Speaker 1Hello, and welcome to the Brand Hunch podcast, where we explore ideas and hunches around how marketers are growing great brands. It's a look under the hood at how much is marketing science and how much is built on a hunch. This episode is in partnership with Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable, and always-on brand tracking tool that helps marketers and agencies answer the age-old question, is my strategy working? It's not enough to talk about great creative or reach. Your CFO wants proof that your campaigns are driving growth with the segments who actually matter. Tracksuit makes it all possible without the six-figure price tag. In just 30 days, you'll have a live dashboard tracking your brand health over time, benchmarking you against competitors, and surfacing boardroom-ready insights. We at Shallow use Tracksuit. Many of our guests on the podcast have used Tracksuit. It's a really, really great tool. If you can't prove your brand campaigns have worked, you risk losing your budget. No! And if you can, you unlock growth. Check them out at GoTracksuit.com. This episode is also brought to you by my newborn son, who you might hear making a guest appearance in the background. Today, my guest is James Hutchinson. James is one of those rare people who has, or makes, the time for anybody. He's worked his way to the top, now CEO of Sling & Stone, joining the business back as an account director over 11 years ago. If you don't know Sling & Stone, they're one of Australia's most respected PR agencies, helping brands launch, grow, and shape their future, representing challenger brands such as Reddit, CSIRO, Canva. And Klaviyo, the latter of two we also work across. Before this, he was a news editor and journo, and James really knows his stuff when it comes to PR. I'm so keen to tap into your brain. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2Thanks for having me, Linz. Looking forward to it.
Speaker 1So, if I'm not mistaken, I feel like you studied music at university, which is not the most obvious path into journalism.
Speaker 2Not the typical pathway, no.
Speaker 1No. Tell me how that happened, and then how did you segue into journalism?
Speaker 2I kind of tried to do journalism during uni, and it was just one of those things where, you know, I'm not very good at big assessments, things like that. I'm great at, you know, thinking on the fly and coming up with big ideas, but sit me down and make me write a five-page essay, and I tend to procrastinate and put it off. So, I think during university, I kind of went back and forth in terms of what I wanted to do and kind of ended up sort of focusing a little bit on music for, you know, oddly enough, I ended up doing DJing as a course. I'm not sure that's been super helpful to me, but, you know, the main thing I got out of uni was honestly how to think creatively. And how to argue for yourself, because I think you do a lot of that. And all of the other things, you know, that I've learned since around journalism, communication, storytelling, I've kind of picked up on the job and picked up from the people around me.
Speaker 1And so, was it from your degree that you jumped into a role at the AFR? How did that sort of work, and what were you hoping to achieve there?
Speaker 2So, I kind of always wanted to be a journalist, and actually a job kind of fell into my lap from a friend who had gotten a job at PC World at the time, which unfortunately is no longer a thing in Australia. They were hiring for some technology reviewers. So, my first job was actually reviewing printers, of all things, and spending a lot of time printing off pages and timing how fast the printer was. From there, I ended up at Computer World doing more journalism and actually starting to delve into that and went through a couple of sort of publications like that before I ended up at the AFR doing reporting across a wide variety of things from technology to policy to all sorts of things. But I was kind of there at the time. I was kind of there at the time when the NBN was kind of going through that sort of big change from the Labor government to the Liberal government and really sort of changing the way that the entire project was running. So, I spent a lot of time reporting on policy around the NBN, which taught me a lot about how government works and how big nation-building infrastructure projects can be communicated well and poorly at the same time.
Speaker 1Yeah. And I mean, not to age you, but obviously channels and the way in which journalism was created and shared. Back then is very different to today. Are there any elements or things that have remained with you that you learnt back in the day that are still true?
Speaker 2A hundred percent. I still lean on the lessons that I learned both at the AFR and other jobs very much through my career and still talk about them today. Probably the key things that strike out to me, well, for one, I know it's the bane of everyone who uses AI now, but I was taught very early on to use the MDash properly and
Speaker 1grammatically. And are you still using it?
Speaker 2Yes. I still use it. I'm very fond of it. And I am still, I will take to my grave the fact that, well, it's not take to my grave, but I will fight to the death over anyone who claims that the MDash is purely an AI artifact. I don't believe it is. It's just a sign of good writing and good grammar. But beyond that, the key things that I've really sort of taken away, particularly from my time at the AFR, I came up at the time when, you know, sub-editors were still very much a thing and they had started to phase away when I was there. But they very much sort of guided me and held my hand and sort of taught me a lot about how to tell a good story, how to really sort of get to the crux of what actually matters for a reader and for an audience and not simply just report the facts or not just do it in a way that is boring, to be honest. And I remember one editor telling me, which has stuck to me to this day, I'm not sure I can say the full sentence on the podcast, but he said, every story needs to have that YGAF, which was an acronym for why I give an F, and essentially, why should the audience care? And that's a lesson that. I think has stayed to me to this day. I use it daily. I tell all of my clients, you know, similar things, not as crudely. But I just find it something that, to be honest, I think a lot of people are missing in all sorts of comms, whether it's marketing, whether it's communications and PR, whether it's just good old storytelling, the actual idea of why I, as the audience, should care about what you're saying is something that I think can be a little bit of a lost art at times. So it's really sort of stuck to me and I've carried it across my journey.
Speaker 1Yeah. Incredible. How do you think you get to, let's say a client comes to you and they want to just talk about themselves, it's not very interesting, and your job is to make it interesting. How do you go about sort of finding what the interest piece is there? I guess I'm sort of in a nutshell, like, how do you do your job? But, you know, people think they're interesting and you're probably sitting there thinking, this is absolutely not interesting. How do we turn this around?
