“Communications leaders are increasingly speaking the language of business,” Mike Neumeier, APR, said. As a result, the public relations function is now connected to “revenue, reputation, employee retention, and risk, rather than just relying on activity-based metrics.”
Neumeier is CEO of the Atlanta-based Arketi Group, a marketing agency. He was the guest for the July 29 episode of Strategies & Tactics Live, PRSA’s monthly livestream on LinkedIn that delves deeper into the topics covered in its Strategies & Tactics publication.
When attempting to measure the impact of public relations campaigns, “For decades now, we’ve been talking about ad-equivalency being dead, and audience-reach being a red herring, and everyone knows [those things] won’t cut it,” Neumeier said.
Today, that shift “has not only earned PR folks a seat at the table, but made it an important seat.”
In May, the Arketi Group released its first “CMO Signals & Shifts” report, based on a survey of marketing and public relations executives. The research found that although chief marketing officers have greater influence and stronger executive relationships than ever before, only 38% of CMOs surveyed say the role is positioned to succeed.
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of Strategies & Tactics and host of S&T Live, asked Neumeier what accounts for the apparent contradiction.
“I think that number will increase over time,” Neumeier said. But for now, “The role has expanded faster than the resources, authority and organizational support behind it. That could have left many comms leaders feeling like they don’t yet have the ability to control the outcome, even though it’s not their own fault.”
As Elsasser pointed out, the report also calls alignment with the CEO the number-one driver of success for communications leaders. But what does alignment with the CEO look like in practice?
It used to be that a brand’s image could be tightly controlled with the marketing mix, Neumeier said. “Today, people don’t have to look very far to see if you treat your customers and employees in alignment with the brands you’re putting out in the marketplace,” he said. “It’s so transparent now, which is what I think has earned the chief communications officer and CMOs and the heads of PR a seat at the table, at the right hand of the CEO.”
In the past, the job descriptions companies used to recruit communications leaders often didn’t match what the CEO wanted, Neumeier said.
“The job description might have talked about brand awareness and perception, but when you dug into it, the CEO cared about lead generation. That means they hired the wrong person” for the top communications role.
In recent years, CEOs have become more sophisticated in understanding the types of communication professionals they need, Neumeier said. As a result, more companies are recruiting communications leaders who will enter their roles positioned for success, he said.
Communicators underestimating AI’s impact?
The Arketi Group report shows that public relations leaders have widely adopted artificial intelligence tools in their work. Elsasser asked if some communications leaders nonetheless still underestimate the impact of AI on their industry.
The rise of AI in communications and in the world at large “is moving at rocket speed,” Neumeier said. “Communicators may very well be underestimating how profoundly AI will change not just content creation, but how audiences discover information, how they evaluate criteria, and the opinions they form about your organization.”
Large-language models — artificial intelligence systems that can understand and communicate in human language — “are devouring our content and producing their own interpretations of that content,” Neumeier said. The AI’s interpretation “might not be the interpretation that you or your organization thinks or hopes it will be.”
In the age of AI, Neumeier said, communicators must figure out “how to put the right message out there that is being interpreted in the right way, to showcase what we think, feel and believe.”
Here, Neumeier takes part in the S&T Live Lightning Round…
