Jeremy Weisz 15:09
It’s really interesting, Carol, when you talk about this. I’m curious when you go to pitch ADT like there’s a lot of really amazing brainstorming strategy that goes into it, and it’s really a blank canvas when you go to pitch ADT, what were your thoughts on, why and how you were going to pitch this? Because, like, you could probably have brought up a million different ideas for them.
Carol Levine 15:40
Well, the whole pitch process is really interesting in and of itself, because it starts with, what’s the problem? The first thing we ask is, what’s keeping you up at night? Or what are the pain points? Where could your business improve? Where are you having a roadblock? So starting with, starting with the problem, but from there, also looking at a briefing, which I have to tell you, because, you know, you may have encountered this in other conversations with marketers or agencies, which is the whole RFP process and how do you get a piece of business, whether it’s ADT or anybody else. Number one, it’s usually competitive. And number two, often you have to give a lot to potentially get something. So, in the case of ADT or any other client that has an issue or problem, it’s really getting a brief and it can’t be sort of this superficial kind of description. It’s really got to be concrete. It has to have some KPIs associated with it, in terms of, what does success look like? What you know, is it a media play?
Is it a marketing situation where you’re going to look at various tactics like podcasts, sponsored content, earned media, influencers, and other things. And once you have a really good idea, then you sit down as a team over pizza and pop or wine or whatever, and really brainstorm. I think the other key part for ADT and for more current clients, is research, and the kind of research that we can now do with technology. So, historically, you could do market research, you could do a focus group, you could speak to a couple of people. Today, you can do social listening. You can do landscape analysis. You can still do the traditional but just imagine using technology to tell you what people are saying about your brand online, what platforms they’re using, what are some of the conversations they’re having? What are the themes that rise to the top? So we are using technology, we’ve been doing this for years, but really getting a pulse on not what a small little group is saying and not what a biased group is saying, but really what a broad audience is saying, and where they’re saying it, and the language that’s resonating with them.
You could be using a word that doesn’t have any meaning to the audience. And you think that that’s the buzzword because some smart person told you, but in fact, you have to use the language that is commonly used, and you also have to write at a level that people can understand. And I think that all communicators are understanding that you really — you really need to speak to people like regular, regular people with regular words.
Jeremy Weisz 19:15
So that’s really helpful. I love how you broke that down, because part of the process is to kind of start with the problem and ask those questions on what’s keeping them up at night, what’s blocking them, what the problem is, and then kind of defining KPIs from there, and then doing deep research to find out more on what that program, or whatever will look like. So you have a specific kind of discovery and methodology to come, even though all these companies are different, because I know you work at ADT to Palm to Burger King, but you’re taking a certain methodology and approach to all of them to come to a real, specific solution.
You mentioned, it’s really amazing the causes even from like the beginning of your company from Burger King to helping with child abuse to ADT with domestic violence. So it’s pretty amazing what the different causes you’ve been able to contribute to. I want to talk about the services for a second and how your services have evolved. So in the beginning, what your services look like, and then what does the services look like now, because I know when I look at your services page, you have a lot of capabilities, but where did it start? And then we can talk about how it’s evolved.
Carol Levine 20:37
That’s a great question, because the definition of public relations is something that is, theoretically, it’s the relationship between an organization and its various publics. I don’t know what that means, I would tell my parents, like, they would say, what do you do? I’m like, I don’t know. What do I do? I get companies in the newspaper, on radio or TV. It was very hard to make that sound like a profession. But at the beginning, it really was using traditional media. And the beginning for me again, was many years ago, and it’s using traditional media, whether it’s print newspapers, magazines and so on, or radio, radio talk, news and television, to cover a story that you helped your client create. So it included that, and that was really how we launched products, how we dealt with issues, how we advocated. It was really to try to get ink or to get airtime.
That has changed as the whole communications landscape has changed. And is there a conflict or a fight or a territorial dispute between who owns what? So at our public relations agency, we do social media, we write content, or we guide content pillars. So we might create the content pillars and do all kinds of research, and then the client might write the content. We may write the content. Digital, we’re not a web design firm, but we guide our clients in terms of, what should their website say and look and do so the content of it, and then, are these the right images to reflect the content? And someone might say, well, why don’t you just go to a web design agency? The truth is that public relations typically sticks by that client on their communications journey for one of a better word, and so that website, the impact that it’s going to have, the changes, the refresh of the new content, etc, is something that we want to pay attention to and be involved in. We don’t have to necessarily lay it all out, but we guide on strategy. So that’s new. The social listening is another part of what we do, crisis communications.
