#25 The Importance of Brand Building in Digital PR with Stephen Kenwright

Steve:
Today, we’re delighted to welcome Stephen Kenwright to the Digital PR Podcast. He is currently Director of Strategy and Digital Marketing at brand and creative agency Ride Shotgun. However, you’ll likely know him as the now exited co-founder of Rise at Seven. With his new role at a brand agency, we wanted to chat to him about the importance of brand building in digital PR. If 2024’s buzzword in digital PR was relevancy, do we think 2025’s is going to be brand? Let’s talk to the man himself to find out.

Louise:
Hi, Stephen. Hi.

Stephen:
Oh, hello. Nice to be here.

Louise:
Thank you for joining us. Before we start getting into all our questions about brand, would you mind giving the listeners a little bit of an overview of who you are and your career to date?

Stephen:
I’ve been doing digital marketing or marketing of some description for about 12 years now. I started an agency called Branded 3, where we started doing digital PR quite early. I don’t think we invented it, but we were certainly early to the party on that front, especially when we got through that SEO era of no one really being able to buy links anymore and had to find an alternative. So that was fun. I was there for about seven years. We did some M&A, merged Branded3 into an agency called Edit, went in-house for a little while. So I’ve looked after PR teams as well as SEO and web product and paid media teams in-house too. Then, yeah, started Rise at 7, grew that quite quickly, and sold my stake to my co-founder Carrie, took a load of time off to be a full-time dad, and then I’m back at Ride Shotgun, yeah.

Steve:
You’ve done so much, Stephen. That’s such an impressive CV. And we really, really appreciate you taking the time out to talk to us. So we want to talk to you about brand. Let’s kind of start at the beginning, I suppose. So in complete layman’s terms, when you talk about brand, what do you mean? And why should an SEO or digital PR be thinking about brand and brand building?

Stephen:
Brand I think in a nutshell is really the popularity of and associations that come to mind when the public thinks of a company or a product or a service. I say a product or a service as well as a company because a company could quite easily have quite a few brands under its belt. But it’s really how often someone thinks about that particular product or service in a purchasing situation. That’s kind of brand awareness in a nutshell, but also the distinctiveness of that product or service. So what is it that’s the offer? What’s different about that company? And what are the associations, when does that brand come to mind? So it’s about building popularity and it’s about building associations in the minds of customers about what they think about that particular brand.

Louise:
And when it comes to an SEO person or a digital PR person, why should they be thinking about brand?

Stephen:
Well, from an SEO point of view, brand is the single biggest ranking factor and has been for about a decade. It’s increasingly going that way as well. So you would possibly have already made the connection that if your clients or your company is on TV, tends to rank better. Those other big brand building activities tend to have a massive impact on search results. There was a study that tom kappa did on moz.com maybe six or seven years ago that shows that brand search volumes correlate more closely with search rankings than DA does. And that’s Moz who sell DA so even they are really on board with the fact that brand is a big thing particularly true in the last couple of years where google seems to be taking really punitive action against websites that aren’t brands if you don’t have a noticeable brand if you’re not a recognised entity, you find it a lot harder nowadays to rank so the days when you could build an entire company like a money supermarket dot com off the back of SEO campaigns, not really the case anymore. At some point, you have to be thinking about brands and how the work you’re doing will translate into that area.

Steve:
That all makes sense. How can someone working in digital PR ensure they’re thinking about brand in the right way? It’s quite a discussed topic on social media and in the digital PR community. And, you know, we’ve talked about relevance and is it relevant to the brand, et cetera, but you’re an expert in this. So how do you think digital PR people can be thinking about it in the right way?

