Intro And The Microsoft Wake-Up

Chris Norton 0:00

Welcome back to Embrace and Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth from failure. This week, I'm joined all the way from Australia by Professor Jim Macnamara, one of the most respected voices in communication measurement in the world. But his whole career started with an actual kick-in. His biggest client, Microsoft, slid a very long report across his desk and told him he didn't care what work Jim had actually done. He just wanted to know what the results were. So he went and got one. And that one bruising client meeting actually led to a master's, a PhD, and a professorship. Fascinating chat list, and you think you're going to enjoy it. So let's get into it. Jim Macnamara, welcome to the show.

Jim Macnamara 0:47

Thank you.

Chris Norton 0:48

Joining all the way from uh Australia. So thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate this. Um, and I want to talk about uh, well, your area of expertise, which is measurement at how you got into measurement, because you told me a fascinating story about how you actually got into uh measurement because everybody's trying to measure everything in marketing and PR at the moment. Um, and what I love about AMEC, the Barcelona principles, is we're actually um you can actually track impact now, which is what a lot of marketers that's the panacea, that's what we're all looking for. But you actually you've been and you've been behind controlling creating those principles yourself, I know. Um so do you want to tell us about how you got into um measurement in the first place? Because I think the story is fascinating.

Jim Macnamara 1:38

Yes, well, it's interesting how sometimes our biggest mistake in life, or one of our biggest mistakes, can actually lead to success. Um, so I, like many people who worked as a practitioner and ran a communication agency for many years, and I had some very large clients. One day, my biggest client called me up and said, uh, Jim, we want a detailed report on what value you've brought to our organization. What are the results you've got for us? So I went away the way we used to do it, and I wrote a very long talk to my colleagues, and we wrote a very long report. We listed all the press conferences and all the things we'd done, all the events we'd arranged, all the publicity we got. And I took it back to the client, sort of expecting that this was, you know, pretty good. I was feeling pretty chuffed. And uh I gave it to the CEO and he looked at it for about two minutes and he slid it back across his desk to me and he looked at me in the eye and he said, Jim, and I can remember his words to this day. He said, Jim, I don't care how much work you did. I just want to know the results you got, the value for my company. And the truth was, uh, I didn't know how to evaluate that. I didn't know how to calculate that. Um, and so that was a pretty big shock because it was my biggest client. As a result of that, I enrolled in a master's degree in research and uh studied research. And then uh eventually that led to me bailing out of my PR agency and setting up a research company, doing a PhD, ended up becoming a professor of communications specializing in evaluation.

Chris Norton 3:12

Nice. So so you you actually used the the worst thing that's happened to you at work to craft your entire career, which is amazing. And um what I suppose what why did you feel that you couldn't justify the impact of what you'd done? Because you're right, a lot of people try and track everything down to the other degree. So I started PR 26. I went to I did you I used to teach PR at university and I also did a PR degree in the UK. So I'm one of the brief people who did the PR degree. There's not actually as many of them left now. Um, but but measurement was always was always interesting. Like I I started my first job and we used to measure um key messages and size of article and A V E, the national the swear word in the PR industry, um big and yeah the size of the article, key message analysis, and then I did I'd put it into a spreadsheet and it'd prepare this quite detailed an analysis. But you're right, it didn't really tell you the actual business impact. So, how how how do you think things have moved on now, that way you can literally get down to the the nitty-gritty and measure business impact?

Outputs Versus Outcomes In Comms

Jim Macnamara 4:20

Well, we're still in the process of getting there, I think, because uh I mean the real problem with what you talk about, and I did the same thing, uh, and many practitioners still do, is we measure what we call outputs. We measure an hour activity. So we measure all the things we do, and when we measure uh media publicity, volume, impressions, reach, share a voice, they're all outputs. They're what we're putting out into the media. They are not what's in the minds of our target audiences and our target markets. So they are not outcomes or impact. And still today, a lot of the industry, whether it's advertising or PR, is still measuring outputs. And so what we're doing in AMIC and uh what I've been involved in for many years is pushing people to look at measuring outcomes. We're talking outcomes, we mean how have you changed awareness, how have you changed attitude, have you converted people to to uh making inquiries, to subscribing, to registering, to buying a product, to going to a showroom? How, you know, sales and profits are the ultimate. Um, and there are many drivers of those, but at least we've got to get beyond measuring the stuff we put out. Uh, and I like to quote Alex Aiken, the former head of the uh UK government communication service, because he says we've got to do more than sending out stuff. He calls it SOS. And what we've been doing for a long time is simply sending out stuff. What we've got to do is measure the outcomes and the impact.