Speaker 2Yeah, it's an interesting question because I spend a lot of my time doing that. And especially, we work with a lot of companies at startup scale up and even enterprise phase. Kind of, you know, trying to get to the crux of the story that they're trying to tell. And I think a lot of people generally and quite naturally think they've spent a lot of time and effort and poured their blood, sweat and tears into a service or a product or a company. And therefore, other people should be excited about that. They're in their own bubble and drinking their own Kool-Aid and really sort of thinking about, this is something that is so precious to me, so other people should care. And often what that ends up meaning without them realizing it is they've got a solution or they've got a something that they feel strongly about, but they're not really clear on what the problem is to the audience that they're trying to explain that or sell that to. And so that YGAF kind of piece is something that I use, again, almost daily because most of the time, the problem statement is actually missing. You know, if you're selling an AI product, for instance, which a lot of people are these days, a lot of them tend to be solutions in search of problems. And, you know, you could do something faster and better and, you know, add more and more and more and more quantity and that's great. But if you don't have an actual problem that you're trying to solve, in the first place, or that problem isn't clear enough, then you're not going to get customers. And so, honestly, I spend most of my time trying to get to the why of behind the product and the problem behind the product and help to really sort of tease that out so that we can actually get to the real reason why they deserve to exist and they deserve to be heard and seen by the audiences that they're trying to reach out to.
Speaker 1And I guess what you're talking about there is critical thinking and the ability to kind of kindly critique something someone wants to talk about through the lens of a prospective customer or someone that doesn't have a product. I think it can be taught.
Speaker 2Journalists can make great communicators. They bring, obviously, skills around, you know, what makes a great news story or what makes a great story generally or how to ask the right questions in order to tease some things out. I've seen great journalists become great PR people and communicators and some of the best people that I know. I've also seen some sort of try it out and really struggle because you also need to learn how to do client service and how to do it. You need to, you know, work through a problem and not simply be, you know, steadfast in this is the way it's done and that's the only way it's done. I also think, you know, journalism is a, in media is such an important channel to tell a story, but it's also not the only channel particularly right now. And so thinking more broadly about all the different ways that people are consuming content and consuming information is becoming more and more and more fragmented. And so some of those skills are, you know, a little bit different to what they were maybe even 10 years ago. Some of the best people, honestly, that I've worked with in the industry. I've not had a journalism or comms background. They've simply been great people, people, and they've been great storytellers and, and they've just been able to, you know, get on someone's side and really sort of make them feel comfortable enough to actually tell their story in a really sort of deep and fascinating way and get that story out of them. So it's been, um, yeah, it can be taught, but I think there is an innate sense of being able to tell a story that come really, really natural to some people and less naturally to others.
Speaker 1This might be a bit of a basic. question, but how do you define the role of PR and how has it evolved over time? How has PR's own PR shifted and how does it exist today?
Speaker 2I think about PR often as all of the ways that your story can be consumed in a way that you as the marketer or as the brand can't control. So what I mean by that is, you know, there's obviously the traditional marketing sort of channels like out of home billboards and TV ads and all those sort of things. And you can. You can say whatever you want on those things and no one's going to bat an eye it or no one's going to really sort of argue with it. Whereas the moment you tell your story to a journalist or in a social channel or by, you know, an external influencer or creator, they could twist your story in so many different ways. And so comms and PR generally has to be really good at not only telling the story, but telling a story in a way that is so understanding of how the audience is going to receive it and how it can be, you know, either twisted or manipulated or changed in certain ways. And, you know, where the good PR stories and the good stories generally are the ones that are super simple, super clear, and really sort of give an authentic why behind the story. The ones that aren't are the ones that, you know, expect that you're going to take on the story no matter what the audience cares about or thinks about. And then a tagline or a billboard just doesn't work in the comms channels that we typically sort of work in.
Speaker 1So in my world, in the brand space, we and marketers, on a brand strategy, it's stuff that we would like to say from the inside out, often looking at, you know, competitors and the landscape always, but it's things that we would like to say. It sounds like the work that you do is so much more almost like fluid and sort of, you know, nebulous than just what the organization itself wants to say. How do you manage that? How do you keep comms on brand, but also fluid, whether it's from like a cultural relevance perspective or a timeliness, or how do you know when to flex and when it's too far?
Speaker 2I think it's absolutely being relevant. To the context and the culture, right? We work with a lot of global brands and a mistake that a lot of global brands have is they'll take whatever they've done in the US or in Europe and try and apply that to Australia with no changes or no real understanding of the Australian context or the APAC context and expect that it's going to work. It just doesn't, you know, we speak English and we've grown up on American culture, but we don't necessarily think the same or speak the same or have the same sort of cultural aphorisms. So, you know, really understanding not just the broad culture, but the specific cultures of, you know, reaching the audience. Or reaching to a mum at home or reaching to certain audiences, demographics, you know, psychographics, things like that is really, really important. The other thing is just, it's not a, it's not a single phase, you know, again, to your point, you know, a brand campaign could be we're rolling out a tagline or a campaign, and we're just sort of hammering that for the next six weeks. A good comms campaign has a really clear idea of how you're going to launch, but then also how you're going to sustain that over the long period and being consistent, but also very clear. Also being flexible with how things are going. So if you launch something and it's, you know, not landing the way you really wanted it to for some unknown reason, you're able to really sort of flex and really sort of change and adapt that based on what you're hearing back from the community. The ones that aren't that are the ones that are kind of constantly just banging the same drum or saying one thing one second, another thing the other second, and then not really being able to hear and listen to the communities and the audiences that you're trying to actually reach.
