S3
Bonus Episode 1
Programmatic and the PR Landscape
About This Episode
We unpack the traditional media landscape, look at how PR has evolved in recent years, and how PR can complement a digital marketing strategy.
Glenn Frates | Regional Vice President, Cision
Ben Brodie | Director of Corporate Development and Channel Partnerships, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
More and more communication pros are reporting directly into the C suite. And that really demonstrates the need for all of these teams more than ever to work together. What’s good for paid is good for PR is good for social, you never know where you’re gonna get your audience right whatever channel paid, earned, owned a good PR message translates across all three and hopefully resonates and is picked up good content has good content no matter what channel you’re hitting.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:33)
But then you think about the social landscape. The research data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Sneha (00:00:50)
Did you know that 59% of PR professionals believe that technology will be key in driving industry transformation? Well, PR has come a long way from traditional media for reputation management, and strategic communication. Public relations can now benefit in a number of ways from technology by doing things like identifying media outlets, making the right contacts and monitoring brand mentions. Thanks for tuning in. And welcome to the first bonus episode of season three of the How Agencies Thrive Podcast. I’m Sneha Suhas, the Education and Development Manager here at StackAdapt. To kick start this series of episodes, we have Glenn Frates from Cision and Ben Brodiefrom StackAdapt. If you haven’t guessed it yet, in this episode, we’re trying to understand all things. br I’ll now pass it over to the experts in the industry to introduce themselves before we get chatting on specifics. So Glenn, can you tell us a little about your professional experience so far, and also introduce yourself?
Glenn Frates (00:01:59)
Sure, absolutely. Thank you for having me today. It’s great to be here and chat about all things, good content, and PR and how it relates across I think, all channels. My name is Glenn Frates. I’ve been with PR Newswire Cision for 20-plus years now, I run North American operations for the distribution team. And Cision is a pretty fantastic company. I’m a little biased, obviously, in regards to really being able to connect a communications pro across the entire spectrum of what they need to do in regards to their day-to-day job, from distribution to monitoring, to really having just a great impact on getting in front of audiences across different channels. And I think that’s going to be the main theme of what we’re going to discuss today. So again, thank you for having me.
Sneha (00:02:55)
Thanks so much for joining us. I’ll now pass it to Ben.
Ben Brodie (00:02:58)
Yeah, thank you, Sneha. Glen glad you’re here, we’re certainly really looking forward to you espousing that wisdom that you had in your very long and tenured career on the dualities between paid media, and now how PR and kind of communications is molding both of those together. My name is Ben Brodie, obviously, I’m part of the StackAdapt crew here, I work on both the corporate development side as well as the channel partnerships world. And really our mission in these two departments is to figure out the right types of alliances and partnerships, to move both StackAdapt as well as the industry forward in providing the right types of solutions for advertisers, brands and agencies. And, and this is why the partnership between decision and the StackAdapt is so exciting, simply because in today’s world, of all of these different touchpoints, extremely fragmented types of communication is very challenging to get across to consumers. And so with both of these really, industry forces combining it provides a really valuable solution to all that that needed.
Sneha (00:04:07)
Thank you so much. Great to have you both on the show. And thanks for making time for this. Starting off, I’d like to know how you could define ber in today’s terms we had and still the have the traditional media like radio, print and television. But how does digital marketing take PR beyond this? And can you give us a quick overview of this in terms of paid, earned and owned media?
Glenn (00:04:36)
Sure, I’m happy to jump in. You know, PR has really changed from the days of when I started in regards to at the end of the day PR is a type of you know, it’s brand reputation, right? It’s it’s trying to control the narrative in terms of what you want to get in front of media in front of traditional journalists, as well as what you want to know when you’re targeting other audiences like analysts investors is, and then obviously consumers, it really crosses over all paid, earned owned, in terms of a good PR message translates across all three and hopefully resonates and is picked up, right if you have a good blog, and you have a great executive quote, for example, and you’re gonna push it and you’re pushing it out to analysts and investors, you’re also hoping that you can repurpose that great executive quote, and get in front of earned, you know, earned media coverage, and get good pickup from, from whatever, you know, whatever industry pub, whatever trade is following your company, and hopefully, you can, you know, really get that message out there across, you know, really all three of those main large bucket.