Chris Norton 5:44

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I had somebody taught telling me the other day, it was a client, and she she shall remain nameless, but she was um she was obviously head of marketing, uh, and she was explaining to me that the head of sales in her international global company uh was was like asking for the business impact of the marketing as a whole, you know, like down to the and and I said that is the argument that every marketer and every I said you you don't don't feel alone there. Like there's people having that argument. It's the it's the argument that's been going on since since we invented the wheel in marketing, I think. Do you agree? Do you think do you think that people in sales still think that we just do the colouring in and then we do, you know, marketing isn't isn't really a discipline that's measured effectively?

Jim Macnamara 6:32

Uh that's still true to a large extent. I mean, even in the advertising industry, which has been a much larger industry than PR, traditionally advertising is measured reach and recall. Well, you know, uh when you look at that, uh, we can reach a market, but they can ignore it. And even recall, I can recall thousands of ads, but I don't buy the product. And so we have been measuring these tracking measures that are really activities and outputs, uh, how much stuff we're putting out. And we kind of assume that it'll have an effect, or we've been a little bit scared to go and actually find out whether it is having any effect. And of course, you can do it. You can go out and do surveys, you can interview people and say, you know, did you hear about this product? Where did you hear about it? Why did you buy this product? So we've got to move beyond measuring media, which is the intermediate stage, and measure audiences. What's happening in the audiences is where we've really ultimately got to go. And we're slowly getting there.

GEO AEO And LLM Visibility

Chris Norton 7:30

Well, I'm I'm hoping I'm hosting a um an event next month, and it's on GEO, AEO, and how to maximize and how to how to maximize your impact, basically. I mean, we're talking about two types of impact, but really visibility, really, in GEO and AEO, which the two are is quite interesting having this conversation because I again one of the big things, the conundrums that I've I find with the AEO GEO thing is there's loads of different tools that will measure your visibility and predicted visibility, but it still feels like they're going like sticking the finger in the air, measuring a thousand queries, prompts in the to use the term that they use, and then they're giving you like a share of voice percentage. But to use your example, I don't think that they're actually again, they're not measuring impact again, they're just measuring visibility. So it's just like the good old days of are we on page one on Google doesn't mean that people are actually clicking and and actually buying or even landing on our website or reading about us. Do you know what I mean?

Jim Macnamara 8:34

Well, that's true. Uh, but I think it is to be fair uh and to be practical, uh we tend to we use program logic models. Most most professions use program logic models where you start off with inputs and then you have dumb number of activities. And of course, we do have to produce outputs. We do have to get the visibility in the in the large language models. Um, the important thing to do is to recognize that that's only a step along the way. It's not the end result. And so it's quite legitimate to track your outputs because if you're not getting any visibility in traditional media or social media or large language models, the chances are you're probably not going to be successful. But the thing is, it's a it's a step along the way. So we certainly support measuring media publicity, reach impressions, share a voice, sentiment, all of that's valid. Measuring visibility in LLMs is becoming increasingly important because, you know, the sort of no-click environment we live in. But the message from AMIC and from me and and people who uh research in this area is that we've also got to go to the next step. What's happening in the target audience? Are we getting traction? Are we getting click-throughs? Are we getting conversions? Are we getting buying? Uh, etc. And there's many metrics you can measure there. You can measure follow shares at a very basic level, but then you can measure click-throughs, you can measure conversions, you can measure registrations, subscriptions, inquiries, all the way up to changes in awareness and attitude and ultimately behaviour.

