier and enabler, it's augmenting that intelligence. It's those who have sector expertise and have seen a bit. And you know, it can come at at many different ages, but especially those that have been seasoned in their field.

You know, that level can become quite supercharged by technology today. And we see both, um, within our clients and also between agencies and clients that need of the counselor to show that human expertise as a stabilizer and as a filter, a cultivator, an assessor powered by technology. 'cause the noisy [00:15:00] systems, those trusted perspectives and voices start to matter a lot more.

Steve Halsey: And you, you and I are hearing though that hearing that a lot in all the conversations we're having, even just. How the, uh, agency client relationship is, is changing a bit based on that, that need for that counselor. It's no longer, Hey, I need you to help put together the strategy and let's do a quarterly check-in.

Now it's just with a pace of change and all those stacking pressures, you know, how do you make sure you've got access to more senior council on a more regular basis? And that's, that's really is changing some of the, some of the dynamics, um, in terms of. How we staff, how we interact with our corporate clients.

I mean, what, what's, what's kinda your perspective on this shift and how it's gonna shape out over the course of this year?

Anne Green: Yeah. I, I, I just feel that we need to empower all the levels within an agency environment to really use technology and the knowledge that surrounds us. One of our strengths is we have [00:16:00] multi-generational workforce that's learning in all directions all the time, mentoring, cultivating, and so in that way.

Helping folks leverage technology to become stronger, faster, smarter, quicker to become orchestrators of many different tools, agents, knowledge bases, and then raise that up to sort the wheat from the chaff along with the council for maybe more senior people. I think that's going to be, say, professional services in our sector looks like going forward.

To me, the AI piece brings us to our next theme, which is AI grows up or under pressure, and I just wanna put the pin in the fact that I do need to hear you singing Bohemian Rhapsody at some point, like all the parts. So if that was AI generated, then I think we may need to put a link in the show notes, but we'll, we'll see if we can get that out of Steve later.

Um, but the AI grows up piece I'd said earlier. We had informally dubbed for our own team because again, making it legible, knowledgeable, understandable that 2024 was [00:17:00] about exploration, 2025 was about enablement. We've dubbed this coming year, the year of standardization and acceleration, meaning. What are the standard operating procedures for, in our context, any given type of client, what are the types of agents prompts, the knowledge base that should just be standard?

How are we using AI to onboard, do all the different things and how are we using it at a ground operational level as well as a very high level thought partner? So that's the standardization piece. That standard operating procedure, that's something we're talking about a lot and I'm hearing. That in many different conversations I'm having and I'm evangelizing it, and I'll talk about this more later about the human side of this transformation.

'cause I got a real soapbox on this one. But with the standardization, the other piece I'm seeing about AI growing up under pressure before, you know, you jump into this anchor theme, Steve, is this question of. 2025 was a year where a lot of companies cut a lot of jobs, [00:18:00] and in some cases the rationale was very tied to AI and AI efficiency.

At the same time, there was a lot of discussion about the fact that the real ROI of AI was still yet to come. And I'm not throwing shade here. I'm just trying to figure out what is actually happening, because you and I have both been having deep conversations with this, with pretty much anyone we can, and my hypothesis here is that there was a lot of cutting that had to take place anyway.

Yes, AI is a part of it. But it's not the only part. And in some cases, I think there was an over indexing on the narrative that it was ai because in many cases we're not seeing the implementation of AI throughout enterprise organizations to the point yet where agents are truly replacing humans if they ever should.

Right. Um, so my sense may be, and I'm just gonna put a stake in the ground here, that we may see some rehiring in certain sectors for, for cuts that were made too deep. Where AI can't pick up the slack yet, knowing full well [00:19:00] that many of these companies have said all along, look, we're going to be trimming, but we're also gonna be shifting roles and hiring at the same time.

So, you know, let's watch those trends. I think we may see more about. The movement of jobs and rehiring than we will about, oh, this, we're cutting 'cause of ai. But I, I don't know. What's, what is this AI grows up piece signaling for you?

Steve Halsey: Well, I, I, I think it, it's interesting with, with disruption, everybody e even those in Silicon Valley at the Edge everybody's just working through this at, nobody really knows, uh, knows what, what the end game is.

So when I think about something like rehiring, I think that's all part of the learning process, right. Rehiring isn't really a failure of ai, so to speak. I think it's a sign that humans were removed before the systems were really ready to, to leverage 'em. And so when I'm thinking about the real gap as it relates to ai, it's, it isn't who is using it, but who is using it with discip.

Right. And [00:20:00] getting back to what we were just talking about a few minutes ago about the senior counselors, that's where it's so critical as to who is training your model and how are you constantly putting in your ip. 'cause that's when you can leverage it across the full generations of your workforce and really, really tailor it to something that, that creates value.

So, so that's kind of, kind of, kind of my take on it. And you and I were talking the uh, uh. The other day and you, you referenced a, a Fortune article you saw, which, which I thought just captured exactly what you were talking about on the spend of AI versus just humans.

Anne Green: Deloitte, this is hot off the press, um, like right at the end of December.

So it's really quite fresh still as we record this in early January that, um, Deloitte came out and their CTO was saying that they have research that says 93% of spend on AI transformation. I'm sure they surveyed, uh, they always survey [00:21:00] tons and tons of enterprises, you know, and, and c-suite or tech leaders.

So 93% of the spend in AI transformation is on technology, and 7% of the spend is on the people side of it, which I think is deeply problematic and that's certainly what they're. Deloitte, CTO was saying. And I, I think you look at that and that is a stark stat and needs to shift. And I, I'm gonna have a soapbox on that at the end of, of our podcast today, when we talk about one shift, leaders can make

Steve Halsey: Well, and, and what I, what I thought was interesting that, that struck, struck me about that article was, um.

You know, I always like a, like a good anecdote. And in that it was, it was he, he compared it to basically trying to make paella and ending up only with cilantro. You know, you've got all the ingredients, but none of the recipes. So how does it come through? And I just. To me, I just think that's a really powerful reminder that technology alone doesn't transform business leaders, like you [00:22:00] just said, have to invest in that human side of it.

Training, process, redesign, culture evolution. 'cause without that balance, even the best models or even the best computer chips aren't gonna deliver meaningful impact. So I think getting back to what you were talking about with rehiring and those types of things, I think that's what, what. Business in general across all sectors is trying to figure out.

What is that new operating system going to be and look like? Which bridges me to actually, which was my first prediction, which is basically we're sitting in a world right now where content is infinite, right? Narrative really is becoming that both a constraint and an advantage. So in 2026, I think. As I talk about narrative as an operating system, I mean, we need to move beyond just messaging a campaign to really think about how do we align leadership, culture, AI output, crisis [00:23:00] preparation and posture, market presence.

How do you use all those to create a narrative spine that is always on? Because before a human even curates something, it's constantly being curated by ai.

Anne Green: Yeah, it's, it's interesting, this idea is corporate narrative is an operating system. It reminds me of conversations we've had in past podcast episodes about how comms or corporate affairs is structured in different organizations.

So you both have speed, agility, knowledge of the business units, but also you have a very strong center of gravity that's agile can pivot, has access to leadership. So that corporate narrative remains solid and repeatable. I remember hearing from, you know, a friend who runs another agency, leaders are repeaters.