Ben (00:05:46)
And I completely agree. And I think, at the end of the day, we’re all in the same business here, earned and paid. Whatever other buzzwords you want to put to it, we’re under this umbrella, that of communications, we’re all we’re trying to do is communicate a certain message to an end individual. And the vehicles in which we do that, which have historically been siloed, in burned, owned and paid are now having to come together, and the truly effective strategies employ all of these, these pieces as one synergistic approach versus having all these different communication vehicles be siloed and stretched, and in different teams, so on and so forth.
Glenn (00:06:34)
That’s exactly right. You know, from, you know, I work and talk to clients, weekly, from the smallest to the largest brands. And that is a great point in terms of yes, those traditional silos have definitely broken down. And you know, when I jump on a client call, for example, we’ll have multiple teams on that call marketing, will have their product team on the call will have their SEO team on the call, good SEO best practices translate across all t, right, in terms of having that great engaging headline, having a good piece of multimedia, you know, really trying to embrace Google’s high-quality content perspective and what they see as high-quality content that obviously translates to pay. And that’s why I think, you know, we’ve partnered with StackAdapt, for that very reason, we realize, you know, the traditional PRN network is fantastic, right? Obviously, I’m gonna, you know, it’s it’s, it’s abroad, it’s great, we can target really well in terms of getting your content into specific trade pubs and online, getting into specific websites that cover a specific industry. But now with our partnership, we’re broadening the visibility of that same great piece of content, and getting it in front of a channel in front of an audience that we weren’t able to previously get it in front of.
Sneha (00:07:55)
I think that’s a great transition to my next question about where programmatic comes in here. So where does programmatic fit in here? And how does it help build the earned and owned media space for a brand? And what channels within programmatic would you recommend for this?
Glenn (00:08:15)
I can answer the first part, I’ll let Ben answer the second part in terms of recommendations just because I think that’s more his wheelhouse, you know, in terms of how it relates and translates into, you know, going from PR to paid programmatic, it absolutely is a perfect synergy in regards to we target really well, in regards to the PA, you know, for the PR and network and distribution, we target really well again, industries, and we get it in front of, you know, a specific editor that’s following a specific industry. Now, when you move into, you know, your side of the world in terms of advertisement and good content, we have a great ability to offer our clients, hey, we can also then target very specific trade pubs in a different channel, you know, it’s getting, I can the PR and network feed is great, but it doesn’t have the same channel access that for example, StackAdapt has, so it just really goes in, I can’t emphasize this enough. Good content is good content, no matter what channel you’re hitting. So I think that’s another thing that really translates well into programmatic in terms of PR, that good image. And I’m always going to tell you no good lifestyle photography. That’s great for the press release. We embedded it in the press release. That’s great for your blog post. And then obviously, it’s great for any potential paid channels. Well, yeah, absolutely.
Ben (00:09:47)
And it’s all about those two things that they were talking about Glenn, which is reaching large swaths of the right audience, and being able to do that in a high engagement format with that high engagement outcome. And that’s where the duality of certain tactics fit really, really well with PR. Ultimately, when you kind of look at traditional PR placements, and kind of the new age of what we call high engaging advertising. From a display standpoint, you look at things like native display, which is really kind of blending both of those together, where you have these articles, or these basic content, snippets, if you will, being placed in highly contextually, highly relevant areas, within other articles. If you’ve ever seen those sponsored by or Content Widgets, in an article that you just read, that’s very, very relevant to what you’re looking for. That’s effectively a blend between PR and paid advertising, coming together to now put the right message in front of the right person across the right content, and drive that really high engagement back to another piece of syndicated content.
Sneha (00:11:11)
How do you put all of this together? There’s traditional media, there’s social media, your walled garden space dominated by Facebook, Google and Amazon, then you have the open internet, where programmatic thrives. So how do you pull this all in for a great PR strategy?
