PR veteran Andy Polansky took charge as CEO of Weber Shandwick last November after serving as president of the agency since 2004. With Polansky at the helm, Weber Shandwick continues to move toward a digital-first model, as the agency recruits Web analytics experts, social-media executives and other communications specialists who don’t necessarily come from a traditional PR background. However, despite the digital lurch Polansky is quick to put traditional PR channels into proper perspective.
“There’s still room for generalists in our business,” says Polansky, who created Weber Shandwick’s Client Relationship Leader (CRL) program. “We need people who communicate extraordinarily well, in the broadest sense. But I do think the business has become more specialized and is very much about the depth of expertise across the different practice areas. That is the model for today and the foreseeable future.”
Weber Shandwick, which is owned by Interpublic Group of Companies, works with major brands, including American Airlines, PepsiCo. and Unilever. Polansky spoke with PR News about how his agency is steering its clients toward a digital future and how PR agencies and their clients can enhance their relationships.
PR News: What are the biggest challenges right now in agency-client relations?
Andy Polansky: Clients are always looking for the big idea and, from a public relations-agency perspective, the good news is that clients are quite receptive to having their PR firm/partner come to the table with some strategic thinking and creative approaches, whether it’s a product launch or service offering…They’re looking for synergy, integration [and] partners who play well in the sandbox.
So many of the clients we represent are in intensely competitive categories, naturally that’s always front and center; how one differentiates [itself in the marketplace]. From a corporate-reputation perspective, a lot of clients look to their agency partners now for more focus on reputation, as it relates to valuation.
We’ve done a lot of research at Weber Shandwick that validates, or suggests anyway, that consumers are interested in the corporation behind the brand and companies are recognizing that more and more.
It’s no longer just about what’s on the shelf, but the overall enterprise and how the company interacts with all of its constituencies.
PR News: What are some of the major priorities that clients are demanding before the agency starts to develop the campaign?
Polansky: We recently did a white paper where we interviewed 12 CEOs of major multinational companies and one of the big priorities that came across very clearly was to think in a global context.
More than ever before [companies] are focused on aligning their global strategy—even their global spend level—with what the business goals are of the enterprise.
For a long time, we saw a CEO [who] might articulate strategy and will talk about emerging growth markets, whatever the focus may be, yet the communications supporting that strategy didn’t always align with that and, frankly, companies didn’t always spend money on marketing and communications to support that vision. I’m now seeing that more and more, which is an important development.
PR News: Are there a growing number of accounts in which the agency is working in tandem with other marketing disciplines, such as advertising and media buying?
Polansky: We see quite a bit of that. Weber Shandwick’s heritage, within the Interpublic Group of Companies, is often to work in collaboration with our sister companies and partner with the various [marketing] disciplines. Clients are looking for integrated solutions.
Anytime you can come at a business problem or marketing opportunity that way it’s going to be compelling to marshal those types of resources across the disciplines.
Sometimes it affects how we organize ourselves. There are certain clients who might want to see how we might house expertise across the company within one team.
One area we continue to make a big difference is subject-matter expertise that goes fairly deep.
PR News: What are some of the areas of agency-client relations that can use improvement?
Polansky: A lot of it has to do with the integration of research and strategic planning; research to inform strategy and strategic planning to formulate insights against which programs and campaigns are predicated.
The other piece would be measurement and analytics. It’s important for our profession to continue to evolve our thinking around analytics. It shouldn’t be just a rear-view function, looking back and measuring the success [of a campaign]. It should be continually informing the strategy for programs as they develop.
We’re in a dashboard society, so I think most major companies are very focused now, and rightly so, on measurement and analytics from the outset of the campaign.
PR News: What are companies looking for in terms of building their social channels?
Polansky: There are a lot of layers to how one thinks about digital and social. We’ve scaled those capabilities dramatically over the last few years. We now have nearly 500 people (out of 3,000 employees) dedicated to social and digital.
That takes on different forms. We now manage close to 150 Facebook pages [and] more than 100 Twitter feeds. And what’s interesting about that work is it is not just about marketing but relates to customer service and how companies should be responding and engaging with customers in that context.
We’re doing a lot of real-time broadcasting work [and] lots of webcasts. But more than anything [we’re] building content for clients—brand journalism [and] building newsrooms as hubs for journalists to come and get information about companies. That’s a really important development in a world where there are fewer beat reporters and news organizations that don’t have the same scale as they once had.
PR News: Do you see PR agencies increasingly taking on the form of quasi-network programmers?
Polansky: In some sense, sure; we call it a studio. So, naturally a lot of that work is video. That’s fundamental to much of the work we do.
It’s developing the content and having a studio-like operation with people who have different types of skill sets to develop the content, whether it’s written form or digestible chunks of content that resonate well online.
PR News: Is that type of mindset getting to be cost of entry for brands that want to increase their visibility online and boost their lead-gen revenue?
Polansky: We’re getting to that place quickly. There are more and more companies that are thinking about digital and social that way; how one engages across multiple platforms, whether it is with their customers, their own employees, the media; whomever the constituency may be. And public relations knows how to engage across all constituencies. PRN
(Editor’s Note: Conversations with a CEO is the first in a series of Q&As with senior executive across across business sectors and industries—including PR.)