Um, another thing it reminds me of is, um, our conversation on the podcast last December with Benjamin Thiele-Long, who wrote an incredible book about the unified skillset of public speaking and interviewing and your presence, and how do all of these things [00:24:00] create a narrative coherence. I think in sometimes like training or the narrative, it's been largely located at the most senior levels and more episodic in how it's trained.

And maybe it's episodic in how that narrative is updated. But truly, and I, I think you see this, you know, we talked earlier about sort of Verizon being restructured under Dan Schulman and bringing corporate affairs back together. And he talked about that brand, the importance of, um, that through line. So the idea of narrative coherence.

Is more important than ever in all the voices that are bringing it forward. So yeah, I, I resonate with that a ton.

Steve Halsey: I like that narrative, narrative coherence. So I guess as we kinda wrap this section, it's almost like. AI doesn't really create clarity. The organizations have to have to bring that. And it's not always easy.

Anne Green: No, it's, it isn't. And you know, I'll talk again about the people stuff, but to me the people are equally as important as the technology. Clearly the technology is striking, but we don't have 7 billion books [00:25:00] about change management written because the people piece is unimportant. It's, it's literally the most important piece.

So. Um, our last anchor theme we're calling cross sector signals that Leaders can't ignore. And one that I've been hearing a ton about that I find very, very fascinating is the impact of a drug. GLP-1s. We have all heard about them, they've exploded onto the scene. It's funny in some ways. They're not as big as maybe the AI revolution, but if you think about how chat GPT sprung onto the scene, it had been around for quite a while, this kind of machine learning moving into their attempts to create these large language models.

But there was a moment when that certain model of chat GPT changed everything. Same thing with GLP-1s. We've had diabetes drugs, they've been researching them. They've seen some of their impact, but suddenly. The move and it was Novo Nordis with Ozempic. Although Eli Lilly has really taken the poll position now, um, in the [00:26:00] sector, it exploded on the scene and it's reshaping everything.

And the reason I was thinking about this is, you know, a group that we continue to do work with pwc, um, I'm, I'm citing all the big four today. Um, Ali Furman, who's head of their consumer markets that she and Paul Lineal just wrote a piece in HBR in in last October, and they were talking about how GLP-1s are across sector phenomenon.

So if you think about impact not just in the healthcare space, and that could reduce spending through reduced comorbidities and better health, especially if it spreads beyond. Just weight and obesity into heart disease or other, even addiction. I mean, there's so many as form factors change. Is there a weekly pill?

Is there a annual injection? All of these things are gonna be explored, but PWC was charting the impact on grocery spend decline if the main purchaser is on one of the GLP-1s. Apparel spending increases fitness and wellness, [00:27:00] spending shifts, travel shifts, restaurant patterns, less quick service, more.

Full service. Just I, I think I had to respect. The massive cross sector change that not just AI is making, but GLP-1s and how many people in the financial sector and others are talking about this as one of the big trends. So again, that to me is a great example of cross sector signals. What do you take away from all this and what, what's on your mind in this theme?

Steve Halsey: Well, on that one, I've been surprised how much I've heard that conversation in spaces I didn't expect logistics company actually talking about how that's fundamentally changing things. And I, I guess when I think about the, the GLP-1 impact, I'm, I'm just reminded of the saying. Disruption doesn't stay in its lane, right?

So you're seeing it with something like a medicine like GLP-1s. We're definitely seeing it with things like ai and we're kind of seeing the framework that if your [00:28:00] story only works in one sector, you may be a little bit too niche for what may be what may be coming. Because the interconnectivity of everything in these industries that, I mean.

Think about how quickly that story about GLP-1 changed, right? Five years ago it would've been medication. The medication would've worked. So these would've all happened in like a sequential series of storytelling versus boom, it's everybody everywhere. Trying to think about what is the real. Financial impact as well as the, the, the health impact on those, those individuals.

So to me that's where this whole idea of narrative becoming the, the connective tissue and in a lot of ways, being prepared to respond to things that you otherwise wouldn't have anticipated coming. Because in the past it had been said as well, this is a healthcare issue. This isn't a grocery retail issue.

Anne Green: It kind of is this example, to bring it back to your idea of connective tissue, we we're having a lot of [00:29:00] metaphors around narrative because I think it's just so powerful and, and helping us create systems of thinking about how do, how do we respond to this? But I guess I was summarizing it, GLP-1 show, what does it mean to stay in your lane?

You know, as, as a company, as a sector, as a topic, as a theme, it's hard to think that there's. In some cases there may be, but there the lanes are much more interconnected and there's a lot more shifting and moving between them in a world where everything is so interconnected and I think it's actually really fun and exciting to think about this new challenge.

Not easy, but you're right. When something that might've sat purely in the healthcare pharma. HCP healthcare provider setting, insurance payers, like the, the purview of that world becomes, you know, something that logistics in the cold supply chain has to worry about. That, that, that shows you that the matrix is ever more interconnected.

Steve Halsey: [00:30:00] Well, I'm gonna be really interesting to see how, uh, how these predictions played out, uh, for those listeners of the show. You'll remember at the start of 2025, we gave our predictions and we revisited those, uh, uh, midway point of the year. And, uh, we were remarkably on track. So we will, we will see whether our predictions for 2026, uh, hold up and what other exciting things, uh, come down the pipe.

As we're working our way through 2026. So I guess as we get ready to wrap this predictions episode, and I think we really need to think about what do we need to tell the leaders that we're working with and our peers? You know, if you have one big leadership shift lesson that you wanna talk about for 2026, what advice do you have for our listeners?

Anne Green: Yeah. And check back in June. We'll be accountable June or July about our predictions. We, we love to check in, but, so one shift. It was great. I love [00:31:00] that you challenged me to think about this. Um, so I wanna get back a little bit of my soapbox. I don't throw rocks in glass houses. This is hard, what I'm gonna talk about, but I, I, I think it's important.

I wanna encourage leaders. To embrace the recognition that AI enablement and transformation is as much about people as it is about technology. People are talking about this, but I don't know that the depth and importance of it is really embraced. And that Deloitte quote, about 93% on tech, 7% on people, if that's at all true, if that's even within a 10% margin of error, we are in trouble societally, I feel, because, um, it's not just the question of upskilling.

I, I think upskilling is something we're sadly quite poor at in the United States and other nations. We talk about the need for it a lot, but I see very little will or energy or hard dollars put against it at a truly macro level. So we've, we've run into this before, say the globalization craze that close a lot of factories and plants, [00:32:00] so much talk about.

Relocating jobs and upskilling. Very little of it done. So that's a piece of it. But the bigger thing I'm thinking about is the urgent need to shift mindsets and understand the cultural and personal psychological impacts of this kind of rapid change around ai. In particular, it's both filled with potential and excitement, but it's also tied to really intense dialogues around workforce loss, around massive societal shifts, around a lot of consequences.

We'd like to avoid. I'm hearing some very nuanced discussions around water uses and energy uses, but these things are hard. So our people who are trying to get to embrace these technologies and our organizations as a whole, we know we only change as much as our people change with us, you can only evangelize from the top so much because you need everybody throughout the organism to change.