Glenn (00:11:32)
My advice, for anybody representing you know, a good brand ambassador, my advice, and it really matches with our recent global comms report from decision is teams internally need more than ever to work together, you know, in terms of like, how you put all that together, what the what is a good strategy? You know, we see more and more in the feedback we got just again, in that recent great survey and white paper that we posted in January, more and more communication pros are reporting directly into the C suite. And that really, I think, demonstrates the need for all of these teams more than ever, to work together to again, and you know, it’s been as mentioned, I think, a couple of times, it’s all about, you never know where you’re gonna get your audience, right, whatever channel, Instagram, Facebook, a sponsored placement post on the front page of USA to that an analyst looking at Yahoo Finance, on and on and on, right, hundreds and hundreds, the Bloomberg terminal, you name it, right? You never know where you’re going to capture that good audience. And that engaged, you know, an audience that you want to engage and get follow up from in terms of follow up engagement. That’s all important to click through. And so I think it’s really important for teams to strategize together on what is their output, right? I do hear also on those client calls that I mentioned that I joined, some PR teams have no idea what the paid team at their company is doing. And they really can’t, you know, they need to work together and fall under, I think, the same leadership more than ever, because what paid is churning out or what social the social team is churning out in regards to content, and it’s good engaging content, absolutely translates to PR, and, again, across all channels that you mentioned.
Ben (00:13:21)
Yeah, 100%, I mean, mission-critical. You got a and I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, which is we’re all in the same business of communication. And with Glenn, just as you said, more and more communications professionals are rolling up into the CEO, this now creates a function of things that can’t be siloed simply because we’re all just different vehicles. So the communication professional now has to think about all the different avenues associated with communication and to them, like, let’s let’s just take the way we behave out in the world today. All multichannel. We say it’s a buzzword, but it’s true. We’re always on. I think the latest stat that I saw was we are engaging with digital, over eight hours a day, eight hours a day straight. That’s an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of information. That is just being Firehose that you are on top of that the average household laughed at. I saw 22 different connected devices. So when you have all this, this fragmentation of all these disparate communication channels, you have 1000s and 1000s of messages and pieces of content and people squawking at you from all different angles. It has to be cohesive. Instead of thinking about things as touchpoints, we have to now start thinking about things as journeys. And not only the journeys in terms of oh how does a customer buy but journey He’s in terms of how people think, how you think how you behave, how you become influenced. And that’s where all of this comes together. And why the partnership is so exciting. Because just as Glenn said, historically, things have been siloed, scission, and StackAdapt are trying to bring things together.
Glenn (00:15:18)
Oh, I liked that reference from touchpoint. To journey, I think that’s, that’s a great, a great description in terms of, and it’s also going to add to that it’s all about efficiency. Again, you don’t want to be siloed, and have all these different, you know, out, like you’re putting out in terms of content, you want to be able to, you know, I like to use the phrase repurpose good content across all the channels. So why wouldn’t you do that, what’s good for pain is good for PR is good for social, repurpose that good image, right? And to your point to about, it’s a little scary, right? I know, my house probably matches that number pretty well with my kids and family. And yeah, you again, I think you just never know exactly where you’re gonna potentially find engagement from, you know, the audience that you want engagement from. So I think it’s important to just take it all in one big picture view of lights, you know.
Ben (00:16:17)
That’s the golden key right there, and be able to have technologies and solutions to help facilitate all that mission critical, because trying to do that on your own and, and piecing all that together will make your head explode.
Sneha (00:16:32)
Now, it was interesting to hear that we have 22 connected devices per household. That’s, that’s quite a lot. And it’s a good number to think about. But if you think about ads, we have conversion metrics, like CPC, CPMs. Can you also throw light on how the results are measured? For PR, would you say PR, has now become like ads, thanks to the digital landscape.