Chris Norton 10:05

Yeah, because I I've at Prohibition we launched about three or four years ago, actually, before we just before we did started this podcast, which is about three and a half years old now, and we we worked with a uh my old boss, which I believe you know, and he actually referred you on the show, Stuart Bruce. So me and Stuart worked together for two and a half years, and I'm with friends now, you know. And um measurement was was a thing that I was as keen on, I've always been keen on making making sure that my agency, we're based in the north of the UK, um, measures impact, measures not just numbers, but actually some sort of impact. And I do think it's been so we developed our own sort of uh dedicated framework around the the Barcelona principles. But I think that this new LLM GEO area is quite interesting because I don't think anyone's nailed I've seen uh James Crawford in the UK, I don't know if you know him, but um I've seen him reference that we need to be creating some sort of I think he's had a little stab at it on how to an initial stab at how to get um measure sort of LLM visibility and to use the Barcelona principles and an AMEC around that. But do you do you think anyone's nailed it yet, or is it just a work in principle? Is it is it is it being developed? And do you think it's gonna continue to be developed as AI gets cleverer and cleverer?

Jim Macnamara 11:23

Well, certainly um uh the big focus at the moment is how do we measure uh LLMs and where we're appearing, uh where our client or our products are appearing in large language models, and that's important. Um that will continue to evolve because at the moment uh AI is improving by the day. A lot of our large language models are still full of errors and facts, you know, factual information, misinformation. Uh they have hallucinations, you s you submit a prompt and you get a different answer every time you submit it. So this field is moving rapidly, but at the end of the day, the industry's still got to recognize that getting your brand or your organization name into an LLM is only visibility. It doesn't yet mean that anyone's taking much notice of it or doing anything as a result. And so we come back to that point of, yep, we've got to tick off getting visibility, traditional, traditional media, social media, LLMs, but we've got to go further to say what's happening in the target markets and the target audiences that we're that we're interested in. And uh, you know, when we talk about measurement, the other thing I I harp on a lot is it's more than measurement because there's measurement is just taking the measures. We then do evaluation, which is making a judgment on how does that compare to our objectives? Are we getting there? And then the third level is insights, because we're not just doing this to look backwards, because most measurement looks backwards. It tells you what what happened in the past. The insights we can gain is informs future strategies. So, you know, are we are we failing in certain areas? Are we winning in other areas? What's a competitor doing? So I like to talk about measurement evaluation and learning or measurement evaluation and insights if you prefer, because measurement's just the first step. And the industry is a bit hung up on just collecting lots and lots of measures. You can end up drowning in data. The issue is the evaluation and the insights you get from it. You know, what are we doing well? What should we stop doing? What should we what should we change as we go forward? That's the exciting part of the whole measurement and evaluation sphere. Uh, and so I think the sooner we get beyond the retrospective rear view mirror looking back and sort of grudgingly trying to prove we did a good job and actually look for those results, I think it becomes a much more positive and exciting place to work.

Chris Norton 13:43

Yeah. And then, yeah, I know you mean like dedicating insights from just measuring and making sure. Yeah, look, because but that's kind of how that's kind of how we worked in social media, right? So social media, like we we'll we'll if we've got a client in social media, we'll have audited the client, looked at their positioning, looked at their competitors, looked at where the gap is, looked at how they should position themselves. Then we launched the camp, then we'll launch a campaign of execution, we'll make sure it's on on point, hopefully, and and it'll be executed. Then we measure, but you're doing monthly measurements, so you're measuring everything, all the key things, and and also the business impact as the final stage. But what we with social media is you can't because you can measure everything so carefully, is you can then do exactly what you just talked about, which is where you look for the insights, you tweak the insights, you change your approach. Because some things one month work and some things they don't. PR is a lot slower than that. And marketing in general, I would think, is could can be a bit slower than being able to just twist the digital marketing bits now and again. Do you know what I mean? It's a it's a it's it's it's a lot slower, is is PR. But I like the fact that you could use your insights to to craft your strategy to get a better result.

