T H E P R G E N O M E P R O J E C T

The 2014 C r i t i c a l I s sues Fo rum Ed i to r i a l Se r i e s

MAPPING OUR FUTURE

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Imagine seeing this modified tweet: MT @Socrates: “an unexamined life (or business) is not worth living.”

For the past several years, the PR Council has had the courage to create an annual event (Critical Issues Forum) that hits the public relations industry head on with big challenges to examine and rethink our business and how we do it.

This year we chose “The PR Genome Project: Mapping Our Future” as our challenge to seek out some of the world’s greatest thinkers in areas related to our own needs to evolve and adapt. You can find written summaries here along with links to the videos of the actual sessions.

Last year, the Critical Issues Forum took on the theme “Content Frenzy!” Early in the day, media pundit, author and professor Jeff Jarvis turned to the audience of PR professionals and cried out: “You are all a bunch of lemmings following me over the cliff of a sh*tty business model!” And so we commenced a tough self-examination. You can review the videos here as well.

Whether you call “agency of the future” a trope, a meme or a tired cliché, most in our industry would acknowledge a need to simultaneously reconfirm our core differentiating competence in a converging world, while rapidly adapting to new demands and adopting new skills.

And so we embarked on our re-examining of our PR Genome.

Here you will find our recap and ongoing debate on that evolving genome. From whether we are all deluded in thinking we understand influencer mapping and viral content, to whether we are ready to engage completely new audiences, to disrupting disruptors,

to having the courage to challenge the Kool-Aid-drinking of Big Data, to learning a new visual narrative competence.

I invite you to read our recaps, view our videos and dive into the conversation. And I challenge you to evolve intelligently, without fear of missing out on the coolest new mutation, or clinging too much to a dead-end line of DNA.

Mapping Our EvolutionCHRIS GRAVES

CHRIS GRAVES: MAPPING OUR EVOLUTION

“ Most in our industry would acknowledge a need to simultaneously reconfirm our core differentiating competence in a converging world, while rapidly adapting to new demands and adopting new skills.”

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What proves that data beats human intuition? Data.

Advocates of big data can point to a growing body of research showing that data analysis beats human instincts in everything from purchasing decisions to parole-board rulings to late-inning pitching changes. Those questions and many if not most others, they argue, should simply be answered by algorithms.

So should public-relations professionals be using data as aggressively as campaign managers and baseball executives? Not necessarily, cautioned the “Big Data vs. Big Intuition” panel at the PR Council’s Critical Issues Forum.

“People feel like, ‘Oh, if it’s big data, it must be the truth’ — no, there are ways you can use data that may be incredibly wrong,” noted Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Dstillery.

“I want to take a stance against the quantification of everything,” added Tim Leberecht, CMO of NBBJ. “The world is a garden, not a machine. PR professionals are

gardeners, not engineers.” Public relations is in many regards a romantic pursuit, he said, a question not of what is but of what can be: “Data is reactive — it tells you what the world is. Innovation is about what the world is not.”

Is big data smothering your creativity?

Speakers

TEDDY GOFF Partner, Precision @teddygoff

TIM LEBERECHT CMO, NBBJ @timleberecht

CLAUDIA PERLICH Chief Scientist, Dstillery @claudia_perlich

“ THE WORLD IS A GARDEN, NOT A MACHINE. PR PROFESSIONALS ARE GARDENERS, NOT ENGINEERS.”

– @timleberecht #PRGenome

ANTHONY PALETTA Special to the PR Council

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IS BIG DATA SMOTHERING YOUR CREATIVITY?

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Data offers a tremendous utility, the panel observed, but it does have its limits. “The question is how much can data solve?” Leberecht said. Perlich noted that machines can optimize solving a repeat problem:

“With my data I can optimize the hell out of everything, but you really don’t want me to.” What is absent is any trace of new or alternative possibilities. She noted a friend’s ideal path to JFK airport in New York. Repeat use offered a rigorous means of testing its possibilities, but in isolation; the roads not taken may have offered better options.