Glenn (00:16:59)
For sure, it has ventured in and it is absolutely because of the digital landscape. And I think, you know, it’s been influenced a lot the last, oh, at least 10 years, in regards to really, you know, PR, I don’t think 20 To 30 to 40 years ago, demanded the same type of ROI on the metrics front, and that didn’t even exist, you know, 20 years ago, probably. So that said, I think the number one piece of ROI, if you will, is still you know, earned coverage. And, you know, the media contact, getting a call getting an email from that press release, certainly. But more than ever, you know, in terms of reporting, and what a company is looking for what a brand is looking for, is also related to views on page and click-throughs. You know, it’s really important to have good click rates in regards to and painfully we still see it sometimes in a press release, go out without a good website to good transparent URL. And it’s not very often but it still comes up, you know, day to day in the 1000s of releases that we distribute. But yeah, then we offer and give reporting from you know, whether it’s a free report or much more advanced nicer reports from decision team, you know, click through rates are really important. And then on page read time, you know, did somebody stay 10 seconds? Or did they stay that great, fantastic number of you know, one plus minute engaging with that page before they moved on in their, their life, their day, their headline cues, you know, if they’re a good writer, Spot desk editor, whoever. And I’m gonna say that I’ll leave it at that. So earned coverage, certainly URL click through rates, headline clicks, and then just overall paid the actual story page view.
Ben (00:18:52)
From the paid media side, there’s a variety of different tactics, that decision and StackAdapt employed to boost enhance in obtain those exact things. For example, time on site readership, or, you know, another word for that as quality traffic. There’s there’s certain buying metrics and certain algorithms that both Cision and StackAdapt employ, to go out and find individuals who are more likely to spend 15 seconds or more on a piece of content. And that’s really powerful, especially when you’re out there trying to create these strategies where you have to pay for them. But you’re also really looking for those that right traffic, the right type of individual, for your money. That becomes a really interesting opportunity for you.
Sneha (00:19:44)
Thanks. Yeah, that brings us to the last question. Do you have any tips to share for any person starting out just right now? Any trends they should look for? Any changes anything that to foresee in the next few years.
Glenn (00:20:02)
You know, once upon a time, I think columns teams, paid team social teams that companies again, decently siloed, 10 plus years ago, I think my one is, specifically for somebody just starting out, I think you need to learn as much as you can across all of these areas of expertise. I think a company and a brand will find great value in somebody who knows, good SEO, good multimedia, what makes content engaging across again, all channels, and then being concise, you know, one of the we still see headlines, 200 plus characters, and nobody’s reading those last 100 characters. So I think a tip in regards to creating this content, I think, as quickly as you can engage that audience with a great first lead that headline, and then as soon as they get you get that engagement, and they open up the body of the story, then you know, that additional click, dolt, then bore them, you know, you got that click, now keep that engagement at a high level, keep that content as high quality and relevant and seasonal and timely as you can make it I’ll stop there. I can talk about content for a while longer, but oh, look, your podcast is gonna, you know, you don’t want to go an hour, then what do you got for us?
Ben (00:21:28)
I think that point you made about learning is so critical. Because it was 10-plus years ago, it was a lot easier. It was a lot easier. Today, you know, all those stats that we talked about, it just creates a very interconnected web of communication and how people think. And, to your point, Glen, if you don’t learn enough about at all, you can have a very difficult time trying to either advise clients build these journey type strategies that are really moving business forward in an ultimately doing what we all want to do, which is provide value in the form of communication to somebody receiving that communication. So learning is so important in putting it all together and knowing that there are no more saw silos, and everything is interconnected. And if and if we should probably play a game, how many how many times we said interconnected, you have to take a shot, or siloed. I think both of us like that one.
Sneha (00:22:40)
That’s really great input. Thanks. Thanks so much. And that brings us to the end of the first bonus episode. Lots of great input from Glenn and Ben today. I for one learned a lot of new things. And I hope you as the listener did too. Thank you for tuning in. And thanks for joining us, Glenn and Ben, we have episodes releasing on alternate Wednesdays. So make sure you follow the podcast, catch the episode, right when it drops, subscribe, follow or drop us a line at academy@stackadapt.com. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. See you in the next episode.
Episode Outro (00:23:20)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at StackAapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
