Data-Driven PR: Reshaping How Brands Connect With Their Audiences

The media landscape has fundamentally transformed, leaving brands struggling to navigate an increasingly fragmented ecosystem. But according to Michael Kempner, CEO of Mike WorldWide, this transformation presents unprecedented opportunities for those who understand how to leverage today's digital environment.

Kempner, speaking with host Peter Woolfolk, reveals how successful PR strategies have evolved from broad-brush approaches to precision-targeted, audience-centric campaigns. "Today you can design media strategies that are very audience-centric," Kempner explains, noting that younger generations have almost entirely abandoned traditional news sources like newspapers. Instead, they curate personalized news environments through digital channels, newsletters, and social platforms.

This shift demands a complete rethinking of media strategy. Rather than focusing solely on prestigious publications, brands must understand their audience's entire "media lifecycle" – what they consume when waking up, during commutes, at work, and before bed. Kempner calls this "the new top tier," emphasizing that cable news might reach only 1-2 million viewers while digital platforms collectively reach tens of millions.

Perhaps most revolutionary is how AI and predictive analytics have transformed campaign planning and measurement. These tools now enable unprecedented precision in targeting specific journalists, predicting content virality, and demonstrating clear ROI. "If we increase brand love for your service or product by 2%, I can tell you how many more cases of beer you're going to sell," Kempner notes, highlighting how PR can finally prove its value alongside other marketing disciplines.

For PR professionals seeking to remain relevant and effective, embracing these data-driven, audience-centric approaches isn't optional – it's essential. The future belongs to those who can integrate earned, owned and paid media strategies with precision measurement to deliver genuine business results in our increasingly complex digital ecosystem.

Information on NEW podcast website.

Chapters

• 1:30 Welcome to PR Review Podcast
• 2:35 Mike Kempner Introduction
• 3:15 Audience-Centric Media Strategies
• 7:00 Digital Media Distribution Channels
• 14:24 AI-Powered PR Analytics
• 20:34 Measuring Campaign Success
• 22:49 PR's Value to the C-Suite
• 26:31 Integrated Campaign Approaches

Transcript

Announcer: 1:00

Welcome. This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others. Now here is your host, peter Woolfolk.

Peter Woolfolk: 1:20

Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to our listeners all across America and around the world. Now, apple has ranked this podcast among the top 1% of podcasts worldwide and recently Feedspot listed this podcast as number 13 on its top 70 best public relations podcasts in the United States. So thank you to all of our guests and listeners for your continued support and if you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review. Now question for the audience With the continued evolution of public relations, how can brands break through, considering the ever-changing media landscape? Well, my guest today has an answer for you. He is the founder of Mike Worldwide, one of the largest independent public relations firm, with offices in New York City, new Jersey, los Angeles, london and Mexico City. He has also counseled some of the world's most prominent executives and brands Outside of Mike Worldwide. He was also active in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. So joining me today from New York City is Michael Kempner, ceo of Mike Worldwide. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Kempner: 2:33

Well, thanks so much for having me here.

Peter Woolfolk: 2:35

Well, let's talk about just what are some of those changes taking place in the media, and how does one go about developing strategies to maximize the benefits of using them.

Michael Kempner: 2:46

Well, thank you for the question. It is a great question, one that we work on every day, with the rapid change in the media. But there are a few, I think, core issues that are happening today that are very important if you're thinking about putting together a public relations strategy, One, it's really. You know, today you can design media strategies that are very audience-centric. You know, when I started, it was a much more broad-brushed approach. You know, there wasn't a great way to really target in on who you're speaking with. You would do it more, publication by publication, but have the similar, same messages for a broad stroke, an important, broad group of people, and you really couldn't even measure the impact you're having. But today you can do all that. So if you think about designing your strategy with your audience in mind and what we used to call stakeholders, you can be very specific in both your content and your channel distribution.

Michael Kempner: 3:51

So if you think about media today, it's really about channel distribution, and some of the big changes that have happened is, for instance, if you look at media consumption studies, if you're a Gen Z, you're not reading the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. All of your news is coming from some digital format. You know we've heard about TikTok and Instagram, but there are literally hundreds of places, if not thousands of places, where the vast majority of Americans are finding the news. To give you an example, cable news in total doesn't reach much more than a million or two million people a night, where podcasts such as this, youtube shows other newsletters, other digital means, are reaching tens of millions of people. So it's not to suggest that legacy media is dead or unimportant, but it really is to suggest to understand your audience and understand the content and challenge distribution so you can impact them to whatever action you know buy a product, enhance your reputation, join your organization, whatever it may be.

Michael Kempner: 5:14

And the other important piece is you know what we call here the new top tier piece is you know what we call here the new top tier If you really look at the media that people consume during the life cycle of their day. So what do they look at when they get up in the morning? What do they look at on their commute to work? What do they?