Jeremy Weisz 23:37
Talk about the social listening for a second before we get into crisis. And what kind of things you do around that.
Carol Levine 23:44
The social listening, again, is using different tools, like it might be a radian six, it might be a meltwater. It may be other technology platforms, and some are proprietary to be able to understand who’s saying what? How often they’re saying it, who’s following who, we may get caught up with the number of followers, but that’s really not as relevant as are they the right followers? And what are they saying? Are they engaging? So the whole analytics and the whole listening is another part of the equation in terms of what we’re doing, and I think that drives content. So understanding doing that social listening, and understanding what we need to talk about, how often we should be talking about it, and who’s engaging, and who should we follow? And who should be following us?
Who’s interested in what we have to say, or what our clients have to say. We want to know who those stakeholders are. Which stakeholders, a client may be asked for donations from 10 companies in this similar type of area, well, which ones have a better relationship with their patients, or physicians, or so on. So you really want to get those insights, not because, oh, we have to be there, but oh, the data is showing, these physicians are very active on social media and we want to be able to get their attention. This is one way we can get it. So that’s the listening, which I think is, again, part of the research and the discovery, certainly in terms of developing a new plan. Then the crisis is also something that is increasingly important. It’s not always a crisis. Sometimes it’s an issue that if you get into the picture quickly, it doesn’t become the crisis. And a lot of that is around key message development. So, last week, I did a media training with one of our healthcare clients.
So we spent the morning looking at the key messages, refining the key messages, doing mock interviews, filming them, critiquing them, getting the other four people getting some of the other people to say, well, how could he or she have done it a bit better. What would you change? And then again, educating clients on the changing media landscape. How to bridge difficult questions. How to avoid speculation, a whole host of things. And this was a pre-launch initiative, and then an issue cropped up, and they had all their messages, and they were well prepared, and the question I ask at the end is like, how do you feel right now? And it’s, yeah, you know what, I’m not a lot more comfortable, and it’s only going to get better with practice.
So, we give them a manual and encourage them to practice amongst themselves, because nobody likes to do a run-through. So crisis communication and media training and workshops from a preparation standpoint, another part of what we do.
Jeremy Weisz 27:25
On that point for a second on the crisis management. So, like, a company may be launching something, and they’ll be like, we should really get some training on this as we’re launching and getting a lot of questions. They’ll bring in your company to kind of go through and train them, because they are going to be probably launching a bunch of media. I’m curious, again, you’re going through best practices, you’re going through their messaging. You’re critiquing across a lot of the companies you’ve worked with, what are some of the common mistakes that they make, off the bat, when you’re in there with them, their initial run-through and you and other team members are giving feedback. What are some of those common mistakes that people make?
Carol Levine 28:14
Well, I love it. I love the question, because we tell them. First of all, we tell them nothing’s off the record. That’s number one. Or maybe it’s not number one, it’s number two. Number one is, never say no comment. They want to run. They’re afraid of looking bad. The first question we ask in the media session is, what do you hope to get out of this session? And what are you worried about? They’re worried about looking bad. If they’re an employee, they’re worried about disappointing the higher-ups. They’re worried about their messages being misunderstood or miscommunicated so if they’re not clear, they’re generally not worried about not getting out the key messages. They’re pretty good on that, I think, with a little bit of practice, but it’s that whole fear of the unknown.
And we ask them to describe what they think a media interview is like, and they’ll say it’s like going into a minefield or falling down a deep, dark hole. And we try to turn that around and say, no, it’s really like doing a business interview. And we encourage them to feel that they have an agenda, that they go into the meeting. And you should go into any meeting with an agenda, and these are the things you want to get out of it. And you have to keep that in your mind, regardless of the question that is being asked of you, you have your answer, and you have to figure out creatively, a way to get that answer out almost irrespective of how the questions asked so. So, that’s part of it. And the other thing that we do, in addition to the key messages, we do Q’s and A’s, but we do a really long list.