Speaker 1I was having an interesting conversation the other day with someone and would love your thoughts on it. We're talking about PR and on one hand with the rise of AI, it's never been easier or quicker to help with copy and write a press release and, you know, distill ideas down, you know, without having to do as much critical thinking. But on the other hand, and this is, was their perspective is sort of the rise of authenticity and back to quality work over just quantity. And he was saying, I think we'll see more of that. And I think we'll go back to basics as in just good quality PR and relationships and single-minded ideas. What are your thoughts on the two?
Speaker 2I think there's definitely a dichotomy at the moment, between AI being all about scale versus AI demanding authenticity. And I know there are some people who are, say, basically taking the flood the zone concepts and going, let's just get as much content out there as possible. I don't believe in that whatsoever. I think, I think we are already seeing the downsides of AI being that anyone can do any form of content and therefore think that means that you should do all types of content all the time. I just saw a thing today about, I think, Fair Work Australia being inundated and drowned in the amount of AI that they're able to do. And I think that's a big thing. generated complaints that are coming through and just not being able to keep in touch with them. I was also talking to a friend who's on one of the dating apps and saying, you know, they basically expect that all the answers in the chats that they're having right now are all
Speaker 1Gen AI. Oh my goodness, I wouldn't even think of that.
Speaker 2No, but you know, where is the authenticity and probably the interaction that should be the most authentic, right? At the same time, you're also seeing, I'm seeing at least, you know, this kind of new language come out where as soon as something is not hitting right, or it even has a whiff of inauthenticity, it's deemed as AI slop, regardless of whether it is or not, it's just become the name that you apply to anything that, you know, feels inauthentic. And I think all of that is to say that we are going to see and we're already seeing campaigns that cut through that, you know, focus on authenticity. It doesn't mean that AI is not used whatsoever. It may be used for concepting, it may be used for, you know, creating variations and scaling some of that content for niche audiences. But at the core of it, the story and the campaign needs to be incredibly authentic to you, to the brand, to the audience that you're trying to speak to. If you're using AI throughout the process of actually creating the story, then you're just relying on averaging to the mean of what everyone else is saying, because that's what AI is at the end of the day. It's, you know, taking all of human knowledge and all of human sort of information and, you know, averaging it out. You know, if you are relying on that to purely generate your story, then you're not going to get very far. And I think people will sort of smell it from a mile away.
Speaker 1So when you think about PR and authenticity, and trust, and there's so much work, money, effort, there are so many teams working on reputation and brand building in various capacities. And then it might be a terribly timed AI written article that is, you know, hugely damaging to an organization. When you think about building trust from a PR perspective, is there a big shift to in-person events and, you know, typos in things deliberately so that people know they're real? Is that happening? Or like, how are you thinking about how to retain the sort of the level of trust that you pride yourself on?
Speaker 2It's funny how even the authenticity, you can become inauthentic quickly. So I don't know if you saw, but even over Christmas and New Year's, my Instagram ad feed was full of brands saying, we're sorry, we accidentally sold out of this because it's so exciting. Or like, one brand did it, and then suddenly every brand did it. And what started as something that caught your eye because it was out of the norm, and it was something that, you know, you weren't quite expecting, suddenly became the thing that everyone was running. The thing to do, right? It was the marketing trend. And, you know, we say that all the time, right? The memes start, and then everyone jumps on them. And then it becomes, it starts as something that actually is true to someone, and then suddenly becomes inauthentic because you've done, it's been done a million times before, and you're just jumping on the bandwagon. And so from a PR perspective, yes, you can jump on a trend or the latest awareness month or awareness day or things like that. But realistically, the things that are always going to sort of cut through are things that counter cultural, like they're always kind of like counter narratives that you're not quite expecting, either because of what you think the brand stands for, or what everyone else is doing. Yeah, the brands that are really sort of cutting through are the ones that are just changing that. I mean, even, I really loved the the Marty Supreme sort of marketing campaign, because Timothee Chalamet really sort of just went into this whole like character, you saw the, like the internal marketing meeting, which was obviously all scripted. But, you know, really sort of played into something that you weren't expecting. Like it wasn't your flashy trailers and your flashy billboards and things like that. It was the artifacts of movie marketing and just, you know, get to the heart of what they were trying to do. And it's just simple ideas executed really well that get people talking and just get this conversation started. And that, at the end of the day, that's any good comms campaign. It's not, hey, I saw that ad. It's more like actually starting a conversation about like, what does that actually mean? And why do they do that? And, you know, what does it mean for us? And that's the thing that, you know, ends up being part of the cultural conversation that gets people not just aware of something, but actually remembering. Yeah. So, yeah, I find that really interesting.
Speaker 1Something I've been sort of thinking about and circling around lately is this idea of brand respecting an audience's attention, treating them like they are intelligent, which I'm assuming you'd agree with. But on the other hand, you've often got, you know, limited time, short attention spans, you know, the best copy is that that's sort of succinct and to the point. How do you navigate the two if you're trying to talk to an audience in a way that makes them feel inspired and intelligent, but at the same time in this world of quick?