Jim Macnamara 14:52

Well, social media certainly uh does does work really well because it's so so quick, it's so dynamic, it changes by the day. Um we're able to get a lot of data from that. Um, but of course, it's still media. And I suppose at the end of the day, you can think of there's two worlds that we can look at. We can look at media, but media is the thing between us and the market. It's the inter that's the word media means, the intermediate. So we can look at media, but we've also look at audiences or markets, if you prefer to call them that PR calls on publics. And it's interesting that our world still focuses on media. We're very obsessed with media, and actually the real, the end game is the audience, is the public, is the market. And I think there's going to be a shift over the next decade, and clients are going to demand this to say, okay, it's one thing to look at the media, and of course we need to be there. That's step one. But we've also got to go on, get to move along and look at what's happening with people, what's happening with our audiences and our markets, because that's where the dollars come from.

Strategy Alignment And Baseline Measurement

Chris Norton 15:55

Yeah. You've um so you've said um you've said clients often have an action plan, but no strategy. So how do you tell the difference in the first meeting? What do you what do you ask them to expose it? How do you how do you get to the nitty-gritty basically?

Jim Macnamara 16:10

Well, an organization should have a strategy. Uh, strategy should uh precede plan, uh, because the strategy is that overarching goal of where does the organization want to be? What kind of organization are they? Where do they want to be in the next three, five years? And then the plan is how to get there. Um, what you often find is organizations have a strategic communication plan, but they're not quite sure what the strategy is, and there's often a lack of alignment. So, in true strategic planning, the first thing you look at is the organization's strategy, uh, and that should identify their purpose, their vision, uh, where they want to be in the market, and then they should have an operational plan, and then the communication plan should completely align with that or part of that. It may not actually align with all of the organization's strategy because we can't do everything, but we will pick at least some parts of that and say, right, we are going to drive this result. Um, and and that, and then we put evaluation in behind that.

Chris Norton 17:12

Yeah, I find I've I found it on the ground, uh practically when I'm talking to clients, is because you've got different types of clients, right? You've got the financial client, you've got the marketing client, you've got and sometimes when we when we get to the nitty-gritty, okay, so they're like the seven, is it the seven whys? So you're like, okay, why are we doing that? Why, why? And then it can get a little bit awkward because some clients don't actually know why they're doing what they're doing, they're just doing it because their competition are doing it, or they're just doing it because their boss said, do that. And I found it can get a little awkward. How would you deal with that?

Jim Macnamara 18:58

Yeah, I think that's where uh getting the communication function, whether it's called PR or strategic com or corporate com, getting it into the decision making, you know, call it the C-suite or whatever, because ideally, um, in the ideal world, we would inherit a really good strategic plan from a client with clear objectives, etc. But often we don't. And uh, you know, I spend some of my time these days going into an organization and working with the senior C-suite executives to sort of work out, actually ask them those questions. What where are we going? What do we want to do? Also, there can be honesty in that part because PR and communication can't drive everything. You know, results are affected by brand value and equity, reputation, they're affected by product pricing strategy, distribution channel. Uh, and so you can you need to have all of those factors in your mind because uh at the end of the day, when we do talk about outcome and outcomes and impact, uh, those are multi-causal. Um, they are not only caused by communication, they can be caused by pricing strategy or a poor distribution channel, um, or in case of government, you know, an unpopular policy that you know nobody could sell. Um, so I think it is important for communicators. And to me, evaluation, good evaluation skills is one of the things that can get you there because you understand the difference between activities and outputs and outcomes and impact. Um, and if you can get into the advisory situation with senior management, you can help craft a communication plan that has realistic objectives. Remember the old smart analogy. It says specific, measurable, but they've got to be achievable. And too often PR and communication people inherit a plan that sometimes I think is not even achievable. It's just been dumped on their desk and they have a go at it. Well, you know, of course, evaluation is going to be a you know a problem in that case. So I think the more you can move up the food chain, moving upstream is is very important.

Chris Norton 21:01

Yeah. Achievable is interesting. Increase brand awareness by 25%. Great. What's brand awareness today? Hmm, we don't know.

Jim Macnamara 21:09

Well, that's that's true. Very often, and that's why we talk about evaluation as formative evaluation as well as summative or ex anti ex posts. Very often, in most cases, you've got to do evaluation in advance. I want to know the baselines. I want to know where the uh awareness is, where the attitude is, where the reputation is, you know, what what's what what do people need, what are their concerns. Then you build the communication, then of course you've got baselines to measure against. And as you say, if uh if awareness or you know a reputation was in the gutter, we're not going to get it improved by 25% in one year. Uh so good evaluation at that base, but most people jump straight over formative evaluation into a plan um and not even knowing whether it's achievable.

