Stories by Kaylee Hultgren

This week’s PR Roundup looks at Ford Motor Company’s marketing campaign introducing “employee pricing” discounts amid auto tariffs and a report that ranks the DEI and sustainability communications put forth by the world’s most influential brands.

Muck Rack’s 2024 State of PR Measurement report revealed a crisis of confidence in the metrics tracked by PR professionals. Yet most understand that demonstrating the value of their work requires adequate measurement and accurate data to support it. PRNEWS spoke with Johna Burke, CEO and Global Managing Director at the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), to assess the state of PR measurement.

Chinese Laundry CMO Sarah Zurell is on a mission to make the fashion footwear brand cool again—as it was in the ’80s. And that, in her mind, meant they should be cool enough for Taylor Swift. Thanks to a coordinated PR effort on the part of Zurell’s PR agency CLD, some creative marketing tactics and a symbiotic relationship between marketing and PR, that dream was realized. We caught up with Zurell to discuss the PR-marketing partnership that made her pie-in-the-sky goal a reality.

This week’s roundup looks at an IPR report on adapting to new media relations strategies, the Substack journalist trend and Kennedy Institute advice on messaging during an election season.

An Institute for Public Relations Webinar last week, titled “Al-Powered Answer Engines: Shifts in Digital Reputation Building,” panelists outlined five ways in which marketing and communications professionals can proactively manage digital brand reputation amid the shift brought about by AI-powered answer engines.

At the 2024 Meltwater Summit in New York City earlier this summer, Katie Stratakis, Head of Corporate Communications at Samsung Electronics America, shared the company’s approach to proactive brand storytelling and best practices for brand reputation management during crises.

PRNEWS’ final Digital Learning Series event, on Measurement and Data for PR, took place August 14. We caught up with panelist and measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing, to discuss the latest challenges, tactics and tools for measuring and evaluating reputation.

At the 2024 Meltwater Summit in New York City last month, Neil Cameron, Head of Canadian Agency Partnerships at TikTok, guided attendees through “six universal truths” for creating compelling, short-form video on the platform. Regardless of budget or bandwidth constraints, PR and marketing pros can leverage these principles when creating video content.

The blurring of lines between marketing and communications functions continues to be a top industry trend for 2024. To provide insight into how that plays out inside one of the world’s most well-known brands, PRNEWS spoke to Mastercard’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Raja Rajamannar, on how the disciplines overlap, integrate and collaborate.

As the industry grapples with identifying and communicating the most effective metrics for demonstrating PR’s impact—which is increasingly tied to driving business outcomes—PR measurement remains in a state of flux. PRNEWS spoke with Carolina Calkins, Principal at Intelligent Relations, to discuss earned media metrics and the influence of AI on measurement.