Speaker 2I actually think that historically PR has been this awareness thing, right? It's the thing that is meant to grab attention by doing some sort of activation or doing some sort of stunt or something that kind of gets people interested. But I think today, you could do something like that and be known for about 30 seconds, and then you're on to the next thing. We're no longer in this like 24 hour news cycle, we're in this like 30 second news cycle. It's like the next TikTok and you're suddenly, you're not even yesterday's news, your last minute's news. We don't have attention spans anymore. The thing that I think is most important is that we're not just doing this to get people interested, we're doing this to get people interested. And I think that's the thing that's most interesting. And what we are doing a lot with brands now is less about how do you quote unquote, stop the scroll, but actually, how do you forge memory in the audiences that you're trying to get into? And I think memory is the thing that we are most interested in, because you can get awareness and attention, but you're not going to hold it for very long. And if you're not doing something that is genuinely interesting enough for people to remember and to talk about after they've seen that and heard that, then it's probably not all that worthwhile anymore, especially in an AI world when there's so much AI content out there, the things that are actually going to come out of it. And I think that's the thing that's cut through, I think, are the things that are actually going to forge memory. So I think to your question, think about who is the audience that you're really speaking to? What do they already know and assume? And then how do you either get them talking or thinking about something that they don't expect or that they really feel already emotionally, whether it's a problem that they're having or something that they're not quite sure is missing from their lives?
Speaker 1Something else I've been thinking about, I've been thinking about a lot of things recently, I clearly had a lot of time on my hands on maternity leave, is the role of executive communication and C-suite. having a role and a voice, whether that's from a personal perspective or as a curated company sort of perspective. I guess we saw that the big Coldplay Kiss Cam scandal, you know, executives of a, I believe, startup scale up, you know, and that came to the fore and it became, you know, such a huge message. You've then just got a lot more people on LinkedIn and actively communicating their ideas personally or on behalf of the organization. Do you do a lot of work in that space? Do you think it's growing? Are there pros and cons? Like what's your sort of, how do you reconcile executive sort of communication?
Speaker 2It's so important. And again, I think it comes out of the need to break out of what people expect. Like people are sick of the brand voice and like the brand saying something. I think because, you know, over time we've kind of got to this thing of you're speaking from the brand, but when all the brands are speaking, you know, it's kind of really hard to tell kind of what's authentic or not. And so the minute it comes from a human and particularly an executive, it feels that much more authentic and that much more powerful. And I think we're just attracted a lot more to that. To when people speak versus when brands speak. And so, yes, we absolutely do a lot of work with executives of all scales from, you know, startups through to, you know, publicly listed companies to really help them, one, find their voice and really sort of understand, you know, how do they speak in a way because they may be a little bit nervous about sort of stepping out from behind the brand and being themselves. But the ones that really sort of do well are the people who have that sort of natural authenticity because, you know, they're not just, you know, speaking in, you know, buzzwords on LinkedIn, they're actually showing, you know, a personal side of themselves, whether it's their love of running or whatever, or their family or whatever it is like that added authenticity just adds so much more to that. So we help them find their voice and really sort of understand, like, how do they start to build their own sort of profile, whether it's on LinkedIn, on podcasts, on, you know, all forms or all channels that they may be relevant on. And then, you know, we can help them sort of build the content, but it works so much better when they are invested and actually developing the content. You know, there are still people who want stuff being ghostwritten for them and we can do that, but when they're writing it and they're actually, we're helping them kind of just maybe refine it and polish it a little bit. It's obvious that it comes so much better when it's from their voice, but helping them find their voice in the first place is something that they're not necessarily
Speaker 1used to. And I guess you get into the question and I'm interested in your answer. Do you think that they should first and foremost be the operator or the spokesperson at a, let's say, CEO level? What do you think comes first?
Speaker 2I mean, you know, you and I both know that our jobs are as much internal as external. And I think, you know, building the company while running it at the same time. And I think building is very much about being external. Like as an example, you see Ted Sarandos, the Netflix CEO right now being very public with, you know, the future of the company as they sort of navigate the potential acquisition of Warner Brothers and being incredibly out there and personal and public in how he's thinking about the future of, you know, potentially that combined company. I think that just, goes to really show he could be, you know, just focusing internally and having the private closed door discussions, but being out there in public and focused on the public narrative of what they're trying to say just really sort of helps to show that they've got nothing to hide. What they're saying publicly and what they're saying privately, sort of one and the same. And so I think for any CEO, if you're spending all your time just focused on the internals and operations, obviously, they're incredibly important. But if you think that's 100% of your job, then there's probably something missing from your role. I think whether you call it marketing or comms or whatever it is, to be a part of what the CEO does, because ultimately you are the face and the leader of
Speaker 1the company. Have you ever seen it go wrong where somebody C-suite wise or anyone really has overshared or shared something that might not be popular opinion? What's your thoughts there?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think where I've seen it fail is when leaders can come across as sort of tone deaf or self-centered. So as an example, I remember seeing someone who had recently gone across to San Francisco and then came back and said that he wanted to see the 996 work method come to Australia. And I think that's a really good example of that. And I think that's a really good which is, you know, working 9am to 9pm six days a week, which obviously didn't go down well, came across as incredibly tone deaf to how we like to live and work in Australia. So I think that's just an example of if you don't really sort of understand your audience and what they think and what they care and feel about, then it can really sort of just come across as tone deaf. And, you know, we are probably more attuned than ever as humans in social media generally to people who really care and people who are authentic versus people who don't come across that way. I think you see it all the time in Reddit AMAs. I love reading the AMAs because you can tell the ones that they're genuinely interested in and then the ones that are either being ghostwritten or they're doing because they feel that they have to. The ones where they're genuinely sort of engaging with Redditors and the thread, the compelling ones because they're giving actual answers and actual insights into their day to day. The ones where they're skipping questions or they are giving just pure PR canned answers are the ones that, you know, immediately send red signals to not just myself as a professional communicator, but to the people in Reddit, like they can smell it from a mile away. It's an ick. Exactly. Exactly. It's always a great litmus test of, you know, is this something that they genuinely feel that they should do?
Speaker 1So you mentioned Reddit. Nice plug. A great client of yours. Tell me a bit about some of your wins generally. What have been some of your most favourite projects that you've worked on?