So. If people are not allowed to be holding both of these complexities [00:33:00] at once, it's really hard to change. It's actually a very scary, and it can feel disingenuous. So I will say lean hard into the human aspects of this transformation, and in doing so. Be open, encourage your teams to speak about and hold the paradox of AI upsides and downsides that exist simultaneously.

And I think that speaking to the nuances and the realities here is more likely to help catalyze change than just sweeping all that complexity and the stuff that's inconvenient under the rug. So that's what I'm offering leaders for 2026.

Steve Halsey: Those are great insights and, uh, certainly not a boring time to be be in a leadership position.

Mine's, mine's, uh, kind of shocker to you. I'm gonna go back to this whole idea of a narrative system. So the one shift I would really encourage leaders right now to do is to stop thinking about communications as managing messages or managing campaigns and really start thinking about it as a governing [00:34:00] narrative system, or like I said, an operating system of, of.

Of a company because in a world of instantaneous AI summaries of synthetic content that we had talked about, incredibly compressed always on news cycles that don't always have a human curator anymore, and a lot of more third party influence. You really can't control every output, but what you can do is really govern that story.

People encounter over time. What is that consistency? What is that cadence that you're delivering, but to what you were just talking about there in terms of leaders and organization and culture? It also means being really, really clear on what you stand for, how you show up in those moments of pressure matter now more than ever, and how ai your people and your partners are aligned with that same narrative is really important for, for your success.

So the leaders who treat the narrative as an operating system and [00:35:00] not a department or a group that sits over there, they're gonna be far better positioned in in 2026. So. That's kind of what, what I'm predicting here. I think 2026 is gonna reward those leaders who at the same time can really hold and handle that pressure, uh, that can maintain trust, and that can communicate with clarity.

So I, I think that's our roadmap ahead for 2026.

Anne Green: I love it. We'll try to practice what we preach here. You know, we, we have our predictions and we're trying to bring it to life in our own little pond here at G&S, at our integrated marketing communications group and our two agencies. And we're trying to help our clients bring it to life.

So, as Steve said, we'll be excited to check in in a few months to see how our predictions are unfolding. But before we close here at the start of the year, just wanna thank every listener of Building Brand Gravity. We are. This is the start of our fourth season, Steve. It's very exciting. We have fourth

Steve Halsey: season.

Anne Green: Thank you

Steve Halsey: listeners.

Anne Green: Thank you listeners. It's so exciting and thank you to all of our [00:36:00] incredible guests. We've had so many over the course of, of these past few years, we've had a couple repeats, friends of the pod. Maybe you'll see some of those folks again this year. But overall, as always, we've got the full library of episodes.

A lot of them are very evergreen. Check 'em out. Share, challenge us, you know, come at us with contrary points of view.

Steve Halsey: Add your predictions for 2026.

Anne Green: That's right. That's right. We love, we love to hear it. And, um, keep listening. Just check us out and thank you for going on this journey with us.

Steve Halsey: So thank you for joining us on Building Brand Gravity.

I'm Steve Hals.

Anne Green: And I'm Anne Green, and we'll see you again soon on the pod.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: [00:00:00] You as a CEO, you as a business advisor, you as a junior member of the team need to be indispensable to the team that you work on. And that comes from learning, giving good advice, and having that human impact and that empathy that allows you to communicate your ideas effectively and to be trusted. And ultimately, if you can do that, you're on the right path.

To a great communication strategy or a great career. It doesn't matter what it is, they apply the same way and we forget that to our peril, I think.

Anne Green: Welcome to Building Brand Gravity. I'm Anne Green.

Steve Halsey: And I'm Steve Halsey.

Anne Green: And we're glad to be back with another episode. So Steve and I are both in the G&S New York City offices today. And fun fact, we are right above Macy's and Harold Square and there is a lot of preparation going on for the annual Thanksgiving Day parade right now.

Steve?

Steve Halsey: So move over Walt Disney [00:01:00] World. Just try and walk in the street in front of our office and I'll tell you one thing, Anne. If parade prep in New York teaches us anything, it's that big moments require big preparation. You think about it, the street closures, the staging of the barricades to the grandstand construction, to the parking of all the video production trucks.

And even just the sound checks that are going on an almost hourly basis, and it's a full sensory experience around here, but I think it really ties well into the theme that you're gonna be covering with our guests today. That's really, that all this rehearsing, refining, tightening of the production is so important because you've gotta get it right in the moment.

Anne Green: Yeah, I'm really quite excited for today's episode, Steve, because I'm gonna have an in-depth conversation with an expert on one of my favorite topics, which is media training and presentation skills training and speech coaching. So Benjamin Thiele-Long is joining the pod all the way from Cambridge and the UK to talk about his new book, which is [00:02:00] titled , I love the title, How to Be Utterly Brilliant at Public Speaking, Presenting and Talking to the Media, and obviously this is quite an evergreen topic in our space of communications and marketing, but in my mind, there's still, after all this time, not enough time spent, not by a long shot on thinking seriously and proactively about building these satellite of skills that's needed to be effective in these areas.

What's your take on that, Steve?

Steve Halsey: I think we all wanna be utterly brilliant and a big part of that really starts with understanding that. Public speaking isn't a soft skill anymore, and it shouldn't be a soft skill. It really is a trust accelerator. It's a strategic differentiator and leaders who have to manage a more complex, volatile environment with so many different audiences really need to master it.

And I know we've referenced this in the past, but it really is a core competency that should be taught to MBAs. It can be as important as finance, [00:03:00] it can be as important as understanding different aspect of marketing. So I think that's why your conversation with Benjamin is really important. 'cause it's not just tips, it's really about how leaders show up credibly and with influence.

What about you, Anne? You've been doing so much high level media and speech coaching lately. What's most important for our audience to understand?

Anne Green: Yeah. I think for me, and I talked with Benjamin about this too, is it's so fascinating how siloed or divided these tracks were before. So media training on one side and then presentation skills or speech coaching on another.

It's not to say they never crossed over, but in many cases they were thought of as separate practices. You'd hire them in separately, et cetera, et cetera. Since COVID. I've been seeing it come together more and it makes a lot of sense given the media landscape. I was excited to see Benjamin's book and as I got to know him, because he has such a holistic view of this, not just in terms of combining media training [00:04:00] and what we understand as speech coaching or core presentation skills.

Which to me are a little bit different. Orders of magnitude when you get from the basic skills to really coaching to be on a main stage, et cetera, but also his understanding of how it works in your personal life and your professional life. I loved that about it. The other thing I loved is that his book.

Which I'll get in into with him as well is very much like a handbook. You can open any page and get a lot of value. So I think I'm hoping that's gonna come across in the conversation

Steve Halsey: and I'm sure it will. And the other thing I think is important to stress also is a lot of times people view media training, spokesperson message trainings.

Check the box. I did it. I got my certificate, I'm good to go. And it really is a competency that needs to be revisited again and again to really keep yourself fresh. Because I think what we're seeing is so many things, internal presentations, stakeholder briefings, media [00:05:00] interviews, all really collapsing into very much the same competency.

And that's why I'm so excited to have our listeners hear your conversation. 'cause Benjamin has a way of really framing it up. That you really understand is about building up that muscle memory so that you can show up consistently and confidently in every forum. And I think the timing couldn't be better.