Chris Norton 21:56

When we spoke last time, you told me about some work you'd done with Volkswagen and measurement. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Causation Proof Volkswagen And WHO

Jim Macnamara 22:03

Yeah, that was uh just a case study, it was some years ago now, but it gets back to the difficult issue of causation or causality, as some people call it, because at the end of the day, what we know in uh in all areas is they always say success has many fathers and mothers and failure is an orphan. So when something is successful, everybody claims the result. So typically advertising would say we sold those cars. What we did with uh with Volgen in Asia Pacific was a simple research project where we identified from there, they identified uh a number of purchases of Volgen vehicles in the previous six months. We wanted recent purchases so they had a memory, clear memory of it. And then we telephone interviewed a whole number of those and we asked them a series of questions about where did you hear about the car? Why, yeah, basically, why did you buy the car? And we asked it unprompted questions, and they often said, Oh, we saw an ad or whatever. And we also asked them prompted questions like Did you ride in one? Did you test drive it? Did a friend buy one? You know, what were the influences? So we established 11 or 12 drivers of triggers in the decision. Then we asked them, what was the number one and number two? What was the main drivers that caused you to buy that car? What we found is, not surprisingly, that the main trigger of awareness of the model was advertising. But when we came to why did you finally buy the car, it came down to the price in the deal. That was number one. And very closely followed up in third place was independent editorial reviews. So there we could establish that public relations, the PR work, was one of the primary drivers of their sales. Now you don't need to do that kind of evaluation every year. We did it once, and we demonstrated to the marketing people that the the independent editorial publicity was very, very important. And so I think they increased their budget for that from 5% to 15%.

Chris Norton 24:06

Yeah, I mean, I 100% agree with that. Like I say, I'm hosting this GEO event in next month, and reviews are obviously a key, a key thing that AI takes into consideration. But like you say, it can be gamed and it can be manipulated. Um, but customer reviews, I mean, there's there's been argument with the Amazon reviews, there was Amazon reviews that were being bought and stuff like that. Can we still rely on customer reviews, do you think? And do the uh I I have to agree though, I think I'm answering my own question here. I think I do when I'm buying something, I'll that's the first thing I'll do is I'll check out the customer reviews. And if but are would you say that it's PR that's driving customer reviews online? Maybe we'll talk about two different things because you've got editorial reviews and then you've got customer reviews, haven't you? And the two the two are differ are slightly different. I wonder if um customer reviews should be more part of every PR campaign.

Jim Macnamara 25:00

Yeah, customer reviews are really uh a customer relations, a CRM uh I guess metric. But certainly uh in this particular story I was telling, it was independent editorial publicity, particularly reviews of the product, you know, test drives in the case of PR. It could be reviews of a new computer product. When they are written by a journalist, 99% of the time there's been a PR firm behind or a PR person behind providing the product and organizing organizing those things. Um, and so that's one that you can, and that comes back to that causality issue that's always challenging, I must admit. But and sometimes you've got to go, I'm an I'm a believer in the horse's mouth, as the old saying is. If you can get information from the horse's mouth, in this case, we went to people who had actually bought the vehicle and said, why did you buy it? And what were the what were the the drivers of, and of course we found out not surprisingly, there's no single uh influence. Uh most things are multi-causal, but what we wanted to show was was was the work we were looking at, was the public relations having any impact. And what we found is it was having a quite significant impact.

Chris Norton 26:11

Amazing, amazing, really good. I mean, that that I imagine uh Volkswagen got a lot out of that. That's so you've also you've done some amazing work in measurement. So you you measured uh didn't you work for the World Health uh Organization as well during COVID?

Jim Macnamara 26:26

Yes, I led uh evaluation for the WHO right through the COVID pandemic globally. So we were looking at mountains of data from around the world. So we were looking at uh media analysis data, website statistics from Google Analytics, we were looking at surveys, we were looking at uh, you name it, uh reputation studies, trust studies. Um I think at one stage we're analyzing 11, sorry, eight data sets uh to get an overall picture.