Speaker 2I can't pick a favourite. They're all great. But the ones that I really enjoy are the ones that legitimately just, I mean, you know, it feels buzzwordy, but honestly have business impact. We've never wanted to do campaigns that are purely about getting into the trade press and saying, patting ourselves on the back and going, that's a great job. The ones that really sort of cut through are the ones that actually mean that the brand is achieving the goals that it set out to do and it's reaching those audiences. So as an example, you know, we, we work with Krispy Kreme in Australia and the brief that we've worked with them on for several years is to create moments of joy for their customers. And so we've done kind of everything from for one of their birthdays, we, we spread the word that if you go in and the person on the counter says, hip hip, and you say, hooray, you get a free donut. And that was just a small tiny thing. But as soon as it got out, a whole bunch of school students ended up like mobbing a store and just ended up overwhelming and they sold out of donuts. Instantly. So things like that just can be the smallest little thing and doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be overwrought, but as soon as you can enact on kind of what that brief is and just, it just connects with the audience. You can just cut through so much easier than, you know, these big sort of overwrought million dollar campaigns.
Speaker 1It sounds very similar, the sort of ideation process to design thinking, the idea that you're taking two disparate ideas, turning on its head, taking out of category insights or ways of working and bringing them into a new space. To reimagine them. Tell me a bit about your ideation process, whether personally or internally as an organization, do you always follow a similar process? Do you start at the same point? Can good ideas come from anywhere?
Speaker 2I think great ideas can come from everywhere. We don't have fancy names for a lot of our design thinking. I think, you know, yes, we use techniques like design thinking and out of the box thinking and, you know, workshops and things like that. The thing that really sort of comes down to it is getting a really clear understanding of, again, the audience and the behind them and trying to come up with ways that we can reach them that may be unexpected. I love just those like left field ideas that, you know, could come from our creative strategist or could come from the most junior person in the room simply because they're either closer to the product or closer to the audience or they're just thinking outside of the box. And so, you know, we may have a brief for how to reach mothers in their 40s and, you know, we could get a whole bunch of mothers in their 40s to talk about that. Or we could get people to talk about that. We could get people from outside that and come out with sort of slightly interesting ideas. So it's all really about trying to get a mix of the people who know the audience and then the people who kind of come outside of the audience. We are increasingly using things like synthetic audiences to sort of understand kind of more about what the audience is thinking and understanding. We're using sort of, you know, 24-hour surveys to test ideas and assumptions and things like that. We're using a couple of AI, like specific sort of creative AI tools that kind of just help to spur the thinking on the audience. We're using a couple of AI, like specific sort of creative AI tools that and result, but they are sometimes the thing that maybe brings something that you haven't thought about or brings a truth that you want to dig into a little bit more. We kind of, you know, use a multitude of different tools, frameworks and ideas. And honestly, I think some of the best ideas often are about getting people in a room and just, you know, doing some structured thinking around the problem, the audience, and ultimately the insight that we're trying to get to.
Speaker 1And I guess also creating an environment where no idea is silly, you know, the whole idea of like, yes, and, and there's something in that. Let's expand. Unless there's people being too scared to ideate, you know, completely.
Speaker 2Exactly. There never should be, at least at brainstorming phase, there should never be any idea that's too silly. I think if you're immediately shutting down ideas, the second that they come out, then you're shutting down avenues of exploration. And that first idea might not be the best idea, but it might spark the secondary or the tertiary or the other ideas that might sort of come out after that. So we want to explore all sorts of things. You know, we had a, I can't go into detail, but we had a brief this week that went down a pathway of talking about sleep out of nowhere and just led to a territory that I'm really excited about, because I think it was absolutely had nothing to do with the original idea of the brand. But once you start thinking about it, there was some, there was a really clear tie to a human insight that I think can be really powerful. So oftentimes it's the first idea is probably the best and worst at the same time, because you can go around in a circle and come back to the first idea with slight variation in it. And it can just really sort of hit the mark.
Speaker 1And that feeling you just mentioned, is that a hunch? Is that accumulation of, you know, your however many years you've been doing this? How do you put words around what that feeling feels like?
Speaker 2I think the best word for it is taste. And I think that's the thing that gets missed a lot in the AI conversation. I think AI can give you a million ideas, but it can't give you taste. It can give you pattern matching. It can give you what everyone else has done. And you can do your own sort of pattern matching, but ultimately comes down to, does that pass the pub test? Or is that something that you feel is actually going to have impact? And it's hard to put a specific framework around it, because sometimes the best ideas just sort of feel right. But it does come down to, are you actually bringing taste to the table? And I think taste is probably that thing that it's not quite teachable, has to be somewhat innate and natural, but can be such a powerful and unique unlock for a brand or a communications campaign that I frankly think AI will never be able to replace.
Speaker 1I read that you once ran the world's biggest live stream on the Great Barrier Reef. What an incredible experience that must have been. Tell me about how it came about, how, why, when?
Speaker 2Yeah, so we were working with Twitter at the time before it became X, and they had recently acquired it, which feels like forever ago, but it was a massive live streaming platform that was very popular at the time. And we wanted to really just showcase the power of the platform. And we thought, what better way than to send someone scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef and answer questions from the bottom of the Barrier Reef? So quite literally, we sent a boat out on the Great Barrier Reef, and the technical setup for it was a lot more complicated than we expected, because, you know, trying to get mobile signal to the middle of the Barrier Reef wasn't, wasn't easy. But we sent an influencer who was quite popular on Periscope scuba diving. And then we set up a live Q&A that people could ask him. And so he had a scuba mask, but he was able to speak into that. And so it was a lot of fun, because again, it just just showed the power of the platform. It wasn't about saying we're better, or we're amazing, or look how good we are. It was just literally showing like, here's what you can do with it. And here's why it's so powerful. And it just just really hit with obviously media, but you know, more broadly with a lot of the audiences, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, I think there's something in you know, the 250,000 ish, sort of live viewers concurrently. So yeah, incredible. It was amazing.