So it’s almost like being mean spirited, but we try to come up with every question that we can think of, every miserable, horrible, painstaking question that they could be asked, and we try to come up with a reasonable answer that is going to be some iteration of that key message. And we find, again, just giving them that and letting them know that, you know what, I don’t have to be so creative. I don’t have to come up with 20 answers. I have to remember my messages and find a way to work them in. So, yeah, the media training is really a fascinating exercise in, I think, psychology,
Jeremy Weisz 30:59
Yeah, I love that. Really, the first thing you sound like you do is like you shift their mindset, because their mindset is into this really dark place from what they’re picturing, and then you help them view it in a positive light and treat it to something that they know, which is like a meeting agenda. And then just really about preparation for them and preparing for all the worst-case questions. And if they’re prepared for those, then they can handle everything. So thanks for walking through that. I love what you do in getting the creative juices flowing by talking through a couple case studies. Because when I look at your page, and case studies give, whatever business someone’s in. At least for me, I could speak for myself. Looking at some of these case studies gives me ideas on our business, right? And so I love to hear how you help some of these businesses. And I wanted to start with hotels.com. That one stuck out to me on the page because of the — I don’t know if people have seen the commercials before of Captain Obvious, I think it is. But talk about what you do with hotels.com.
Carol Levine 32:13
Well, hotels.com I mean, it’s obvious. Everybody loved the character, and it was a challenge to get him up to Canada. So, again, understanding that in the US, the population is so much larger, the number of media is so much larger. It’s a little bit more difficult here. One of the challenges with travel and tourism and hospitality media, again, is getting them to displace themselves and to actually attend an event. And so we lobbied heavily to try to get for hotels.com to send up their, I wasn’t gonna say spokesperson, well, spokesperson.
Jeremy Weisz 33:08
I don’t want to say mascot.
Carol Levine 33:10
Yeah, I didn’t want to say mascot. And thank you for the spokesperson. I was struggling for that.
Jeremy Weisz 33:17
The idea was, like, if you could get the captain obvious to come that would attract a kind of an event, a media event. So what happened from there?
Carol Levine 33:29
Yeah, so we rented a beautiful two-story suite at the Soho hotel, Metropolitan Soho hotel, in downtown Toronto, and invited travel and hospitality media there. We also had a representative from hotels that could talk about some of the new technology they had for their online platform. But the draw was Captain Obvious and was taking pictures, you know, that was taking pictures with him that they could post. And so, how do you evaluate something like that? Well, how far did that message go? And who were you able to bring out? And that was a success. And of course, you have to understand he comes with his suitcase. You’d never recognize Captain Obvious on the street, if he was out of uniform, but he was definitely the star of the show. And it was an opportunity again, to promote the travel products that hotels.com had.
We’ve done so many different types of projects again, right now and over the last number of years, we’ve been focusing our business, I would say probably 90% in health. But not necessarily strictly scientific, although that is certainly a large, a large chunk. But I think what all the folks on our team find very rewarding are projects where we get to help create awareness and where we can talk about disease prevention and health promotion. One example would be, and we just actually won an award. Just actually, I think, last week, from the Canadian Public Relations Society, we won an award for World Cancer Day. And that’s February the fourth. It’s a global event. There’s a lot of competition for news around cancer, Canadian Cancer, although they’re the major voice for cancer in Canada. They do compete with Lung Cancer Association and prostate cancer and just many other organizations. So it was really important to be able to tell the story, to do storytelling with individuals.
Over the last couple of years, the community of cancer patients has really been hit with Covid, with delayed diagnoses and so on. And so you’d think that it would be an easy sell, but it’s not. And so we were really excited to be able to generate, I think it was something like 38 million. Remember, our population in Canada is about 40 million people, so a very, very high penetration in terms of getting that story out there, where you have authentic stories that are coming from either those living with cancer or people caregivers. So that was really very rewarding. We’ve done a lot in oncology.
Jeremy Weisz 36:54
Speak to the Canadian Cancer Society, the World Cancer Day for a second, and what were some of the elements that you think made it so successful with all the noise out there and cutting through that?
Carol Levine 37:04
There were two things, I think. One was, there was data. So Canadian Cancer Society had done a survey talking about the financial impact of cancer, and the burden, the cost burden to families, people missing work, taking loved ones to treatment, individuals missing work, etc. So there is a big financial component, and they have data and media love data that is applicable to their country or province or whatever. So I think that certainly was helpful. I think the other thing are the stories. There is nothing that beats the authenticity, the empathy that comes from someone telling their story that is relatable. Where somebody can, I mean, everybody has been touched by cancer. So when you can harness those stories in a meaningful way, I think that’s super, super important.