Anne Green: Boy, I couldn't agree more. So with no further ado, let's get into my conversation with Benjamin. I'm so pleased to welcome to our podcast, Benjamin Thiele-Long. Benjamin welcome.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here

Anne Green: and we're here to see this exciting new book that you wrote, How to Be Utterly Brilliant at Public Speaking, Presenting and Talking to the Media, which is something that's very near and dear to my heart.

I do a lot of media and presentation skills, training and coaching, and one thing that's been interesting to me as I've seen those. Skill sets, which used to be very much siloed from each other, come more and more [00:06:00] together, especially post pandemic. So I'm gonna be very excited to get into this with you, but your journey has been really interesting.

So I think just so our audience has a sense, share a bit about that journey from law and communications and back to law and what you're working on now.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here. And it's interesting place to start about that amalgamation because when I think about my career, two very different careers in one sense, but a huge amount of similarity, which is what's always been the driving force.

That's right. I started my career as a lawyer, as a barrister in the uk. I knew that was what I wanted to do since we were about 10 years old, I knew I wanted to be a criminal barrister. And that's what I did. And I was at the criminal bar for about a decade. Just under mainly criminal work a balance of financial crime as well as serious what we call high street crime in the uk.

So offending, which meant essentially I was a courtroom advocate for those 10 years. So 99% of my time I was in court either doing trials or advising. People on issues for trial. And then I moved over into [00:07:00] communications about 10 years ago, then spent another decade in communications.

That link was a really easy one actually. There were quite a few of us in the criminal bar that actually made that transition around about the same time and joined some of those larger agencies on issues in crisis management. As you can imagine, a lawyer's skillset set. Fits very nicely with that.

And so I really had the sort of the reverse trajectory with communications. Most people start as a generalist and become an issues in crisis. I started as an issues in crisis and became more of a generalist. And my decade in comms started in the uk but very quickly moved over to the us where I was in New York and then the west coast.

So more laterally. As part of that career, I ran the West coast office for Kognito, which is an integrated communications agency, really doing financial professional services. I was then the managing director of financial communications at Ketchum. Looking over, looking after a broad range of clients.

And the last three years I was in-house. Petco based in San Diego, the hometown where I was living at that time. More ley being the chief communications and [00:08:00] ESG officer. And right late part of last year made the decision to move back and I'm now back in law full-time with an asterisk there being part-time still working in an advisory capacity.

So working with a few companies on comm strategies, working with a few different people in teams on public speaking or presenting or media training. So really chapter three is the best of both worlds as I see it, getting to do the things that I really enjoy and love and getting to choose who I work with and what I do.

Anne Green: Yeah, my one of my partners, Steve Halsey, who hosts this podcast with me was looking at your book and as I was preparing for this, and he's wow, you don't often see Crown Prosecutor and Petco on the same resume.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: It's quite the mix. But I think you've given me the segue because the sim, the similarity between those two is remarkable.

And it's really a question of how. The book had been something I'd wanted to do for a while. I think mainly because so many people were fascinated by my background as a barrister [00:09:00] and as an advocate and how that translated into communications. And I did find it put me at a bit of a competitive advantage.

'cause if you introduce yourselves while you're in a comms agency as a barrister, people take a second look, and then they wonder why? And then immediately if you can cut to the checks about communications and how to speak and how to be an advocate, it becomes very clear the set of skills that I come with that then translate.

And, particularly with Peco. At the time that I joined fairly new leadership at that point, three years ago an important story that they wanted to tell in terms of becoming public again, it all married with a desire of an individual with Ron as the CEO to elevate the profile. But also as a company, how can we think about this very empirically, but also.

Have a story, have some charm, have something that consumers are gonna enjoy. And I was able to marry those two in a compelling way. And that was really an interesting proposition, but one that was a lot of fun to do.

Anne Green: No, it's been great to reflect on that and I think being [00:10:00] in America how we understand practicing law, people understand there's prosecutors, litigators, but mostly they think of lawyers in a more generalistic way.

So the difference between being a solicitor. In the UK versus being a barrister and being at the bar, and how it is you're speaking the persuasion. It's actually interesting watching so much get argued in front of the Supreme Court right now. I think that's getting a little bit more in the public sphere, but it's always interesting to me and I'm sure you as well, to see how certain threads of things are understood, how they're reflected through the media, what seems to be landing and being absorbed.

So I love you laying that out and the fact that. It's interesting to hear that people, as you would interact with them. Would recognize. Wow, I see the connection with that skillset. And that's what I wanted to bring out at the beginning here, which is that connection. And I think for me and I really felt this in your book, and I wanna get next to why you decided to write it.

I have a sense of it, but I'd love. Love you to share more because [00:11:00] that's not an easy endeavor, to take on. There's a lot of books on how-tos out there in the business world as well as the personal world. But for me, these skill sets of speaking, presenting talking to the press, et cetera, talking to the people in our lives, any stakeholders.

So holistic, so symbiotic with everything we do. And I think one of the things I try to say to my trainees is. The mindfulness and the active engagement, you need to see. It's all around you all the time. There's examples of this everywhere, but people really don't pick up on that and they don't see the connections.

They're like, oh I'm gonna prep for this big presentation, but am I using those same skills in my daily life and business? But tell me, are some of these resonating with you relative to why you wrote this book?

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Yes. Just to pick up on that last point the cues are around us all the time, every day.

And one of the things that I was really quite I would say dogmatic on when I was in communications agencies, were [00:12:00] instilling this proactive nature in my teams to read, to watch, to see, to be a sponge because the more that you see and absorb whatever it is taken from. Can inform a communication strategy, whether it is, how do you make a technical message more appealing?

How do you take a big story and make it a small one in one says, all of these things are around us in what we read, whether we enjoy television programs, whether it's opera, whether it's book, it doesn't matter. They're all around. And this is why reading is such an important part of what we do and we take time to do that.

And the first agency I was at. At Page field, when I moved from law to comms, the first thing all of us did, regardless of our title or what level we were, everybody had TM toast together. Very British. We have team toast together and we'd read through the newspapers, physical newspapers, and I can hear some millennials just gr grabbing their brains going, what?

What do you mean? But we did, and we would thumb through, but it would, we would. Look at things like editorial tone. We would look at what stories being picked [00:13:00] up in one outlet versus all of them. Is it a general interest story? Is it something more specific you'd say, Hey Jim, you aren't you working on this with your client?

And that, that is such an informed process. It informs what we do, and I think that. That is part of the book. The part of the book is there to try and instill people and just to remind people that there is no one way of doing things. There are fundamentals, there are techniques which I'm sure will come on to.

Later in this conversation that underpin. But just like architecture, not every building looks the same, but funda fundamentally, there's principles of structure and geometry that make buildings stand up. It's really the same kind of principle. So if you get the structure right in the foundations, then you can be as creative as you would like.

And why I wrote the book, and I genuinely mean this. This is not a money spinning exercise. This is me. Sharing the knowledge that I've been lucky enough to have, and I think that this is one of the most important things we can do as business leaders when [00:14:00] we get to the top of our careers as running an agency or chief communications officer.

It is, I believe it is a fundamentally important role that we have, is sharing that knowledge that we've been gifted, not keeping it for ourselves, and I was incredibly lucky. To work with some wonderful people in agencies that showed me and taught me things that I have carried forward, which I share in the book.