Speaker 1You mentioned working with an influencer, then what are your thoughts generally on influencers from all the reports and reading that I do, it's on the rise, and influencers are only becoming more and more, you've got P&G, or one of the CEOs that came out saying, you know, we're going largely influencer led from a whole marketing budget perspective. What's the good, bad and ugly in terms of working with influencers?
Speaker 2Yeah, of course. I mean, they're obviously such an incredibly powerful channel. Because, again, they are humans, they are individuals, and they are going to be so much more authentic and natural, most of the time to their audiences versus, you know, a P&G, you know, coming out with the brand and trying to do it themselves. The things that really matter to us are, are they not just do they have the most followers? Or do they reach, you know, the community, the audience we're trying to reach? The thing that matters most is, are they actually authentic to the brand? If we are running, a campaign for lush, and we have a creator who doesn't live by the same sort of ethical and moral standards, then that's not going to land all that well with the audiences. And they will see that from a mile away. And so we need to be very careful and very clear on who we're sort of reaching out to and how we work with them. The other thing that we're seeing a lot more of now is rather than, you know, I think the historical approach with influencers and creators has been get a lot of as many creators as possible. And kind of, it almost becomes transactional when they do a one off campaign. Like they're suddenly selling soap, or they're suddenly selling, you know, beauty products that can give you a little bit of a sugar hit. But there's actually been some research that started to come out that shows that when you use creators effectively, in the long term, they can actually have much more powerful impact than even TVCs in terms of awareness, attention, memory and brand affiliation over the long term. So in terms of the cost to impact ratio, particularly with consumer led brands, they are such a powerful sort of path through to the audience. But even in B2B, I'm increasingly seeing a lot of, you know, B2B SaaS companies and other companies in the space start to use, you know, influencers is a bit of a dirty word in the B2B world, but frankly, community, and people who are actually engaged, you know, for your marketing SaaS company, you know, using people who are well known in the marketing community in a specific area, and working with them, and they're still authentic to who they are, they're not shilling for a product, but giving them the opportunity to actually be involved in, talking about a new feature, or talking about a new product, or talking about something is becoming increasingly a powerful tool for us to be able to reach out to those audiences. Because again, they're reading media, but not nearly as much as they used to. And you know, you want to be across as many of the channels to get in front of that audience as possible at the right time.
Speaker 1What's exciting you from a new business brief perspective? What are you spending your time thinking about or challenges you're solving that are coming through the doors or that you're going after? And are there any tips that you would have for a marketer? Writing a great brief?
Speaker 2Be specific and know what you want. That's actually not true. I think we've had a lot of conversations with companies who don't necessarily know what they want, but are willing to go on the journey to figure out what they want. And if as long as you're willing to go on the journey, then that's great, because we can help you sort of go along the journey. The struggle can be when you get a brief where you don't necessarily know what you want, but you're not necessarily willing to collaborate on what that looks like, then you can kind of, you're coming at it from two sides and you're never going to be in the middle. So simple, but so true. The other thing is just the assumptions that you bring to the conversation. I think, again, you're in the bubble, you're drinking the Kool-Aid, which is entirely natural, but that means you're probably bringing a lot of assumptions to who your prospective audiences are and what they like and what they care about. And so we get a lot of briefs that kind of come through saying we want to be in this particular publication or we want to get in front of this audience in this particular way. And oftentimes it's based on assumptions that might be five or as they used to be. And so oftentimes we challenge the brief and challenge that sort of assumption and kind of give them, you know, alternatives to kind of think about, actually, here's where your audience is now. You know, they're more on Instagram than they are on, you know, another channel or, you know, they're not necessarily reading this publication nearly as much as they used to and get them thinking outside the box around that. Final thing, I think, is just don't be focused on one specific channel. I think more and more and more we are pushing to have the conversations where we're starting with the story. And the strategy and then focus on what agnostic about how you then get that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you're coming to me saying, you know, we just want to be in media and we only care about media execution. We can do that. We're great at it. But, you know, you're often leaving a lot on the table in terms of how to actually amplify your story and use the effort in more ways than one to actually be more effective. If you're purely thinking from a channel perspective, then you're often duplicating a lot of the work or spending a lot of time on work that may not be as effective in amplification as it could be.
Speaker 1How odd to ask the experts the thing that they're experts in for their expertise. I saw a LinkedIn post recently which pointed out that earned media isn't just traditional press anymore. It's review sites, community forums, creators that aren't being paid for their opinions, Reddit. It's, you know, other niche platforms. Broadly speaking, do you think brands truly understand where their reputation is being formed and or how do you track that over
Speaker 2time? I think they've got an inkling of it, but they don't necessarily know exactly which channels or how to necessarily use those channels as effectively as they want to. The advent of whatever you want to call it, AI visibility, GEO, AEO, all those buzzwords, basically how do you turn up on chat models, whether it's ChatTPT or Claude or Google AI mode, is a really powerful sort of emerging space that we're doing a lot of work in because it really sort of helps to unearth exactly where those opinions are forming because you can really quickly see Reddit is driving all of this conversation around a particular set of headphones or the latest car or whatever that is. Or it could actually be tier one media that you're focused on or it could be an affiliate site that you've never even heard of that is suddenly driving the sentiment and the intention and the focus around that particular product or that category. And so we're doing a lot of work right now with a lot of clients to unearth where are you sitting against your competitors or against the category on those chat models and then what's driving that sentiment across whether it's traditional media, new media like podcasts and substacks, Reddit, forums, affiliate sites, directories, all that sort of stuff. It's just so much more extensive than a lot of people sort of think and assume these days. And yeah, so the way to impact those isn't necessarily just have your traditional media relations sort of campaign, but focus on, again, being channel agnostic and getting to the right channels that really sort of are influencing that opinion.