Chris Norton 26:55

And then what did you do with that? What do you what would you what would you do once you've had you'd evaluated it? What what was what were they using it for?

Jim Macnamara 27:02

Well, there were many examples in that. So and the and the frequency varies. So on a monthly basis, we had uh website stats. Of course, we wanted to know which web pages, which videos were being used. And if you take video as one example, we found a lot of the uh detailed technical videos of the WHO were not being used very much. Um, and when we did some research, we found people felt these issues like, you know, what is a mRNA vaccine versus a normal vaccine? Uh didn't understand it. So we came up with the idea, for example, based on evaluation, we needed short videos that were simple. So they created a product called Science in Five, where we had scientists who could explain things very, very simply in less than five minutes, put those on the website, and we had 400 million views in in a matter of a very short time. So it was the evaluation directly connecting into the strategy and adjusting the strategy. We found certain brochures didn't work, we found certain videos didn't work, and if the and this is what good advertising does as well. You know, a lot of agencies will run four or five versions of an ad, and they track the the results of it. And if one's not working, they just trash it, get rid of it, and put the other one on that's working. And so I think we're we've been a bit afraid to do that. So the WHO was uh it was a challenging project because we had many countries, many languages, but we also managed to get high-level work, like uh Edelman uh very kindly agreed to include WHO in their trust surveys uh in 21-22 because Donald Trump had come out and criticized the WHO. We felt the reputation was down. How do we know it's picking up? So in that case, we had an omnibus question. We found that trust was increasing uh over the over the three-year period that I was there. Um so we were looking at reputation, we were trust, looking at a whole range of things.

Chris Norton 29:01

Great. And um, I was gonna, yeah, I've got a few other questions basically. So um you you've also written how many books have you written? It's it's over 10, isn't it?

Jim Macnamara 29:10

I'm in the process of writing my 22nd book.

Chris Norton 29:14

More than 20. 20. I mean, yeah, how the hell are you written 22 books? What what what okay? First question, which is the which is the most widely read?

Jim Macnamara 29:27

That's a good question. Actually, funnily enough, I think one of the most widely read of my books is one of the very early ones. A very I started out with some really simple books. Uh I I was working in uh as head of communication for a big organization in Australia, and I found that we had branches all over the country, and the branches had no clue about media interviews or doing PR. And so I wrote this really simple handbook, just basic tips on how to write a press release and how to organize an interview, and uh published it through a local publisher. And what I found is not only was my organization using it, hundreds of other organizations, you know, clubs and associations were using this handbook. And uh it's as simple as this called Public Relations Handbook for Managers and Executives, and it sold thousands and thousands of copies and still even sells today. And I wrote it in like 1984. Um, but yeah, more recently I've been combining, you know, deep academic. I've written a lot of academic research books, textbooks and research books. Um, but on evaluation, I'm currently writing a uh a high-level handbook on planning and evaluating communication, uh, working with AMEC, and uh that's sort of my latest project. And the aim there is the sort of things we're talking about, to bring absolute best practice and theory into a really practical format. Here's how you do it. Things like we're talking about how do you focus on outcomes and impact, how do you move beyond measures into evaluation and insights uh and destroying some of the myths, you know. People look for the silver bullet, which is a classic myth, you know, that there's one metric that's gonna do it all. Of course there's not, you know, there's multiple metrics, uh, you have to customize it. So that's the latest project. But yeah, sometimes the humblest and simplest books um continue to sell.

Chris Norton 31:20

So when's that book coming out?

Jim Macnamara 31:22

Uh it's meant to be out in September. We're going to distribute through Amazon uh globally. Um, but it's sitting on my manuscript, sitting on my desk at the moment. We're just waiting on the cover and it goes to print. So hopefully September.