I also recognized that as a barrister, I was incredibly lucky to be taught public speaking skills. Most of us are not taught. These skills. We don't, there's no courses at college or school that say how to talk well in a group or how to present a keynote, or how to give a wedding speech or any of those things.

We, we are just expected to know how to talk well in a group, and I think this is fundamentally why I hear so many people say, oh, I can never do that. I can never talk in front of a group and this book is here to prove people wrong. I wanted to dispel that rumor, but I'm sharing. All of the knowledge that I've gained over 20 plus years.

And essentially I'm sure a lot of people will be very cross with me [00:15:00] for writing this book because I've distilled what one might get in a $3,000 presentation training seminar and put it into a $15 book. And that's very deliberate because this is my way of sharing all of the benefits and the good knowledge that I've had to allow other people to apply it and be brilliant themselves.

Anne Green: I love that. I think there'll still be a business model just given. Not a lot of people are self-motivated, but I do, for those that are, I, and I wanna get into this in just a minute. This is so accessible and clear, but I wanna double click as the tech folks say on something you said that is so real to me and been such a pet peeve and pain point, which is.

The lack of formal training or attention to that. And I used to notice it early on, and I hope this has changed, let's take the MBA for example, which is training chief executives especially those that will end up in the C-suite which are the individuals that folks like you and I are counseling, and it's truly the most [00:16:00] senior executives that I still actively work with as.

I'm gonna own my skill enough to call myself a master media trainer. I've put in way more than 10,000 hours over 30 years. So when you look at the MBA line, of course, heavy on finance, operations, et cetera, but the communication skill piece of it and the formal skills, but also the soft skills and the emotional intelligence that's required.

To connect across stakeholders and take an issue that's perhaps very contentious and find the humanity and connection in it. Find the shades of gray. I just think it's woefully under leveraged. And for our young people, there's so much discussion today about AI and what are the careers of the future, and it's very interesting to hear a lot more discussion of the liberal arts, of connection, of emotional intelligence.

And I feel like this fits right into that because this is the most essential way in which. Humans as a species connect outward and connect with each other.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: It, it's true. We are, you can't [00:17:00] deny the impact that technological changes have on society. We were talking right now about ai.

Previous to that it was the internet. Previous to that, it was other things and AI is. The most incredible tool and the way that it is changing the world. You just look at the levels of investment that are being put into it. You don't get investment in companies that are doing things that are not gonna change the world.

And that really is what we're seeing. And I think New York Times had a fantastic article weekend just gone about the 16 billionaires that have been created through ai. That there is so much money being put there and it will change the way that we live and for the better. I'm not a, a tech deni by any stretch of the imagination. But what AI cannot do is it cannot cancel. It cannot give judgment, it cannot give perspective. It cannot create trust or reliability. And this is where we come in. It doesn't matter where you are at your career, whether you are the CEO of a company focused, a company that is wanting the trust of investors, consumers, or your employees.

Whether [00:18:00] you are just starting out your career in comms, wanting to get a foot on the ladder and be part of that team, advising those people. The way that you do that, of course, is by assimilating information. It is, of course, by learning. It is of course by using technology to your strengths, but ultimately you've got to translate that.

Into a dynamic of trust, one of reliability. Mike Mohan, who was the in interim of Petco, and he was the chief operating officer of best Buy, used to just talk about the say, do ratio. And it, again, I put it in the book because it's such an important thing. Say you're gonna do something, do it.

Say that you've done it, do it. It's such an important part. And the way that we interact. It's so important that you essentially the word that I keep coming back to is being indispensable. You as a CEO, you as a business advisor, you as a junior member of the team need to be indispensable to the team that you work on.

And that comes from learning, giving good advice and having that human impact and that empathy that allows you to communicate [00:19:00] your ideas effectively and to be trusted. And ultimately, if you can do that, you are on the right path to. A great communication strategy or a great career. It doesn't matter what it is they apply the same way.

And we forget that to our peril. I think.

Anne Green: I love you centering trust. I think as one of the critical outcomes, which is a constant, you're constantly weaving and building that as we know, you put a lot of trust equity in the bank and it can get wiped out right away. But this is a good segue to something I said earlier, which is when I was first learning media training, which was at Berson Martel in the early nineties when it was the largest agency in the world, obviously Edelman.

Took that title a while after that, but, and I was in the New York office and that was the largest single office of any agency in the world, about 600 professionals. And they had a really robust media training group and some of the most incredible senior trainers that I got to observe. And then over time, I also started to observe presentation skills and speech coaching, which is, some people did both.

But [00:20:00] in terms of when it was hired or contracted or brought in, it felt to me for decades, quite distinct Now over time. To put it practically, no, duh, like I figured out how interrelated they were. But during COVD, what I really found was that these merch together, the virtual setting, but also the way media interactions are changing, let's say the rise of even this medium podcasting or.

Many of the executives I work with, they'll be doing a stage fireside chat with a reporter. So what is that? Is that a public speaking engagement or is that a media interview? It's actually both. It's very holistic and I'm also seeing, I think because again, the multichannel nature of being a front facing executive.

So much more awareness of the full package. And that's why the holistic approach, when you literally have in your title I'm looking at here at public speaking, presenting and talking to the media, I'm like, Bravo. So tell me [00:21:00] why you have that view of a more holistic approach.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: There are two parts to it. I think just picking up on the latter part is the ways in which we now communicate are disparate and changing and amorphous and also.

Any business leader is now expected to do all of them at the same time. And we gone are the days where typically your CFO might do the earnings call, they would never go on a media tour and you do your active best to keep them out of the view of your employee base and you have someone else do the, do the town hall.

That has changed COVID forced. I think accelerated the change that was already happening. But you take the modern CEO or CFO in today's world in America publicly listed, you're doing four earnings calls. That means you're talking to investors. It means you're talking to employees, means you're then probably doing some media and then you're doing a town hall and some other things.

And that town hall is probably hybrid. Those media opportunities are hybrid. All of those are happening now. And so [00:22:00] you have to be a little bit like a Swiss Army knife. And I think in order to. Both be that speaker, but also be an advisor to that speaker. You have to be able to see around all those corners and think about what is the message and what is the consistent message and message points that we wanna deliver to all of those audiences.

But then how will we nuance them to the different audiences? And I think this is to your point. About the AI versus the empathy. That's where we come in as advisors of how to tailor that message. Whether it is the language you use or the anecdote, they have to be different. They absolutely have to. And if you were to draw an analogy I'm a big fan of tennis and the fundamentals of tennis are tennis.

The game is played in a certain way, but you can't tell me a tennis. On lawn at Wimbledon in the same way you do on a clay court or the same way you might do in the rain. You have to adapt to the scenario you're given, but you don't have, we have very few tennis players that say I'll only play on clay court in the [00:23:00] dry.

You've got to be able to have that ability to maneuver. And so the more and more I thought about the book in order to cover. The different types of speaking event that we have and that we'll have. I wanted to make sure that we had fundamental principles so that the reader is not overwhelmed at trying to learn what appears to be a different technique for every scenario.