Still, study after study shows data’s superiority as a tool for things like selecting job candidates and making other important business decisions. And the panel acknowledged that data provides excellent material for mining. But it doesn’t tell you, “What could we do better differently?” noted Teddy Goff, co-founder of Precision Strategies. “There is almost no room for intuition in a controlled experiment.” There are quirks that may have gone unnoticed and can’t be easily accounted for by conventional metrics. “People often behave in ways that they can’t explain,” he said.

Sometimes the best-studied paths can go terribly awry. The flop of Tropicana’s bottle redesign was certainly not the result of an absence of rigorous testing.

“Tropicana had clearly tested the new bottle — it worked in a focus group,” Leberecht explained. “They all do focus groups, they all test.” But in this case the most studied conclusions ran up against consumers’ strong preference for a familiar packaging shape.

Some failure, especially in a realm in which success is uncertain and trial and error will prove the only sure route to tomorrow’s sensation, may be inevitable and necessary. “You have to be wrong very often to arrive at one popular viral solution,” Lebrecht said.

New and startling successes are a model, and it’s understandable why they become the focus of intense study. The ice bucket challenge received considerable attention, but perhaps the most important observation is that it’s been done. A repeat would be “reductive, a copy,” Lebrecht said. The task at hand is trying to imagine something that doesn’t exist. Sometimes these changes can be impossible to predict — a shift from a black to gray font — but yield striking results.

The task is to use data in ways that enable and support creativity instead of smothering it with mountains of fact. Your goal, inevitably, should be something outside of the realm of empirical evidence. “Never start with data — you’ll just go and get lost in the weeds,” Perlich said. Ask yourself what you want to achieve.

“Once you have that, connect it back to data,” she said.

There may be a tendency, on the parts of clients and firms, to think that quantification will provide clear and firm vision. But that could prove a recipe for complacency. “Do you want to get better at persuading people, or do you want to make your client happy and convince him to stay with you?” Perlich noted. Data may provide an illusion or reality of stability for a time, but it might obscure the possibilities that pioneering intuition can — and often has — secured. There is no simple solution for striking a balance between these factors, and it may well emerge as a realm of contradiction. That, Perlich noted, is in fact the most fertile soil for innovation: “When intuition and data clash this is where magic happens.”

“ WHEN INTUITION AND DATA CLASH, THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS.”

– @claudia_perlich #PRGenome

IS BIG DATA SMOTHERING YOUR CREATIVITY?

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“Opinion leaders” are whom everyone wants to convince. “Going viral” is what everyone wants to accomplish. Both lofty and excellent goals — and both widely misunderstood.

The panel “Buzzkill Law and Tipping Point Toast — What Do We Really Know About How Influence Works?” at the PR Council’s Critical Issues Forum sought to tease out just what, amid a realm of desirable buzzwords, we have determined about the function of influence.

The backdrop, those influential texts on influencers: There is Katz and Lazarsfeld’s two-step flow of communication. There are Bass and Rogers’ diffusion models. There is, of course, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point.” And since these, there’s been the internet, transforming most ideas and realities of just how influence spreads.

Duncan Watts, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, outlined a gradual shift in this early model of the “opinion leader.” Originally, the model described opinion leaders as significantly attentive to, and susceptible to, media. But the fragmentation and distribution of digital media has made this group far more influential. “They’re like mini-broadcasting stations as individuals,” he said. “It sort of took the media out of [the process].”

The notion of social influence diffusing “like a disease,” as Watts described, became widespread, and a universe of analogies about contagion sprang up — given a jolt by Gladwell’s “law of the few,” and culminating in the recent concept of virality and “going viral.” The internet, and Twitter in particular, seemed to offer an ideal body to introduce epidemics of information, with limitless possible connections and channels in which to spread. “Going viral” became both a goal and popular expression — and yet it often means far less than it seems to imply.