Chris Norton 31:37

22 books. I mean, my god, I've not even written one. You made me feel uh uh insignificant. That's crazy. Um I will I've got a few other questions for you. So um I I suppose if you were if you were gonna give somebody your hot hottest

AI Ethics And Pricing For Value

Chris Norton 31:55

tip, because we're I feel like we're in a bit of um scenario now, and I don't know if this is over-exaggerated, because this is a PR person talking to a PR person. Are we about to enter a golden era of PR because of the AI is using exactly what we've been talking about, which is journalist um reviews or journalist articles, and it uses them for citations? It's I think it was 80. I've heard a stat that was that is now contested, by the way, that 85-86%, I believe, is of citations and that are public relations coverage, media media exposure. I've heard that that stat is is queer. I'm not sure if the queer is true as well. There's so much misinformation out there. Do you think we're entering a golden era for that? Or is it just PR people being looking for something to cling on to before AI takes over as all?

Jim Macnamara 32:49

Well, you know, f first of all, I don't regard myself as a PR person because I've uh been an academic for nearly 20 years and uh worked in advertising and across health communication, etc. But um I've heard the story, I've been in the game a long time, and I've heard the story of the golden age, it's all going to be great. We hear that over and over and over again. Um and I think public relations still has a lot of reputational issues itself to master. But in terms of the specifics of uh generative AI, there is no question that at the moment um the large language models are drawing a lot of media, drawing on media coverage and and and certain things. Um and so we know that uh, but they also draw on Reddit and so other social media platforms. Um so at the moment, uh it is it is important because a lot of the material that PR people are generating is being picked up by large language models. There's two things I'd say about that, though. First of all, it's both a benefit and a trap because if PR people act ethically, that's good. But they can also go the other way and decide to manipulate LLMs and just pump them full of PR blur. So we could destroy the industry very, very quickly if we did that. The second thing to say though is LLMs are not standing still. And if you look at what's happening with them, at the moment they mostly rely on what they can get access to. Reddit, social media platforms, newspapers, but even major newspapers are behind firewalls. What's happening with LLMs is many organizations are moving into context engineering. You'll hear that term used a lot. And that's basically where you are, if you're using a generative AI product, you're not simply taking an LLM off the shelf, you're actually customizing it to point it to reliable databases. So we can use APIs or we can uh use code to say to an LLM, go to this database. This is an authoritative database, go to this database because it's trustworthy. So context engineering will start to steer very proprietary type LLMs into more reliable areas and not just rely on PR. So there's a bit of a short-term period, and I think it's very important that the public relations field acts ethically and contributes, you know, trustworthy factual information and doesn't sort of try and jump in and exploit this period. Um so I don't think it's going to be a permanent golden age. I think we still have to earn our keep. And I think there's also risks in this period.

Chris Norton 35:28

Yeah, I've got other I've got something else that's related to that. And that's obviously with LLMs, AIs and everything, they're speeding up jobs, uh, you know, the speeds that we can do things and we've got more contacts like you just you you used there. Um, but I mean, what happens? I've seen articles, various articles saying agency day rates are now dead. Everything's dead, isn't it? SEO is dead because GEO is out. Um I saw an article the other day it said, are are agency day rates dead? And I was like, well, I was thinking, so we've we've worked hard to make capacity better so we're working more effective. Um, but this goes back to the measurement thing because you you were saying you don't just measure your outputs, and now are clients paying you for outputs, or are clients paying you uh, you know, and I'm not just talking about the PR industry, I'm talking about marketing in general. Like what other how it's gonna be fascinating to see how the whole world you know rebalances itself. Is it gonna be charging on outputs, or is it gonna be charging on day rates, or is it gonna be do you know what I mean?

Jim Macnamara 36:32

Well, I think charging on results has been been around for a long, long time. It's just we've had problems in defining results. Um, I do think it's a bit adequated to charge a flat hourly rate um, you know, for a PR consultant or an agency. Uh that's a kind of a bit of a 19th-century approach because you're assuming it's a flat field, we're all doing the same work. Uh even in the work I do, I charge on the value I'm bringing. And uh I might spend one day and earn $10,000 and spend another day and earn $2,000. It depends what I'm doing and the value I'm bringing, and I'll price it based on the results that I believe I can contribute. If I can't produce results, I'm prepared to say no charge. So I think there'll be a shift in, you know, towards value. What is the value? And that's why the industry must get away from simply measuring what they put in media. Because, you know, I can hire students who can get stuff in the media, basically. Smart university students can do that. We don't need experienced consultants and highly paid people to be doing that. Where we do need them is tracking that progress through to what is the awareness changes, how are we changing behavior, that audience impact outcomes and impact that I'm talking about. And if you're getting those sort of results, most clients are pretty happy to pay for it because they are seeing real value in it. And I think that's that's the shift. Moving to value, moving away from simply, you know, piles of press clippings. The industry is still a bit focused on the pile of press clippings, albeit it might be a pile of visibility data from LLMs.

