‘Get me on Rogan!’: PR scrambles to navigate new media
Ben Smith
4 min read
The News
Corporate executives and other public figures emerged from this month’s election with a new task for their handlers: urgently figure out how to make them more like the loose, podcast-friendly Donald Trump, and less like the scripted and corporate Kamala Harris.
Executives used to seeking out slots on CNBC branched out to Fox News and Fox Business after 2016, in hopes of reaching the new president to make the case for favorable policies — leaving the influencer economy to marketing departments selling goods to consumers.
Now, the influence-makers are scrambling after their marketing colleagues into the space, seeking to figure out which business-friendly podcasts, eclectic YouTubers, or right-leaning online comic chat show hosts could provide a venue for getting their message out.
“There are a lot of companies coming to us and saying, ‘OK, in addition to your classic WSJ, Bloomberg, what are the other ways we can reach the audience we want to reach and influence?’” said Nikhil Deogun, CEO of the Americas for Brunswick Group, a critical issues advisory firm. “The election drove that home for a lot of people. Companies have realized that news about them is being interpreted and transmitted by a host of new voices to audiences who don’t consume traditional media.”
For the giant agencies that play a central role in American corporate communications, this moment is also an opportunity. Brunswick just published an introduction for its clients to the idea of the “newsfluencer.” (“There is significant upside for corporates who become early participants in this space.”) And Richard Edelman, the founder of the eponymous communications firm, wrote last week that “news influencers” should be “included in media plans over time on topics such as in-sourcing, upskilling, support for entrepreneurs and American optimism.”
“My teams are going to the clients and saying, ’We have a fundamental change here and we need to be in front of these people and we need not to be afraid,” Edelman said in an interview. “They have to get their clients comfortable with free-flowing conversations.”
One feature of this new space, he said, is that few interviewers want executives’ views on what’s good for the world, but they do have an intense interest in commerce. “The essence of the argument can’t be about purpose. It has to be about business,” he said.
The shift is also an acknowledgement that the public relations business has at times been slow to prepare itself for a world in which mainstream news outlets aren’t the only individuals influencing public opinion.
“There’s definitely more interest in right-leaning platforms across the influencer sphere and new research projects to understand those people and their reach,” one PR executive told Semafor on the condition of anonymity.
But this executive noted that the firms weren’t always quick to catch on to what’s percolating in Substack newsletters or on podcasts.
“The big firms have been doing things the same way for a long time. Even a lot of the analytic tools are built for five years ago,” they said.
Ben’s view
Trump is a singularly media-friendly figure, an entertainer and celebrity who was a professional talk show guest before he was president. He’ll always gamely say the most outrageous thing he can think of about whatever topic happens to be in the news. The word for this tendency, back in the day, was “overexposure.” By 2003, when I went to work for the New York Observer, Trump was so overexposed that our legendary editor, Peter Kaplan, had issued a ban on quoting him. He was too easy to get.
Very few contemporary politicians and CEOs have the experience or capacity to operate this way. You can be a fun guest; you can get your message across; occasionally, you can do both.
But the biggest shift in contemporary politics and PR may be that the cost of an error has dropped, while the value of ubiquity has risen. If you talk to everyone all the time, you’ll occasionally say the sort of dumb thing that would have sparked a social media scandal and dinged your stock just a few years ago. These days, it’s vanishingly hard to make a podcast gaffe that has that reach, though Vice President-elect JD Vance may be the exception that proves the rule.
Conversely, a fragmented media landscape means that you need to go on ten podcasts to reach the scale of audience a cable television show used to command. And so a new wave of public figures, and their advisers, will need to navigate in a looser and more forgiving media landscape.
Notable
“Trump immersed himself in creator culture, met them where they were and embraced their mediums,” influencer marketing agency CEO Brendan Gahan told The Hollywood Reporter.
Trump’s podcast conversations “not only amplified Trump’s messages but also infused a sense of modernity and relevance into his campaign,” Saadia Khan wrote in AdWeek.
The ad industry also watched the election closely. “We’ll need more disruptive approaches to our creative campaigns — best practices won’t win. The winning political campaign was considered disruptive: they went against best practices, the rules were broken — the rule book was tossed aside! And it worked,” R/GA’s Tiffany Rolfe told AdAge.