Rather, what is the fundamental thing that if you get right. You will be as brilliant as you can be. And then of course, adding a few tactical things for various scenarios. So podcasting, I include in there, talking on a panel, a competitive pitch, a keynote, immediate interview. All of those things have slight nuances, and we know those as trainers, but what I didn't want everybody to think is now I'm gonna do a panel.

I have to relearn everything. No, same things, but you might wanna also add these various elements onto them. And I think that has to be the way that we are now, partly because. We work in such an agile way. And secondly, you never know what call might come of saying, we need you on this podcast, or can you do a [00:24:00] panel?

And you have to do it at short notice. The ability to be agile is really important. And to be able to counsel that and prepare for that I try and deal within the book so that people do not feel overwhelmed at any point. The book is trying to take all those things that will be overwhelming and simplify them in a way of going, no, you got this.

You got this. Think about it. Apply it. Go get 'em. That's really what the book is of morally meant to do to people.

Anne Green: I love that. And the fact is that there's a set of practices that you build over time. Some of them relate to the content, some of them relate to the voice, some of them relate to your body and how it all comes together depending on what medium you're in and demystifying that is really critical.

So you understand what those building blocks are. Finding those moments of awkwardness you have to push through. What is the thing you do that's distracting? What, how is it that putting it all together feels awkward? So you can make, I talk about getting through the crucible to the other side, where.

You become more awkward to get more comfortable. But the other [00:25:00] analogy I try to remind people of, especially with media interviews, because I find that when executives have been trained in the past, so I've had training, but it's been a while, I remind them that if you walk into a gym. After not working out for quite a long time, and you just go full out, you will injure yourself.

You have to stretch those muscles, warm them up, build them up. And I think that's why it's important to understand these as a set of practices that you literally practice. There's art and science to it. There's the science of how the brain works, how the brain picks up information. And I wanna get into some of that in a moment.

But there's also the art of it, of what you're bringing to it, of yourself. But that's why I love. Your premise that it could be the CEO presenting on an earnings call or in front of their annual customer event, or it could be the person that has to stand up and give a toast at a wedding. And it really does amaze me how, and it goes back to some, you said earlier, people.

This tends to be such a primary fear for [00:26:00] so many people. Those two things are that, that idea of getting up and speaking of course, if the wedding toast is scary, then you're very far from doing something as high stakes as an earnings call. But the thing that I wanna. Move to, is what I'm calling form follows function.

So when you go through the book, if you open any piece of it it's just like this is a whole little chapter here. It's the ideas are short, they're presented quickly, they're presented in smaller bites. There's often both. The principle behind it and the action you take, the practical skills, the literal how to, how did you come to that form and what are you trying to do with that?

It's so different.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Thank you. That, that, that is why I wrote the book because I wanted something very different and this is. Not not a knock on anyone who's written a book that is theory based, but what I did not want is a book that had long chapters that you had to [00:27:00] read through and wade through in order to get from the theory to, okay, so how do I apply it?

The point of the book was to be, I kept on calling it a desk side guide, so when I was speaking to publishers before I selected. LIDI was trying to explain this is a desk side guy. What I want people to, I want people to scribble over it. I want people to put post-it notes on it. I want people to deface it.

I want people to make it something that they can't live without and is by their desk the whole time. And why I ended up publishing with LID, who have to say had been amazing partners is they got that part of it from the off their business publishers. They understood that. The basic premise is I have something to teach them and I have the experience to do it.

And the basic premise that. This is a book for busy people that if you are gonna be public speaking, presenting, you're probably fairly high level. You're busy. You don't have time to wade through theory. You wanna be able to pick up something and get to it. So that was the first step. The second step, and I have to say the writing of the book.

Was fairly swift. The [00:28:00] editing of the book was the longer part of the process, which took the be part, best part of the year because I constantly wanted to go through it applying Occam's razor all the time. What have I written myself that is waffle and what do I really need to communicate?

Quickly, succinctly, so the reader has something quick and succinct that they can apply that makes every page of the book worthwhile. And I think I, I even said it when I was doing the initial pitch, I really don't mind if somebody reads the book from cover to cover or opens it at one page. Reads it and uses one skill that they can then apply.

My promise to any reader of this book is you can open a single page. You will learn something new on that one page and can apply it, and that will immediately approve your ability. And so this was really the driving force behind. The book, the way it was written, but then we got really focused with the team about the layout.

We went through several sets of the layout because they even said with an idea, oh, it's on the page and you have to turn it over to get to the [00:29:00] conclusion. No, if it's on a double page, it's left and right. You will never have to turn a page to get to the conclusion of an idea that I'm trying to convey, or the idea will be on the left and a visual representation will be on the right, so you can really absorb it very quickly.

Even down to the font, the layout, the color, simple things like that were really important so that even people with dyslexia can find the book. Very easy to read and to digest. This was important that this is an accessible book for everybody, number one and number two. It was littered, and you and I have talked about this littered with positive examples of how to apply it.

Gone are the days in. These are all the things not to do. That is not helpful. That is not helpful. When I'm busy and I've gotta go on Bloomberg in 15 minutes time, or I've gotta run a team meeting in 10, that is not helpful. What I gotta do, how do I make it work for me and how do I go get it? And [00:30:00] that process was a long process, but the most joyful.

One for me because seeing that come to life in a way that then is a physical book or an ebook or however people want to use it that's the real joy I think, in what I've, my vision coming to life as to what I imagined, but also just partnering with LID to make that happen in a way that is exactly how, as I envisioned it on my first day that I thought it through.

Anne Green: I love the idea of making something truly accessible in all senses of the word, and that's a wonderful thing and I think under. Represented and under thought of. The other thing I pick up from what you say is that, communicators, we can weave a lot of narratives very quickly. We tend to be verbal, communications focus, but perhaps what you took away from the law and also practice of a communications art form is that old phrase, less is more.

How do you. Bring it down and bring it down. I remember, like you, I've got PowerPoints galore with tons of tips and I've got full trainings if I'm gonna train someone who's [00:31:00] never encountered some of these concepts before, and you have to go back to fundamentals of how the media work or what does it mean to be successful in presentations, but.

I remember years ago, I, for a very senior executive, I'm like, how do I put for media skills the most important things on a single page so that if he or she were gonna carry it around, there's, it's just absolutely right down to the meat of it. And they can glance at it and take something away. Just a reminder, because you can do trainings and then it fades away.

Unless, as we said before, unless you're exercising that muscle. What are your three golden rules, Benjamin, that you start the book with?

Benjamin Thiele-Long: The three golden rules, and I've got them here. These are things that I really thought and these were rewritten probably about 25, 30 times each of them to make sure I got them really right.

But the three golden rules are essentially three principles that I believe apply to every speaking scenario. And I really mean every speaking scenario that if you do no more than apply [00:32:00] these, you will improve what you have to do. And probably. Make it the most impactful it can be. Golden rule is number one, very simply, communication is an audience defined action.

We have to think about who we're speaking to. Most of all, and that is the scenario, the audience, the size, what time of day you're talking, the level of experience. It can be all manner of things, but we forget that at our peril and so many poor presentations that I've seen are by brilliant people that have just not tailored what they're saying to the audience they're speaking to.