Watts cited a study of six projects seeking to go viral called “The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks,” by Goel, Watts and Goldstein. A key to this study, Watts suggested, was the selection of projects aspiring to virality, not simply of those that had succeeded. “You do need to study unsuccessful things,” he said. Some of these projects didn’t work, but it’s the properties of success that proved more interesting. The pyramid of ideal virality — in which each

EXTENDED POPULARITY VS. GOING VIRAL

Why extended popularity is more realistic than ‘going viral’Speaker

DUNCAN WATTS Principle Researcher, Microsoft Research, @duncanjwatts

ANTHONY PALETTA Special to the PR Council

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retweet breeds multiple retweets which leads to more of the same — proved rare. Far more common were linear strings in which a single retweet would breed only a single retweet, or small veins of success.

A look at Twitter data is much more sobering. It yields, he observed, the “Buzzkill Law of Social Media.” Ninety percent of tweets are not retweeted at all; 8 percent of tweets receive even one retweet; 1 percent receive two retweets. The percentage of tweets retweeted more than three times is “infinitesimal,” Watts said. “If you’re having fantasies about triggering viral epidemics on social media, these are your chances.” The ice bucket challenge was a “miraculous event,” he said, putting the odds of similar epidemics at “1 in a million, 1 in a billion.”

Genuine virality is a very rare condition. Perhaps some encouragement is that standard popularity — a term with which it is commonly confused — is a bit easier to achieve. “We don’t really think of the Super Bowl as a viral event, it’s a popular event,” Watts said. On the internet, as anywhere, “bigger events are just getting bigger broadcasts,” he said.

Most campaigns or news that sputter will receive not-unsurprising boosts when someone immensely popular stumbles upon them. “This is what we call the Justin Bieber effect,” Watts said. “Things are sort of sputtering along and then Justin Bieber picks it up.” News that Kim Kardashian was receiving $10,000 from advertisers for Twitter mentions proved shocking, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. “Engineering social epidemics is a good idea, but it’s really fantastic,” he said. Comparatively, the Bieber or Kardashian effect is a built-in source of proven reach. It is also, in those rare cases of genuine virality, easy to mistake the cause of its success. Watts noted that background circumstances may often prove more important than content. He turned to the analogy of a

forest fire: “When we see a particularly bad one we don’t say, ‘Oh, the match that lit that fire is a very special match.’” What may be required is much more careful attention to the characteristics of influencers beneath the Bieber-Kardashian level. The ideal, of “lots of easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people,” may be a question, in fact, less of the merits of a particular campaign than of charting the elusive tendencies of these “long chains of susceptible people.” One telling fact: An audience member asked if the rationality of successfully diffused information had been studied. It had, and “turned out not to be predictive,” Watts said.

There are some strikingly successful general influencers, but a frequent contemporary circumstance is that influencers are diverse and different for any particular effort. “Mass media never went away” and still commands a considerable scope. In some areas gatekeepers remain quite the same — the best option for a book is likely a New York Times review — but in others the “role and identity of gatekeepers shifted.” The task remains figuring out just who these people area.

Some simple theories about influence may not, in fact, hold up. Friends, for instance, are generally perceived as trusted and useful sources. But of all the questions you have in a given day, “How many of those questions got answered by friends?” Watts asked. “How many could answer authoritatively?” The next task is to expand the number of relevant people beyond that group, which is easy to discern, and into a larger sphere, which is not.

Work in this field is not yet definitive, but even in partial form it is valuable. The idea of a “science of influence” may be deceptive, but it is worth rigorous attention. One audience member inquired about virality as a brass ring for which everyone is reaching unsuccessfully. Most may not reach, but efforts to better understand how information spreads can at least yield a shift in results from “something that dies out rapidly to something that dies out less rapidly,” Watts said. It is a fatalistic-sounding distinction, but, for 99 percent of campaigns, it is exactly within that margin that, for the moment, success is to be found.

EXTENDED POPULARITY VS. GOING VIRAL

“ ‘GOING VIRAL’ BECAME BOTH A GOAL AND POPULAR EXPRESSION – AND YET IT OFTEN MEANS FAR LESS THAN IT SEEMS TO IMPLY.”