Michael Kempner: 5:34

look at during the day, when they're bored on a conference call? What do they look at on the way home? What do they look at before bed? And so there is a real life cycle of each of us, and so how do you create strategies that will have an impact on the full life cycle of what we, again, what we call the new top tier?

Peter Woolfolk: 5:59

So, basically, what I'm hearing you say in the beginning is here. One is social media, to put it in a broad scope, because, you're absolutely right, TikTok and Twitter and LinkedIn I mean those have their followers. The other thing which can, when we talk about this, is, as you said, knowing your audience. Then you can have your own podcast or your own blogs or your own video content, because then you can say what it is you want to say, how you want to say it to the audience that you've identified, that you want to reach. Are those some of the ways of going about that?

Michael Kempner: 6:30

I mean again, it goes beyond social media. I would actually make it broader digital media. I mean if you're a farmer or you're a conservative or you're somebody of faith or you live in New York, it's not likely you're looking at that same media when you wake up in the morning.

Michael Kempner: 6:51

There are very specific niche publications that are geared towards you and your interests. That are geared towards you and your interests and we've also passed the stage of where you actually go to find your news. Your news is delivered to you. It's much more of a push environment Newsletters you signed up for, breaking alerts or other websites, whether you're on Blue Sky or X or Threads. I mean you are curating your own news environment, which both is potential, both has got positives and negatives. But you know, gone are the day that you're going to the site, the site and the news comes to you.

Peter Woolfolk: 7:48

So looking at it the other way, is that one you can have your own media, your blogs and so forth, because you've identified that audience, but you also need to know enough about that audience to know where they also other places that they go to to consume media and get information.

Michael Kempner: 8:05

So part of but even having I'm sorry, I'm not going to throw up, but even having your own media and your own podcast. You know it takes a while to develop a money.

Peter Woolfolk: 8:14

Right, oh, absolutely.

Michael Kempner: 8:15

So are you looking for a broad reach? Then you might be better off participating. Like you know, I don't have my own podcast. You reach much more. If I started one tomorrow, I wouldn't have your reach. Maybe you know a year or two from now I might, so again I it goes back to there's so many different potential distribution channels. What are those that are going to give you the highest return?

Michael Kempner: 8:37

and again, we do live in an earned, owned, owned, paid world. So some of this comes through paid media and a lot of it comes through owned. So you have your own channel, but major corporations have their own channels. They thought leadership. I mean, most people don't know that LinkedIn has a bigger readership than the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, and so one could argue LinkedIn's the most important media outlet if you're trying to find an executive or a B2B, but probably not with Gen Z or Gen Alpha. So it really depends. Again back to being audience-centric, but you have the opportunity to really, if you really understand your audience, to pinpoint the media and the content that's going to be on it. And the other thing I would tell you is that, with AI allows you to truly create much deeper precision, even reporter by reporter media outlet by media outlet.

Michael Kempner: 9:37

That then allows you, as a marketer or somebody who is working for a marketer, to, if you have more precision, then you have a much higher probability of a successful program. So if you look at AI today and its ability to crunch data, its ability to make recommendations, its ability to not think on its own but to really understand your voice or the voice of an executive, it really gives you the opportunity to create much deeper precision, which then leads to much better predictability of success of a piece of content, of a program, of a campaign.

Peter Woolfolk: 10:14

Well, I forget the names of them, but I do know because I think I've had some guys who actually created some of those programs where, if you have a particular subject matter that you want to talk about, their platforms can identify the reporters and writers who cover that particular platform. So there's no scattershot there. You can hone in on who those particular reporters are. It'll tell you if they got the information, if it was open to that. All of that kind of data is available to you if you're you know, not only you know, but if you're in a company that wants to reach a particular reporter and or publication, such as newspapers and newsletters and TV reporters etc.

Michael Kempner: 10:57

Correct. But it even goes way beyond that. It actually helps you develop the content, understand what your audience wants to talk about. You know you can use predictive analytics to know a crisis two weeks before it happens. So you can understand what is the likelihood of a piece of content having virality to it, likelihood of a piece of content being read by and shared by your core audiences. And again, even to what does X, y and Z reporter care about? What do they want to talk about, what are they writing about, and how do you even craft a pitch or information that will appeal reporter to reporter. And then there's other very useful items Like. One of my favorite examples is that I needed to find conservative criminal justice reporters on Substack. Well, that if I went to one of my employees and said find me, you know right-leaning criminal justice reporters who, or writers on Substack who write about criminal justice, that would have taken them three months and using AI, you can get that in three seconds well, needless to say, ai is just sort of taken over.

