How Leaders Can Drive Impact Right Now

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: I’ve heard Darryl speak at a recent AMEC conference, and now the pressure is on to equal that outstanding compelling performance, which is why I decided to have you on the podcast. So first, can you give us a quick top line of Hard Numbers?

DARRYL: Yeah. sure. Thank you so much, and I hope I live up to the to your billing, very kind. Hard Numbers is a performance driven PR marketing agency. We’re about 6 years old. We are 2 years in a row now, the PRmoment’s B2B PR agency of the year. And we have about twenty-ish staff and a similar number of clients, based in London, but working with technology, financial services, SaaS, and other businesses all over the world.

DOUG: You’re very outspoken, which I really like, and you believe that PR people really need to make some specific commitments.

DARRYL: In no particular order, commit to outcomes and not outputs. Shoutout to Jonah from AMEC who is the reason we’re talking to one another. She invited me to speak at AMEC’s AI Day in New York. And anyone who will be familiar with the integrated evaluation framework will know it’s all about understanding the business objectives, understanding what you need to know, the activities that you’ll do, the outputs that you’ll create, but all of that is a means to an end to deliver the outcome, the organizational impact that you’re that you’re aiming to do. So, I think PR people very often focus on the output, and they measure their work in terms of the number of pieces of media coverage that they generated or whatever, but they don’t go that next step to say, well, what has happened as a result of it? Have we positively increased our share of search versus our competitors, for example? Have we seen an increase to particular target net traffic to particular target landing pages on a website in part through referral traffic from links that were in the coverage that we secured, for example? Or there’s a whole range of different out outcomes that you can measure, but it’s about outcomes, not outputs.

DOUG: You’ve been pretty riled up about the idea of, you know, paying for hours worked because as we all know, jeez, I pay more for someone who in fifteen minutes can give me ideas and make sure I double the size of my business than someone who has to work for a month and delivers nothing, but that’s been a particular concern for you.

DARRYL: Hundred percent. Yeah, commit to stop selling your services by the time it takes to deliver and pivot to doing it by the value they create. So, at Hard Numbers, we started 6 years ago, and we’re not, you know, we’re not geniuses. We haven’t got a crystal ball. We couldn’t predict the future, but we could see very clearly that AI was going to change fundamentally the business model of the agency business. The agency that myself and my business partner worked at previously, Hotwire, was started 25 years ago, and there’s a lot of legacy and, you know, technical and process debt builds up in a in a business like that that we were completely shorn of. And that by starting with a blank sheet of paper, we could start with a completely different business model, a different approach, a new technology stack, everything else. And one of the principles of that was not doing time sheets, not selling our services by the time it takes to deliver, but aligning what we do to the value they create for our clients. We’re able to do that, firstly, because the business is platformed on the CRM system. So, all of our interactions with all of the journalists and other stakeholders that we undertake on behalf of our clients is all logged in the CRM system. So therefore, I don’t have to ask someone how active they were on our client’s behalf by logging time. I can see how many journalists they were pitching or how many times they were talking to the client or whatever all through information that is abstracted through what they’re doing naturally through the HubSpot widget and everything else. So, I never have to and no one has to record information about how active they are. It’s all just done automatically for us.

DOUG: Technology is changing. PR so much. One area I’d like to speak with, and I appreciate you talking because we’ve always had a fee for service model. We’re gonna do this for you. It’s gonna cost this amount. Does that work? And we’re gonna guarantee that we’ll deliver results. That’s been our model, which at first, I thought was sort of a detriment, but it seems like the pendulum has been swinging more in directions where people wanna budget for what they know they’re gonna get a return on, but you also talked about your research that shows the value earned of media. And because we’re in the earned media space, that’s really driven our push to have an AI related product that can improve GEO in addition to just getting media coverage, but you’ve got some interesting research on that.

DARRYL: Thank you very much. Our first research report, Reputation in the Age of AI, we looked at the world’s hundred biggest brands and four pillars of reputations, so value for money, trustworthiness, innovation, and quality of product or service. And we asked ChatGPT, though, about those four pillars of reputation for the hundred biggest brands in the world, and we found that earned media was cited in 61% of responses via LLMs to answer those questions. And what was interesting is, in relation to, like, brand trust, editorial was cited in 65% of responses. When it came to value for money, it was cited in 72% of responses. And to give you a point of comparison, owned media, so the websites of companies, was cited in 44% of the responses. So, earned media was the most dominant, most frequently cited source and was ahead of owned media and all other user generated content, Trustpilot reviews, anything else like that that we looked at, earned media was front and center, which is good news for us professional communicators.

DOUG: One of the trends we’re seeing is that it’s not just do one thing and your GEO is gonna triple. You gotta have these messages out across multiple platforms, whether it’s earned media, what they’re placing online. And interestingly enough in the US, for local broadcast, more than 90% are placing it on websites, on social media, And it’s in the high eighties that are placing it on YouTube, which you know through Gemini, that’s what their first go to source is for information about content. How important is it to really make sure you’re getting out your messages across all of these different opportunities?

DARRYL: We have a client that we monitor just five prompts for every month in relation to their category. And on average, every month, there are more than 500 sources cited to answer those five prompts. So, it’s a huge range of sources that are cited. So, I think you’re absolutely right. And you have to have a flexible strategy across the different channels, and you have to be able to think about if I’ve got a content asset like a piece of video content, how can I sweat that asset as hard as I possibly can across all the places that, you know, that that that might get picked up and indexed and used by AI search? So, you’re a hundred percent right. YouTube, given that Gemini, AI overviews, AI mode, obviously, you know, use Google and Google owns YouTube, is a is a key source of making sure that you are you’ve got a really rich description of what that content is, why it’s relevant, and what questions it answers, you know, etcetera, etcetera. It’s really helpful to get that picked up and indexed and used, but then making sure that you are merchandising that across all the other video channels that you can use as well. So, you know, thinking about LinkedIn video, thinking about Reels, thinking about TikTok, thinking about all those other places as well. And similarly, thinking about the range of sources that you could potentially get cited by, get your content in, and through that, get into the answer.

DOUG: As we get towards the end, do you wanna have any final thoughts that you’d like to share with the audience to sort of get them fired up to start doing things a bit differently starting right now?

DARRYL: I love what you said earlier. Commit to deliverables. Like, don’t equivocate. Don’t use the excuse that it’s earned so, you know, we can’t make a guarantee around anything. Yes, you can. And any other service or product or anything else I buy from an expert, from someone who does something all the time, that, you know, there is always an implicit understanding that there is some form of outcome that I will get as a result of my investment, you know, in that service. So, don’t be afraid. Make that commitment. Make the commitment to outcomes. Make the commitment to deliverables. Make the commitment to ultimately driving commercial impact for your clients.

DOUG: Awesome. Thanks so much for being with us on the podcast. Always fun to catch up, and hopefully, I’ll see you at the next AMEC event. I’ll be speaking at the one in Dublin, but look forward to catching up again.

DARRYL: Look forward to seeing you. Thank you so much for your time and the invite to come along and talk on this excellent podcast.