Speaker 1Changing gears a little bit, in 2021, Sling and Stone was acquired by VCCP, the global comms group. You subsequently became CEO. We'd love to know a bit about your sort of superpower and, you know, coming up through the business as opposed to being helicoptered in as a career CEO. What do you think that brings that's maybe different? How do you spend your day? What are you thinking about?
Speaker 2We were acquired by VCCP, as you said, in 2021. And our founder, Vuki, sort of stood down, stepped down, sorry, at the end of 2024. He has three kids under five and wants to spend a lot of time with them. And frankly, he's doing really, really well. I catch up with him all the time.
Speaker 1Shout out to Vuki. He's a legend.
Speaker 2I keep him updated most weeks. But yeah, I think when it kind of came time to think about, you know, what was next, you know, they could have helicoptered in a CEO. But I think I was able to bring not just the historical knowledge of kind of where the agency had been and the clients and the team, but also an understanding, a strong understanding of where the industry is going, where the agency needed to go from a strategic point of view, and how communications is changing and how we can kind of do that. And so if I had sort of come in and said, we're just going to do the status quo and to continue that, then that probably wouldn't have worked. But my focus has been on how do we start to establish and disrupt ourselves. We've been the agency for challenges and disruptors since we were born, but we need to be willing and bold enough. Now it's your turn. Exactly. Exactly. Otherwise, we will be disrupted, right? As with any company in any agency. And so, you know, we've been on that journey ever since to think about that. So I spend my days, you know, doing a mix of things. You know, I love to be in client work and I get so much energy from everything from new business chats and hearing, you know, some of the challenges and opportunities through to brainstorming through to just sort of fixing, you know, the smallest problems that are happening on a particular client campaign. I spend a lot of my time on new business and really sort of, you know, spruiking the agency and, you know, showing what we can do and getting in front of prospective clients. Spending as much of my time as I can on looking at what does the next three years look like from an agency point of view? What is happening in the industry, not just in Australia, but globally? Because I think Australia can be a little bit of a laggard when it comes to things like new media channels and things like that, where we're starting to get sub stacks and starting to get, you know, obviously a lot more podcasts like yourselves and things like that, that are really sort of flowing through. So I'm thinking a lot more about kind of where is the industry going from a channel challenge and opportunity point of view? And how do we sort of position ourselves to really sort of be well placed on that? And we're doing that every day. We are, as I said, doing a lot more in the AI visibility space and making sure that that's available across all of our clients. We brought in, you know, a lot of our clients, you know, a guy named Marty, who's the ex LinkedIn news editor in Australia, to really sort of drive a lot of the executive profiling on LinkedIn, both in written and video, which has worked really, really well. We're, you know, building our content and our creative capabilities to make sure that we are a PR agency at heart, but we are, you know, full service communications for the companies that are really looking to drill down into the future of storytelling. And it's working really well. And I'm really sort of excited about what the opportunity in the future looks like for us in APAC and globally.
Speaker 1Amazing. What do you think are parts of the CEO role that people rarely talk about, but probably should?
Speaker 2I think the thing that I think a lot about is, am I spending my time on the right things? Am I getting too deep in the weeds or not deep enough? And I think that is a struggle that most CEOs probably face. If you're too sort of bird's eye view, and you're not actually understanding a lot of the problems that may be behaving, then by the time they get up to you, those problems are probably too far gone. And you haven't had a chance to sort of nip them in the bud. So, you know, I often people call them sort of skip level meetings, or whatever you call them, I often spend a lot of time sort of talking to people at all levels of the business to really sort of understand not just, you know, what are the problems, but what are their thoughts? And what are the opportunities that maybe we're not even thinking about? The other thing is, obviously, though, you know, you don't want to be so in the weeds that you're getting in the way of people actually doing their jobs or constantly pushing people to change here, there and everywhere. So getting that right mix of, you know, depth, but also breadth, but then also thinking a lot about focus and clarity on the business. I've seen a lot of companies changing tacks in order to meet whatever the CEO's will is at that point in time. And you never get anything done. But at the same time, if the CEO is not pushing for certain things, and pushing things, then you may just become complacent. Getting that right balance of innovation and consistency and focus and clarity and speed is a crucial thing that I think you have to think about it constantly and proactively. Otherwise, you'll just end up in doing the same old, same old. I know that you played a big
Speaker 1part in establishing Slingerstone's deep tech arm last year. Was that driven by client demand or a gut feeling that this is where communications is heading?
Speaker 2A bit of both, actually. We have been working with a lot of companies in that space for quite a number of years. So we work with Main Sequence, which is the venture capital arm that was founded out of CSIRO. They do a lot of investment in deep tech companies, companies like Morse Micro, companies like Nourish Ingredients, which does sort of animal-free fats, and companies in quantum computing, artificial intelligence. So we sort of have worked with them to really understand kind of where the industry is. Also done a little bit of work for the CSIRO themselves, and worked with a lot of startups and scale-ups in the deep tech space. And what we saw, honestly, was, you know, there's so much interesting stuff being done. We often talk about Australia as not really being at the forefront of innovation and advanced thinking. I actually think there is so much happening in that space that you just do not hear about because they're not necessarily great at telling their own story.