– @duncanjwatts #PRGenome

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Public relations is sometimes about selling packaged goods, but as Farah Pandith of the Harvard Institute of Politics observed, “You don’t want to put people in boxes.” Ensuring that campaigns are both respectful of and effective for changing and diverse audiences is as big a challenge as ever. That was the focus of a panel titled

“Evolution of Our Audiences: Not the Audience You Expected?” at the PR Council’s Critical Issues Forum.

“Brands come to us and want to know about the ‘urban consumer,’” which invariably means African-Americans, noted Trendera President Liz Gray. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population is now urban, so “the idea of the ‘urban consumer’ needs to change,” she said.

And the majority of Muslims reside outside the Middle East — a fact that continues to shock audiences, Pandit

said. Recognizing the many differences among U.S. and world markets is essential to any meaningful connection to potential consumers, and central to this point is an awareness that smaller demographics will change as inevitably as any others.

Gray noted that millennial females are different from their predecessors. “We saw a lot of females supporting females,” she said, citing survey results. Eighty-two percent indicated support for gender equality, but only 20 percent identified as feminists.

For millennials, however, “it will not be about the term,” Gray said. She cited the ABC series “Scandal” and the rise of powerful but flawed female figures in media as proof of a shifting landscape.

The Hispanic market in the U.S. is certainly changing, explained Mónica Talán, executive vice president of corporate communications at Univision. She cited Fusion, the English-language Univision-ABC collaboration, as proof that “third-generation Hispanics are different. ... It’s not about language, it’s about culture.” The definitive factor for Spanish-speaking

How to make campaigns stick when audiences change by the minuteSpeakers

LIZ GRAY President, Trendera, @lizfoleygrayFARAH PANDITH Harvard Institute of Politics, @Farah_PandithMONICA TALAN EVEP, Corporate Communications, Univision, @monitalan

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“ RECOGNIZING THE DIFFERENCES AMONG U.S. AND WORLD MARKETS IS ESSENTIAL TO A MEANINGFUL CONNECTION TO POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS.”

– @Farah_Pandith #PRGenome

ANTHONY PALETTA Special to the PR Council

CHANGING AUDIENCES

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audiences is content that’s “active and engaging” — not its language.

Pandith noted a panoply of differences between American women and women across the globe. Traditional femininity occupies more of a prominent role elsewhere, she observed, but American females are hardly a monolith. “You can be a proud female in a lot of different ways,” she said. There isn’t one path to success or self-assertion, she said; the question is more “how can you be a woman and not ‘Lean In’ but sit up straight, by god?”

The quest to reach these ever-shifting audiences requires vigilance in “figuring out who these influencers are,” Gray commented. The marketing landscape is certain to contain “influencers that may never make many of our radars.” This isn’t simply a question of race or gender; many subgroups simply don’t come to the attention of marketers. She cited the Heineken 100 campaign and Casey Neistat’s gonzo road trip-meets-documentary ad for Nike. Gray acclaimed unexpected collaborations, such as the efforts to promote the film “Edge of Tomorrow” in collaboration with the Tough Mudder series of races, which generated broad publicity in a demographic unnoticed by most marketers.

Campaigns that seek to connect diverse consumers can yield commercial and holistic benefits. Gray noted a KLM campaign that enabled, through an electronic booth, fliers in New York and Amsterdam to “high-five” one another. Coca-Cola has launched connective campaigns in India and Pakistan. These campaigns may not always be perfect, and in an effort to reach diverse consumers there may well

be missteps, but “consumers will accept you if you admit your mistakes,” she said.

Also, one risk is to forget perhaps the most important source of audience change — age. Pandith called millennials the “most powerful generation of kids we’ve ever known,” as they use and shape technology in unprecedented ways. They are also a source of tremendous volatility. “Who are the influencers? Those influencers change per minute,” she said. The pressing and abiding question, which will require ever-flexible answers, is: “How do you make these things tick? How do you create a moment that continues?”

CHANGING AUDIENCES

“ THE QUEST TO REACH THESE EVER-SHIFTING AUDIENCES REQUIRES VIGILANCE IN FIGURING OUT WHO THESE INFLUENCERS ARE.”