Stephen:
I think there’s a number of leaps that the digital PR industry has to make. So firstly, this idea of relevance, the idea of relevance in an SEO context and the idea of relevance in a brand context are a little bit different because, you know, at time of recording, we’re on the 14th of November and Christmas campaigns are starting to come out. And there’s a whole thing about, I think it’s Lidl, have done freeway cola and put a lorry out there that’s got freeway written on the side trying to beat Coca-Cola to Christmas. Now, the fact that we immediately think about Coca-Cola at Christmas time and we think about lorries for a brand that sells drinks, that doesn’t on the face of it seem relevant, but yet we have several campaigns based on this topic. We wait for this campaign every single year. It’s not a campaign about beverages is not a campaign that’s designed with a keyword in mind and that’s a big shift i think for the digital PR space particularly the SEO space I think digital PRs who had some exposure to “traditional PR” and by the way like if you call it traditional PR and all the traditional PRs no you’re not one of that you immediately have to make that connection that those traditional PR agencies made a long time ago when it comes to relevance. But I think there’s a few other reasons that this shifts happening and has to happen and things that digital PRs need to think about. One of the biggest ones is just how difficult it is to get links now. It’s getting more and more difficult all the time because there are layoffs in the newsroom and there are publications writing entire things with AI. And it’s just a lot more difficult with affiliate programs and no follows and all these kind of things. If you’re basing what you’re doing on link targets, it’s harder now than it was six months ago. It’s much harder now than it was three years ago. And that trend just looks like it’s going to continue. So it feels very much like link target based digital PR is quite unsustainable. And so we have to find something else, right? We know that what we do provides results for the companies we work for. So we have to find a better way of measuring that one that’s more sustainable and one that ideally goes a little bit further up the food chain than links, something that we can talk to a CMO about and they’ll understand what we’re talking about.

Louise:
Yeah, as someone who’s just come back from maternity leave, so I’ve been out of the game for about 11 months, I’ve started pitching again in the last couple of weeks, and it does feel really different. As you just described it, there are less people to be able to outreach to, and the types of links you’re getting back are different. In what I would have considered a small space of time, the change has felt quite palpable to me. So it does seem like, as you mentioned at the beginning, that change from going from buying links that didn’t work for reasons multiple. It’s the kind of new challenge. And it’s like, what is going to be the digital PR at the end of it? And as you’re saying, and I think me and Steve would agree, the whole idea around actually just creating great brands and great campaigns that people talk about, share, and build a kind of affinity to that brand is probably the way to go. In your background as SEO and obviously digital PR as well, there’s lots of tools that everyone uses all the time. Are you finding you’re using any different kind of tools at the moment now you’ve got a bit more of a brand hat on? Is there anything that digital PRs should be looking into and having a bit of a research about in terms of tools?

Stephen:
I think the first thing to say is if you are from a digital PR background and you’re using the tools, don’t abandon the tools because a lot of these insights that you can get from any address are things that are completely alien to a lot of brand agencies been able to see the residual impact of the campaign in the form of links that. We’re pointing at the domain like two years ago three years ago and what campaigns have happened for competitors previously and what worked and what didn’t. A lot of brand agencies just don’t really have that information so it’s actually really useful to be able to take those SEO tools like visibility indexes like Sistrix and say this is kind of what’s happening and SEO visibility is a really interesting one as well because it’s kind of like If brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, then SEO is what people find of you when paid isn’t on. And it’s kind of the same sort of thing. So I would say a lot of those tools are still really useful. I find myself using Sistrix all the time. But in terms of brand tools, the most important tool generally is some form of brand tracker. It can be quite expensive. There are different ways of doing it. Sometimes a brand takes a snapshot every six months, and this is what it was like now, and let’s see what it’s like in six months. Sometimes you’re using a tool like YouGov, or GWI, or one of the Kantar tools, something like that. What a brand tracker really is, it’s a survey. So this should feel totally comfortable for the PR industry generally, but it’s prompting questions of, have you heard of this company? Have you heard of this brand? Really how do you feel about the output of this tool or any kind of brand tracker is that you’re able to map a phone and say how many people are aware of what we don’t ask them how many people are aware of what we do ask them how many people would consider buying something from us, if they consider buying from us how many people would come to us first how many people actually have bought from us how many people have bought over and over again and I do have a funnel is not alien to the industry at all, I think the big shift and the opportunity that comes from some of these tools is you have your own funnel your funnel is not like the funnel that another brand has and that generic look of something that’s very smooth sides all the way down that’s not how it really is in reality. Which is a huge opportunity to set a proper strategy, because you can say, lots of people are aware of us, but no one will buy from us, and therefore we know that the job that our digital PR has to do is convince people to buy from us, not to try and make more people aware of us. So it’s really helpful for setting a long-term strategy. some of those tools also have a lot of audience insight as well like GWI is one that we use quite a bit and it’s just been able to say the audience for this brand is these kind of people and put that into a tool that it says this is what they like, this is where they read, this is what they do and it just spits out an awful lot of information that’s just really handy from a PR point of view as well.