Peter Woolfolk: 12:14

I mean it just I use it a lot on this uh, this podcast. I mean it does things for me. I don't go about identifying auditions, that that sort of thing. Mine is in preparation, you know. So this uh, the transcript from this uh podcast, will be handled by ai. It'll identify. It won't identify the speakers. It'll identify that we had two speakers. I just have to put the names in there and go from there. So AI, you know it's everywhere. I've also used it to written information that I can go from what is a text to speech when I need to do those kinds of things to fill in. So there's so many different platforms to use. I guess individuals have to be very specific about what they want their outcomes to be, who they want to reach and how they want to go about it.

Michael Kempner: 12:59

Right, and again what it can do today and we have predictive analytics here that I can actually tell you that if we increase brand love for your service or product by 2%, how many more cases of beer you're going to sell, how many more people are going to want to buy your product? And then I can tell you how do you increase your brand love. What's the perception versus the reality? You might believe that you've got the best sustainability program in the United States or on the planet, but I can tell you that you may think that, but you actually don't. But the public doesn't believe you. So what do we need to do to increase the believability of how you talk about sustainability, which will then go to brand love, which then goes to selling more products? So it is that granular and we're only in the first inning of AI.

Peter Woolfolk: 13:54

Do you happen to recall the names of some of those platforms that you can use to do those things?

Michael Kempner: 14:00

We have our own platform here that we call Prisma, that we use, that does all of those things. It's proprietary to our organization, but our main public you know, news Whip is a publicly available platform that does predictive analytics. Meltwater, which is a tool that firms use to see and see the success of some of their campaigns but also helps you identify the reporters, has a tremendous amount of AI built into it. So almost any program you're using today that you've used in the past, or tool or tool stack that you've used in the past, all have significant AI built into them now and they're adding more and more and more almost weekly. Again, here we have our own proprietary Prisma platform that really is based around how do we do things for our clients faster, cheaper, better and how do we create more precision and more predictability in our recommendations and more predictability so marketers can feel secure, or more secure, that what we're recommending will be successful.

Peter Woolfolk: 15:10

Now, this applies to products of all kinds, products and services of all kinds, I would imagine.

Michael Kempner: 15:16

Anything.

Peter Woolfolk: 15:17

So part of the I would say part of the discussion in terms of being successful is that clients have to know what they actually want, and my question to you, then, is how precise are they in making defining what it is that they're looking for?

Michael Kempner: 15:37

Most clients not all, but most clients are behind where we are okay. So part of it, part of it, is talk about all the time about how do you teach clients about things they didn't know they need, and so and that's part of our job is to introduce new ways of building programs, new ways of creating success and helping to bring your client along for the journey, and so, again, they may not know what they need, so it's our job to help them understand the tools that are available today to make their lives easier, to help them get more value for their money and to come closer. You can't guarantee success, but come closer to guaranteeing success.

Peter Woolfolk: 16:20

So do you also have an opportunity to work with them where you have, let's say, cross platform campaigns, in other words, various platforms to handle this particular part of a campaign and another program to handle another part of the campaign?

Michael Kempner: 16:39

Right, they could be segmented. No, no, you go ahead. I'm sorry you finish.

Peter Woolfolk: 16:42

No, I just wanted to say that you can use multiple platforms to handle different parts of a campaign, because that way there's more precision built into it.

Michael Kempner: 16:51

And the important part, at least for our firm, is that most of our campaigns are integrated. Again, some form of earned is the tip of the spear, but earned again thought leadership, which would be owned, and then there's paid media involved, because, the way the algorithms are set up, it's very hard to get virality unless you pay for it. So you have to take a look at all those things. But the fact is, all of our tools are integrated. They all talk to each other, and so it may be separate tools that have separate functions. Instead of having to go to five different tools to do five different activities, our tools are integrated and speak with each other, so it allows you to have a more robust view of your programs, your recommendations and your audiences.

Peter Woolfolk: 17:47

Now I would imagine, as I listen to you say, that then you also have measurement tools built into that, so that once the campaign is over or in progress, let's say that that information can be also collected and provided back to the client.

Michael Kempner: 18:04

I believe if you can't measure it, you shouldn't do it so, and our firm believes that you can't measure, so part of it is how do you set the metrics for success at the beginning of a campaign, and then we have the tools that allow you to measure up against the metrics you set. So, yes, measurement is critical, and we use a series of AI-fueled tools that are part of our overall tool stack to make sure that we can measure our programs frankly, across 150 different categories, depending on what are the core measurement metrics that were set up at the beginning of the campaign.

Peter Woolfolk: 18:50

And I guess it's depending upon the campaign, but is there a broad category of what people are looking for in terms of success? It's great to say that, fine, yes, we had 10,000 readers or 10,000 participants, but what I'm hearing you say is that, yes, you did, and here's some more details, some more itemized pieces, like how many women, what their ages were, those kinds of things that can be added to that well, again, there's people.