Chris Norton 38:07

Fascinating. This is and it it it it's interesting that because it's you're saying it's antiquated, it might be antiquated, but the amount of proposals that you get requested for your day rate before you even are considered. So it's it's like it's a reverse thing as well. So you can't really get around it sometimes. Hmm, okay. And so what what's next for for Jim then? What are you going to be doing next? What's your what are your plans? Obviously, you've got this book coming out. What what

Books Next Steps And Contacts

Chris Norton 38:34

else are you going to be doing over the next sort of few months? What have you got planned this year?

Jim Macnamara 38:38

Well, I've spent the last 18 years as a full-time professor, uh, and I've now stepped down from that role. Um still doing similar work. So I'm now working basically as a full-time writer and consultant. So I've got, would you believe, a couple more books planned? Um, not all on evaluation. I'm going to write a few other things because I've always been a writer, as you can tell by the output. Um, but yes, I'm doing consulting. In fact, I'm consulting with some media analysis companies to try and improve their methodology. Um, I do a lot of free work for AMEC. Uh, I'm chair of the academic advisory group. Um, I supervise a lot of PhDs. So I seem to be working 12 hours a day uh as an honorary professor, um, but but enjoying it because I can uh sort of focusing on the projects I like.

Chris Norton 39:28

Yeah, you pick you picking and choosing what you want to work on. Um so you've been on the show now and you've given yours, you've told us about obviously the when what what got your mistake was actually what drove your whole career, which was fascinating. If you were us, who was the who is the next person we should invite on this show and why?

Jim Macnamara 39:47

Wow, that's a tough question. Um if you want to talk AI, um I don't know whether you know Rob Key, uh US. Right. He's probably the the best I've heard in talking about where AI is going, and particularly things like context engineering, because everyone's focused on the the stock standard AI models, you know, perplexity and uh Chat GPT and Claude, etc. Uh, but as I said before, AI is going to move. I mean, right now you're already seeing Claude science, so there's a specific version of Clawed just for science, and it's much more accurate because it's it's a it's been built to access scientific journals and scientific databases. Uh so there'd be a lot of development there. Someone like Rob Key would be really good to talk to. He's a quite a brain on where AI is heading. Um, and of course, I'm sure you talk to Johna Burke and AMIC uh quite often.

Chris Norton 40:44

I haven't actually.

Jim Macnamara 40:45

Yeah, it's worth talking to Jonna. She has a lovely overview of the the entire field and and and where and where it's at. Uh and of course, you know, I mean, many of the people you're talking to, like Stuart Bruce and James Crawford and all those, I know well. Richard Bagnall's another person who's got a great experience across the industry. So any of those folks are worth talking to.

Chris Norton 41:06

Okay, cool. And uh if people want to get hold of you, Jim, what's the best way to get hold of you? Uh if they want to book you or either write you another book?

Jim Macnamara 41:14

Pretty easy if you Google, uh, you know, I'll still come up with my name, and particularly if you put UTS University of Technology Sydney after it, uh, my profile will come up there. But I'm in many sites online. Um, yeah, so most people can find my emails on that site. So I would just say Google Jim Macnamara spelling at M-A-C-N-A-M-A-R-A, and you'll you'll find me.

Chris Norton 41:39

Okay, cool. Anything else you want to share? Uh any anything else you want to share at all? Let me know.

Jim Macnamara 41:44

No, I think you know, well done on the on the uh the podcast. It's uh good to get these issues out there. Um we're in a it is a a very interesting time in the whole communication sphere because we've seen that huge shift in advertising where it's no longer the dominant uh communication platform. Uh public relations feels it's going into a new golden age, but I'm not sure. I think it's how we perform, and we still have the issue the credibility issue of can we produce results? Um, and of course, increasingly AI and digital is is is changing the landscape.