– @lizfoleygray #PRGenome

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Disruption, it seems, is everywhere these days. The term flies off the lips of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, sparks vigorous media debates and strikes fear in the hearts of executives. But the real question, as with many buzzwords, is whether it really means anything at all.

That was the query posed to the PR Council’s panel “Is Disruption Dead?” at the Critical Issues Forum. Moderator Gail Heimann, president of Weber Shandwick, set the tone by describing the sudden ubiquity of disruption. Agencies these days, she said, see about “two RFPs per week that ask you to provide a ‘disruptive’ idea.” The media is abuzz as well; Harvard Professor Jill Lepore assailed the concept in “The Disruption Machine” in The New Yorker. Clayton Christensen called this attack a “criminal act of dishonesty.” Marc Andreessen called frequent disruption a

“handmaiden of rapid progress.” Vox, splitting the difference, opined that “disruption is a dumb buzzword, it’s also an important concept.” All of this leading Heimann to

ask the panel: “If we’re all disrupting, what’s the future of disruption?”

The panelists echoed the sense that as disruption fever spreads, the idea

itself has become increasingly diluted. “I’m more confused than ever about what disruption is,” noted David Hantman, Head of Global Public Policy for Airbnb. “I think disruption is just innovation over time.” In his view, the core driver of disruption is not enterprises themselves — it is expectations. Airbnb’s accomplishment, he said, was “disrupting expectations of how [consumers] can

Disruption: Everybody’s talking about it, but what does it really mean?

“ IF WE’RE ALL DISRUPTING, WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF DISRUPTION?”

– @gailheimann #PRGenome

Speakers

BONIN BOUGHVP, Global Media and Consumer Engagement, Mondelez International @boughb

DAVID HANTMANHead of Global Public Policy, Airbnb

GAIL HEIMANNPresident, Weber Shandwick @gailheimann

PETER MCGUINNESSCMO, Chobani

DISRUPTION

ANTHONY PALETTA Special to the PR Council

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travel.” “We are not disrupting anything,” Hantman said. “People have decided they want to do this and we are facilitating that.”

Bonin Bough, VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement for Mondelez International, echoed this point, noting that disruption isn’t simply a product of external conditions, but just as often a result of an organization’s innovative culture. The question for enterprises should be “why have we built organizations that have to be disrupted by other forces instead of by themselves?” Bough wondered. He suggested that this may be changing, thanks to a more nimble breed of modern corporations, which have supplanted “a regime of organizations that have become stuck in protecting their place in the market…instead of innovating.” As he asked, “Why not Hiltonbnb?”

The idea of internal urgency clearly resonated. “If lack of complacency is a form of disruption, I think it’s fundamental to business and brands today,” observed Peter McGuinness, CMO of Chobani. He was quick to point out that lumbering old corporations aren’t the only ones who can fail this test. Steve Jobs was, for more than the first decade of Apple’s existence,

“repeatedly crushed by incumbents” before the company “completely reinvented themselves and the world.”

Whatever disruption is, it is creating a division in the business world, between those companies that embrace emerging possibilities and those that set out to combat them. Bough noted the battles between Borders and Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix as parables demonstrating the perils of complacency. In contrast, he said, Bell Labs, the company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that’s now the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has embraced waves of change, deftly shifting with the tides for nearly a century.

That level of agility, the panel agreed, comes from a persistent, abiding awareness of the world beyond outside an organization’s walls. Businesses in every industry should keep a close eye on the tech industry; engaged partnerships with tech innovators can offer a better view of not just the current landscape but also a window on the future. Leaders must pay particular attention to “industries that may not be adjacent to you now but are pushing the future of what’s coming around the corner,” said Bough.

But as businesses open the floodgates of disruption, should there be any part of their organization they seek to protect from change? The panel pointed to brands as worth shielding. “You’re not going to change Oreo the cookie,” McGuinness said. “You have to stay true to yourself.”

Still, he pointed out that in today’s world it’s probably advisable to question everything. Sometimes the answer to “should we change? may be no,” McGuinness said. But “it’s people who stop questioning who will have a problem.”

DISRUPTION

“ WHY NOT HILTONBNB?”

– @boughb #PRGenome

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