Speaker 1They haven't engaged Sing and Stone.
Speaker 2They haven't engaged us. No, but you know, honestly, you've got amazing, such incredible scientists and engineers and people who are at the cutting edge of their field. And they're amazing at doing what they do, but not all of them are great at telling their own story. And frankly, you know, they need to be focused on building the business or getting the technology to commercial scale. So we truly believe that, you know, you could have the best product in the world, or a game-changing product, and it could fail simply because the story isn't there and you haven't gotten out to market, you know, effectively enough.
Speaker 1Which is what I was going to ask you. So when you're working in the deep tech, science, innovation space, all industries built on future promises, how do you balance optimism with honesty when the tech might be unproven?
Speaker 2Yeah, great question. It's something that we think about a lot because it's obviously a balance, right? I often think about the phrase, I can't remember who said it, it was about Silicon Valley saying we were promised jetpacks and we got them. And I think it's a great question. I think it's a great question. Like button. So there's a long history of technology companies generally promising the world and not really sort of getting to reality fast enough. You need a bit of both. You need pragmatism and optimism. And, you know, you need to be able to paint the future because often, you know, that future might be five or 10 years away. So deep tech, you require patient investors and patient capital, and you require the ability to be able to tell the story, but obviously not necessarily be able to show the result. For a little while to come, you have to get that optimism, right? But at the same time, you have to be pragmatic in the sense of not everything's going to be world changing. You might change a particular part of the world, or you might change an industry, but that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, it's going to be a trillion dollar opportunity every single time. And so we try to balance that as much as possible. Oftentimes, it's not about going big bang on the first day, but actually starting to, you know, unravel the story bit by bit so that, you know, you're not necessarily going straight to the ultimate 10. 10 year vision or 100 year promise, but focusing on what's going to be visible and available over the next sort of one to two years.
Speaker 1For anyone listening, I don't know the answer to this. I'm intrigued myself. How do you measure the success of PR and comms strategies? And are there any metrics that you focus on more than others?
Speaker 2Great question. Every person in PR and comms will tell you a slightly different story. And again, this is something that as an industry, we probably haven't done the best job at sort of explaining. Ultimately, I don't want this to be a down to the business outcome and the business, you know, goals that you're trying to drive. For some people, it is purely awareness. And so, you know, our focus is on getting to as big an audience as possible. And so we measure that through, you know, everything from the amount of press hits we're getting or the amount of views we're getting on social or the share of voice among the competitors that we're sort of competing against. For others, it's getting to a very specific audience at a very specific time. And for that, you know, it can be everything from showcasing anecdotal sort of data from, you know, the leads that are coming through, directly to them, or using brand tracking, like tracksuit client of ours. But, you know, using that to really sort of correlate to the impact. Increasingly, again, we're using AI visibility as one of the tools that we're using to showcase the value because as you start to use earned media more as a channel to tell the story, it will start to feed into the AI models quite quickly. And so we're able to then sort of track and correlate, you know, how our work is driving visibility, sentiment, and ultimately, impact on the brands themselves.
Speaker 1Last question. Something I don't hear people talk about very often is the role of PR people at the executive table. Do you think that should shift and they should be where the business strategy is being set? Or is that too premature?
Speaker 2I absolutely think that comms should be at the executive table or the board table, depending on how you're set up. Oftentimes, or historically, I think PR has been the thing that you have at the end of a discussion, you know, you've made the decision as a company, and you're sending it to the comms person then telling them to put it out on it as a press release.
Speaker 1Execute. Yeah. Execute.
Speaker 2Yeah. And you're at the end of the supply chain. And at that point in time, you know, it could go all horribly wrong, and suddenly the PR people are at fault. Whereas actually, it was a decision that was made right up the line, that could have been stopped by a comms person that could have made it all better. And I think you're seeing a lot of companies start to change that, particularly in Silicon Valley. So as an example, you might have seen there's a trend at the moment of companies creating almost storytelling departments. And by that, they mean, not just having the PR person, but having all of the earned comms and owned comms capabilities in one sort of team, often separate from marketing, but focused on how do we get the story out there in the most ideal and authentic way possible. And oftentimes, those roles are reporting either directly into the CEO or a co-founder. So as an example, Notion has gone down this pathway and pulled a lot of its comms, how it sort of reaches out to community, creators into one team that reports directly into the co-founder, because it is so important to them that they get their story right. Obviously, they're a very community driven platform, and they need to make sure that, you know, their story is clear and cuts through. And so I think the more brands start to realise that comms is something that should be part of the story from the get go, I think the more you'll see that those stories are a lot clearer, and hopefully, there are fewer crises that come along the way.
Speaker 1Yeah, because you sort of got like the potential reputation, you know, and damage and negative side but you've also got the sort of don't we think about it this way? Or an opportunity that I've seen from an outside perspective is this still serves business objectives, but perhaps sets up all of the comms and, you know, storytelling strategy from there in a totally different trajectory.
Speaker 2Yeah, a hundred percent. The earlier you can have, you know, almost a cynical viewpoint at the table that is actually questioning should that decision have been made in the first place, probably the better you'll be and the fewer crises you'll have. Incredible.
Speaker 1It's been a really interesting conversation with you. Thank you so much for your time and can't wait to catch up soon.
Speaker 2No worries. Thanks so much, Lance. Great to see you. My biggest takeaway today from
Speaker 1chatting with James, other than the fact that he is just such a lovely, humble, hungry, smart, kind person, is the idea of who cares, you know, thinking about internal outcomes and really challenging key stakeholders on who and why should people care about this.
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