The second is persuasion achieves irresistible outcomes. I don't think that we spend enough time really thinking about the most important question of all is why am I speaking in the first place? What is it that I'm trying to achieve? And quite candidly, I'm sure every leader or every listener on this to this podcast can imagine 18 meeting that they've been in that's lasted 35 minutes or an hour or what have you, and they got to the end of it and saying.

What was that about? That is just a prime example of [00:33:00] whoever was running that meeting, just not thinking what is the actual outcome we wanna try and achieve? And really thinking about persuasion. And then number three is to set the path with a compelling narrative. If you have a set of ideas, they can be really strong.

But if it is hard for your audience to work out how those points come together to your conclusion, you are making them do too much work, rather than thinking, what is the most straightforward way that I can explain this? Not only for me to explain it, but for someone else to understand it. And again, this is really tying back what I think.

We think about in law all day, every day, and about persuasion and what is the most straightforward common sense version of events that leads to the outcome that we want. Usually it's either to, in a jury trial, convict or not convict. If it is in a litigation to come to a conclusion rather than going litigation.

Doesn't matter what it's, but we're trying to lay that path. And so what I put is these three golden [00:34:00] rules. There's, they're like a GPS. If you think about. Who are my audience? What is the outcome I want, or the action that I want to achieve? And what's the narrative that will weave all these ideas together?

You'll automatically have a more persuasive, compelling, and brilliant. Set of talking points than if you didn't think about those things. And those golden rules in my view, underpin everything we sell do. They've underpinned my prep for this podcast. They underpin what every CEO will think about in an owns call.

What anybody might even want to think about very simply in a wedding toast, whatever the scenario, apply them, you will sharpen and hone your focus. 'cause if you don't do that, the analogy is it's a magnet wire compass. Get distracted by all manner of things rather than what am I gonna talk about and how am I gonna talk about them?

That's really what it's all about.

Anne Green: I love the idea of starting with the audience. And the other thing I'd add to what you said is, what is that audience disposed to believe or to hear? I think there's very little attention [00:35:00] paid to that often, because, I have a double consciousness as both a practitioner and a CEO now an organizational leader, and my pond is a bit smaller than the large multinationals, but we still have a sizable workforce that's made up of different types of disciplines.

And there's two agencies within our group, and there's different roles and ages, different levels of experience and. I'm always trying to think about what are all these different stakeholders predisposed to hear from me. So it's something I try to speak with my trainees a lot and also my peers.

The other thing I would pick up from what you said is I talk a lot with folks about what success looks like in speaking. And I try to make a distinction between a, they can accurately. Receive and hear what you're saying. And that has a lot to do with speed, articulation, pace, the overall formation of your content.

Does it, I often talk about drop the breadcrumbs or follow the bouncing ball, but the second thing I talk about is do they walk away with your most [00:36:00] important point? If you were going to do the old, if they remember one thing, what would it be? Can you pass that test? And I think it goes to what you're saying, which is that clarity of narrative.

One of the things I find interesting as I work with executives, and they often ask this question, is what makes a truly great speaker or presenter or connector? What are, and that it is subjective, right? But also when you're in the room or you're in their presence, even if it's like.

A one-on-one, you know it When you feel it, as different as those personalities or events might be. What are some of those things for you, Benjamin, that makes someone great versus just good or fine or not fine?

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Two things. One is a bit more empirical, one is a bit more emotional. The first is the empirical one is, I think truly great speakers are those that are able to.

Quickly and effectively adjust between different audiences and scenarios. I think if you get to the point where you [00:37:00] know the message and the focus and what it's you wanna talk about, but can go between an employee and a Bloomberg presenter or an investor and a customer, and. Be able to tailor what it is you have to say in the way you say it to that audience quickly and nimbly.

That is to me empirically a brilliant speaker. And there are certain people that can do that really well. And Kristen Peck, Zoetis, Margaret Edison at Lowe's. Two, just utterly brilliant people that no matter what scenario I, I see you listen to the men, they're hitting the nail on the head with the audience that they're speaking to in a way that is very.

Natural as well. And I think that then comes to the second part, which is more of the emotional, for me, good speakers, good advocacy, good speaking is when you almost get the speaker, but what they're saying just makes good sense. And I think that's sometimes it's quite hard to pin down exactly what that is, but you absolutely know it.

When you feel [00:38:00] it, you, you know it because. You are invested as a listener and get accused as a speaker. To those things as well. This is why I think it's really important that we get our head out of our talking notes, and outta the screen and looking at the audience. We're communicate, look for visual cues, look for nods, look for agreement, look for employees looking energized and.

To your point, business leaders at all levels will have challenging times in their career or in their business's career or their organization's career. And a lot of the time you'll take the stage in a difficult scenario where you are trying to remove fear, uncertainty and doubt. And those are really good things.

Those are good things that we can do. As business leaders to make sure our employer, our customer base are calm or in a crisis scenario. But that, that there also has to be more to, that. You have to remove the fear, uncertainty, doubt. But what is the go get? What is the solution? Have I set it out?

Have I made it easy for you? Here's what [00:39:00] I expect from you. As the business leader, and here's how I'm gonna help you achieve it. If you're able to bring those things in. That's why I talk about making good sense. 'cause you're not only saying, don't feel this way or don't think this thing, but don't worry about this thing.

We got it and I got it with you. Those are for me. Brilliant speakers are able to do that. Regardless of the scenario. And I'm, I'm reminded he, he won't mind me telling this story, but I was lucky to be in chambers with Oliver Blunt QC as he then was KC Emily Blunt's father, he was.

Just an exceptional barrister. He still is an exceptional barrister. He was just a powerful litigator, very strong, very physically strong very determined. The way that he spoke was very powerfully, had a really strong voice, and it was just quite something to watch him in core. And unfortunately I wasn't there, but when Emily Blunt.

Got married to to John Krasinski. He did a speech, which to all intents and purposes, and every version of facts that I hear had, the great and the good of Hollywood, like [00:40:00] Meryl Streeps, laughing, crying, sighing, just, he was able to just completely tailor a very specific advocacy style that he has to a wonderfully.

Dramatic and empathetic father of the bride speech that captured the audience. And if you think about greatness, that it's that's what I'm talking about, the ability to just have those skills but then apply them in a way that just brings it to life to each audience. That's what greatness, I think, can look like.

Anne Green: What a delightful story. I can just imagine it and I'll add one thing that. I think about sometimes, and it's coming out in what you're saying for me at least, which is a really wonderful speaker, I think about the audience's experience. They experience that person. The audience wants to know you have them in your hands, that you've got them.

There's nothing more awful when someone's on stage and it feels like something's going wrong and they're losing it, or they're worried the audience, that sense of anxiety just pours through you and [00:41:00] you're like, oh my God, I hope they're okay. And that can be minor or quite extreme depending on the situation.

But the audience wants to know that you have them with a sense of confidence and command, and yet. The softness and vulnerability that can come with that confidence. And I think it's actually an analogy to the kind of leadership that's very effective today. How do you bring both a confidence and a sense of groundedness?

I do a lot of yoga, so I talk, I get people up standing grounded, rooted in the earth, bring the energy up and out. But that with that, you don't have to hold so tight. You can open your hands and be vulnerable too. So it's an interesting thing you're bringing up for me, but flipping the coin, there's a lot of people that do training out there, and I wanna throw any of them under the bus.