And that is almost like a best practice almost all of the pharmaceutical launches that we do, even for a new product, which is really a scientific announcement, okay, it’s a new molecule. It’s a new treatment paradigm that’s been discovered. And you send out a four-page release, and it’s got all the details and all the side effects, and you just passed one with Jamie Campbell, who was a TSN, a sports network reporter for the Toronto Blue Jays. And we did a launch for a new oncology product for our client, Beijing. And we learned that Jamie had also been diagnosed with CLL, form of blood cancer. And through his physician and serendipity and a bit of luck, Jamie agreed to talk about his story. And the impact of something like that is just amazing. And what does that do?
In some cases, it really sends somebody to their doctor to say, you know what, I haven’t been feeling well. I don’t want to let this go. I’m not saying that was the case in that particular campaign, but in many cases, when you talk about symptoms, for a host of diseases, that may not be very visible or very noticeable, and someone says, that sounds a lot like how I’ve been feeling. Gonna see my doctor. That means getting somebody treatment earlier, and it improves their health outcome. So it has to be a win.
Jeremy Weisz 39:58
I’ve experienced that many times where someone will tell me a statistic and I don’t even know what to do, but until I hear a story that directly impacts me emotionally, that’s when I tend to act. So definitely I love that, backing having the data, but also backing it up with specific emotional stories that hit home. And speaking of, we are talking about, obviously, the cancer, work that you done in cancer, and I wanted to talk about your partner, Esther, and talk about your partnership with Esther.
Carol Levine 40:44
Wow, thank you for bringing that up. Despite the fact that it is really so hard to talk about, it’s a story that should be told. And so just a little bit of context, Esther and I crossed paths at an agency. I had an office. She was working there. We instantly hit it off, I went out on my own, and I said, Esther, come and she said, no, no, I’m not ready yet. I don’t know enough, I have to pay my dues, etc. So we stayed in touch, stayed in touch, and then finally, when she made the quantum leap, it was the two of us, as I described, the beginning is two young people, women sitting there with two gray desks in an empty space that was then outfitted by my home furniture. And we were so different on so many levels. Esther was fun and gregarious and everybody loved Esther. She was just a joy, very magnetic personality, almost five foot 11. I’m about five foot one. So, as people joke, we were joined at the hip and neck. And we just had different strengths. I was sort of the more cerebral and serious and good cop, bad cop.
She was always the good cop and I was always the bad cop, to the extent that people thought that she worked for me, but we were equal partners and we went on and through the business, the meteoric rise and fall of business, good and bad and weathered, the economic downturn of 2008, and the whole bit pandemic. And then, just over the space of one week, Jeremy, she wasn’t herself and she was having arguments with some people, and she was just off. And she called me, she called me on a Monday morning and said, I can’t come into the office, I can’t use my computer, I can’t use my cell phone. I think I’m going to go to the doctor. I said, well, call the doctor. Anyway, the doctor told her to go to the hospital right away, and within four hours, she was diagnosed with glioblastoma. And for your audience, whether it’s John McCain or Beau Biden or Ted Kennedy, the celebrities that have been diagnosed with glioblastoma. It’s an absolutely horrible form of fatal brain cancer.
And so Esther had surgery, she lived for 16 months, she was never the same after. And we never had a transition. We never had a real goodbye. So the loss has really been challenging as I joke with a lot of sarcasm, she was my exit strategy, and she went and died on me. But I will love Esther forever and her legacy certainly lives on. Just the other day, and I have so many friends in the US in public relations and partly because, Esther was the co-chairman of our spring conference of the Public Relations Society of America. So we partied with our colleagues all over the US, and someone posted a picture the other day about missing her. I’m like, you can’t do this to me. It’s just too much. But I think this podcast, really would not have been complete without that acknowledgement. So thank you for that.
Jeremy Weisz 44:54
Yeah, no, sure. I want to thank you and her legacy lives on through you and through the company and all the amazing work that you have done throughout the years. So I just want to thank you for sharing your lessons, your journey with us, and I want to encourage everyone to check out energipr.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast and Carol, thanks so much, and we’ll see everyone next time.
Carol Levine 45:22
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeremy, have a great day.