Michael Kempner: 19:17

There's still plenty of clients and plenty of people who you know. Obviously, getting earned media is critically important to them I mean earned media is the ultimate third-party validator and that hasn't changed.

Michael Kempner: 19:31

But again, is it the right media to the right audience? Are we trying to build brand so we can measure brand and find out whether we've enhanced the value of the brand? Brand love? Is it about driving people to a website? Is it about increasing sales? So there's a lot of different objectives. So you set the objectives at the beginning, so then you know how to craft your campaign to hit and reach those objectives and then you can measure those. On the other side, but obviously our media has not gone away and it's more critical than ever. At the same time, legacy media is going away, but there are. Because of digital media there's the reach. Might not be as broad, but there's more places than ever to place your clients or place your campaigns again to that targeted audience. So it might not be the reach of the New York Times, but you might be hitting Gen Z women who care about the environment in a much more direct way than you're ever going to do that through a broad-based article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal?

Peter Woolfolk: 20:50

What I'm also hearing here is that one of the issues that has always been in front of PR people is dealing with the C-suite, that there are too many people up on the top floor that didn't fully understand or appreciate public relations With this kind of information. It's a good way of proving its value to the C-suite folks upstairs. Would you agree with that?

Michael Kempner: 21:10

Yes, it's always been. The challenge of PR versus advertising is to be able to. How do you measure it? How do you measure value? And that's the holy grail of PR. How can you get an equal seat at the sweet C-seat table, along with advertising and other marketing services? So these kind of activities allow you to help prove your value, which can get you that seat. You know, the one place that you almost always have a seat where again we use a significant amount of AI and predictive analytics is around. Crisis. Crisis typically gets a seat at the table, but other types of marketing often don't, and so it's our job to be able to prove our value. So the C-suite sees us as an indispensable resource.

Peter Woolfolk: 22:04

You know, that's the thing. I think that's one of the major selling points for a lot of these platforms, because, you're absolutely right, c-suite wants to know you know, what's the value? How do we know that it worked, how do you know how effective it was, those kinds of things. So there's a lot of value, not only for what its actual performance is. There's a lot of value not only for what its actual performance is, but how you are viewed in the scope of all the other programs and departments in your organization, of course.

Michael Kempner: 22:33

I mean there's a tangible amount of money an organization is going to spend on marketing, and so PR is always a better value, just kind of. If you measure it the same way, advertising measures itself. I've never seen a scenario where PR did not provide much deeper, much better value for the dollar. But again, you know, the CC grew up in an environment where you can measure advertising better than you can measure PR, where you can measure advertising better than you can measure PR. But the reality is that if we're given the opportunity to get in front of that C-suite, I can measure it today in a way that I couldn't in the past, and I can measure it today the same way that advertising measures themselves and be able to show the significant value we provide for the dollar relative to other marketing services.

Peter Woolfolk: 23:28

Well, I think that's huge in terms of when folks are always looking at budgets, and particularly when it comes time that they might have to trim some budgets. Whose services in this organization do we value more or as much, and how are we going to make decisions from that? So have being armed with the kind of information you're providing to sweet sweet folks is hugely important, and I think folks really need to pay attention to that, if they're not already yeah, again, I I agree with that, and the fact is that you know we believe in integrated campaigns, so I'm not going to suggest in all cases we're more important than advertising.

Michael Kempner: 24:06

In some cases advertising is more important than us, but it's to understand the audiences and the objectives and then work backwards from there to decide which pieces of an integrated campaign are the most important. You know a full-service public relations firm. Today we do almost everything an advertising agency does. You know it's influencer, social media, content, video, experiential. But it's really a question of what's the tip of the spear Is it earned media or is it advertising? Besides that, it's very difficult in some cases to even tell us apart from each other.

Peter Woolfolk: 24:45

Well, mike, you've given us a lot to consider here today. Is there anything that we may have missed in terms of better understanding of the social media and the changes that take place, and how to best manage those?

Michael Kempner: 24:59

No, I think I appreciate your questions, I appreciate your insight, have valuable insight into this conversation that firms are going through right now. You know you layer on top of the chaos and some of the uncertainty in the economy and society today. Being able to really understand who your audiences are and speak directly to them has never been more important.

Peter Woolfolk: 25:28

Well, I certainly agree with you there and let me say thank you so very, very much to you. My guest today has been Mike Kempner. He is the CEO of Mike Worldwide. He joined us today from New York City. So, Mike, thank you once again for being a guest on the Public Relations Review podcast.

Michael Kempner: 25:44

Well, thanks so much, and I also want to thank Gabby Gaines from my staff for bringing us together, because obviously you're only as good as your team, and so I appreciate my team and I appreciate you today, and I look forward to talking again in the future.

Peter Woolfolk: 26:00

And say thank you again.

Announcer: 26:01

And to my listeners, let me say thank you for listening and please join us again for the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast. This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you for joining us.