But in media training, and you alluded to this. There's been a style of media training, especially over the decades that I've seen, and these were very great professionals, but a lot of them came outta broadcast news, often men just because of that was the gender that was mostly in that hard or hitting [00:42:00] financial news especially, and they tended to come in training like, I'm going to destroy you.

I'm gonna show you how scary it is. I'm gonna break you down. I'm gonna, and I often say to a lot of my clients, Hey. You have to understand that many of the most elite attorney most elite reporters are trained in the style of attorneys. They know how to do deposition style, which means they hand you a shovel and you start digging and you're at the bottom of the hole before you know it, yet many, there are very few of my clients that will end up on the US show 60 minutes or pick the equivalent on the BBC.

So do you have a sense today of what some of those characteristics of trainers that you feel are well matched to this moment?

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Mean, I absolutely share your internal or maybe external eye rolling. I have been in, I mean my the British experience, the British equivalent for that is you get a journalist who was, I don't know, the ornithology reporter for the West Anglia Daily Times, who is now a media trainer and started to some CEO of how to do, an annual report on a town hall, and you're [00:43:00] thinking what is happening here?

But the real issue with that, it's this sort of. Emphasis on the what not to do so much. What not to do. What not to do. And you think you spent 75% of the time telling me what I shouldn't be doing what should I be doing? I'm hoping that those days are now in the rear view mirror. If not that they are getting to there.

The media trainer of today, coming back to your. Your question a little earlier has to be training in a way that applies core skills that are then applicable in different scenarios. And of course, if you have the privilege of doing a half day media training with an expert, putting them through their paces in different ways.

I loved media training when I was, when an agency and I enjoyed the research that I needed to do. That's to learn this expert set of skills so that I could show up well to do practice runs, but then also giving feedback in a way that is actually useful. And I talk about feedback in the book quite a lot because there's a section specifically for PR pros, and I think this applies to media trainers generally, but pr [00:44:00] people more more on a day to day.

How do you give feedback to someone who's new to this versus give good feedback to somebody who's more experienced? There is. Wide feedback that is transferable. So that can be used in a different way so that there is not the need for ongoing support. You don't need another session because we're now not talking to Bloomberg.

We're doing a fireside or we're doing a panel. You don't need to do another training. Hopefully the skills should be there. But then also developing a and one of the one of the most positive experiences I think I had. In-house and also with long-term agency relationships is when you could have a set of speakers where you could do feedback and it could be a word or a phrase or a key phrase, and that person knew exactly what you meant.

You didn't have to go through all the theory again. You say That was great, but re redo, point, proof, anecdote, structure, or it could be something very simple in terms of the feedback, like pace. You don't have to go through chapter and verse of what you meant. They go, got [00:45:00] it. They would go again with the structure that you've taught them or with the keynote that you've taught them that they're able to apply.

So I think media training has to refocus more on what to do. Positive examples, good examples of what that looks like. Good examples outside of their world to show them new things. I also see that there is a bit too much you, we get this a lot. In professional services, for example, you get a lot of professional services firms that look at their brand and they want to become friendlier or softer or more approachable, for example, or, whatever version of that they have, and which is the right thing to do for many professional services organizations when you think about the reputation of that industry.

But then they will show. A trainer will show examples of other people within the industry rather than say someone in a consumer facing industry that is that bit more personal, is able to develop a business message, but in a way that is a little bit easier to understand or a bit more consumer centric.

Those are the examples we should be showing to say, okay, if you want to get a bit more like that. Here are some good examples of what that looked like and I [00:46:00] particularly did that a lot in financial services where these people were really in the weeds of financial services or FinTech or banking, whatever it is, and go, I dunno, why do we listen to a retail interview?

Why don't we listen to a nonprofit interview? Something that is connecting to a different audience, but showing you those skills of how they can be applied and just softened ever so slightly to still be. Effective in the audits you have, but also impactful to the new audiences that you want to get.

Anne Green: I think that's a wonderful way of looking at it because why should you?

Be stuck just in your sector, in that same box as everyone else. This has been an amazing conversation. We literally could talk about these things forever. I loved meeting you and getting into the book. So my final question often on our podcast is, what has you and its gravity today, something fun.

You know what's what do you have a passion for? What are you excited about right now in your life?

Benjamin Thiele-Long: If I'm allowed to pick two things really briefly, first one, the, something that has me in my gravity right now is just having moved back to the UK recently. Just the story that's happening with the BBC right [00:47:00] now, it's a really interesting.

Story. I think for anybody on this podcast, anybody who works in comms, you should be looking at this and listening to what's happening as the BBC story evolves. What this might mean for reporting, how we think about reporting. When you consider, sorry, sorry to go there. You've got one side of the pond.

You've literally got the president calling a journalist saying, quiet piggy 'cause of a question that's not asked. And we've all now moved on from that, whereas the BBCI have not moved on from that. But please, I feel like the media have moved on and we've just gone to what's the next thing. But we're really looking very forensically at the BB, C story.

And this is an organization that's even looking at itself and the way that it reports. And we've got people, resigning or looking at the, this is a really interesting story for anybody. And I think it's gonna have legs and hopefully it's good for our industry that the media holds itself a little bit more to account or, and readjusts over time.

But ultimately the BBC is such an important part of the British culture and institution that it'll be interesting to see what changes happen and how the [00:48:00] BBC forms as part of that. On a more positive note the other book, the other thing that's holding me, its Gravity is a book, which is there are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shaak, and there are very few novels that I've read.

Twice over. This is one of them. Not only is it just the most incredible novel, the weaving of storytelling from ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Day London, and these people and these characters. If anybody wants to look at a masterclass in narrative and weaving together stories, read this book because it's just beautifully written, beautiful stories and just such a wonderful concept.

But I think it's holding me in its gravity also because ultimately the key theme of the book is about kindness. There is so much and I've been really thinking about kindness a lot recently. Maybe it's part of my age, maybe it's part of my sentimentality. Maybe it's just part of life, thinking about.

Is what we're doing kind. Should we think more about us as [00:49:00] organizations, even very commercial organizations? Are we speaking with kindness? Are we treating employees kindly? Are we treating each other with kindness? Can there be more? It it's no longer a detractor from the business of business.

I think to your point, you talked about, we have tough decisions to make, we have tough feedback to give, but you can still be kind in doing that and it really. Even comes down to communications to get too deep into it. But you think of the Dalai Lama's always said before you speak, ask yourself three questions.

Is it true, is it necessary? And is it kind? Kindness is very much part of how we speak to each other and how we should speak to each other. And it's just something I've been thinking about a lot and the book has been a really good reminder of. Just a little bit more kindness every now and then can have such a positive impact on people's lives and the way that messages are delivered, even if it's bad news.

So it's something we should hold in our hearts, everything that we do in the world of work.

Anne Green: That's a wonderful recommendation and I co-sign on that very much. We are lacking in kindness and compassion [00:50:00] right now, and the more we can reflect on that, the better. Benjamin, thank you for joining us.

We really appreciate you taking the time to be on Building Brand Gravity.

Benjamin Thiele-Long: Thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's some serious pressure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'd argue perhaps even in law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you modified your contracts? Um,

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

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

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

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

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

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

And frankly, you know,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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