Steve:
Do you find that you can sort of surprise people at the brands you’ve worked with or like have as clients, like with the level of data and insights you’re able to give them, or is that kind of an expected thing? Because I’m often amazed, like when I share results or things from some of the tools you mentioned, like Ahrefs, like YouGov, et cetera, they’re like, wow, this is incredible. This will really help thinking across lots of our other disciplines, not just digital PR or digital marketing. Is that bearing out for you as well?

Stephen:
Yes, absolutely. I was in a workshop this last week where we were talking about brand and how we need to set brand foundation moving forwards, but quite a big company. And I was able to just pull up Sistrix, stick the brand name into the tool and say, this is kind of what’s going on. And they’re like, we’ve never seen this before. With big agencies that are paid a lot of money, it’s like we’ve not, we’ve not seen this data in this form. I’m like, literally, I’ve just tapped, you know, into, into this thing. I think we’ve got to recognise how siloed a lot of our client organisations are. When you’re talking to brand teams or quote unquote traditional marketers or comms teams, they probably haven’t seen an awful lot of the information that you can get out of Ahrefs or Sistrix or other tools that are available, of course. Whereas, you know, the SEO teams are probably not aware of things like brand trackers. So there’s a huge amount of value to be gained by just taking what some of the other teams in organisations are doing and taking it across the barriers, helping then the client to take it across the barriers and educate them on what is actually just bread and butter to some of the other teams for sure.

Steve:
Yeah, for me that’s like one of the most exciting bits of my job still is being able to like educate and inform and look clever, look like a wizard. Yeah, as you say, so that’s exactly it. I was trying to think of a better way of saying it, but ultimately I like looking clever. We kind of touched on it there, but we mentioned in the intro, you’ve recently taken on a new position at Ride Shotgun, a brand and creative agency. You’ve come from an SEO background, you obviously have a great heritage in thinking about brand, thinking about search in a different way, but why are you there? What is an SEO like yourself doing there? What does your role entail and what’s kind of motivating you to do it?

Stephen:
Again, you know, when we talk about PR, when we talk about any of these kind of disciplines, they’re quite big terms and the agencies that are in those categories do quite a lot of different things. So what Ride Shotgun does a lot of and does more of than anything else is creative production. Which means videography, means photography, it makes ads, but it makes ads for social, it uses AR, VR, and all these kind of cool things to make stuff. And that’s the heartland of the agency. And from the agencies I’ve been at previously, we’ve had the good data that we’ve been talking about that gives us some good insights, and we have some really good ideas. And then we go and pitch an idea to a client, And we don’t really know if we can do that. Like we don’t know how that’s going to come to life. We make it happen because that’s what we’re really good at, just making it happen. But as soon as the client’s gone, yeah, all right, we’ll do that. We then have to find either a freelancer or a production agency like a ride shotgun to be able to come and make this happen for us. And we don’t know really how it works. And for me, that was a huge opportunity just being able to understand like, When I’m gonna pitch an idea to a client, I can cost it before I pitch it. I know it’s feasible before I pitch it, but also I get to talk to some experts who say, have you thought about doing this instead? Because some of the things, like I think of some really successful campaigns we’ve done in the past that we could have done a much better job of if we use CGI, for example, and generated that thing using a computer, which is really normal for a production agency. And just the way that they work is so different. It’s almost like that opportunity you get when you switch from agency side to brand side and you see, oh, this all makes sense now. Now I understand why they couldn’t do this thing or why they were never gonna sign that off, et cetera. So for me, it’s a nice opportunity to be able to see how everything gets made. And particularly because it’s not just Google anymore. the agency has been for years making video for YouTube, for TikTok, etc, etc. So this ability to be able to not just say, you should be doing something about TikTok actually, and also we can do it for you and this is how much it costs and you can use our 40,000 square foot studio in Leeds or the one in Portugal in case we need a sunny day, that kind of thing. It gives us the opportunity I think to do the end to end bit that I’ve not been able to do in previous agencies quite so well. But like I said, you make it happen. It’s just, do you understand? I like learning stuff. That’s the crux of it. That would be the answer that I could give in 10 seconds instead of the rambling that I just gave you.

Steve:
I think the rambling was great though, Steven, genuinely, because it gives great context and you can tell how motivated and excited you are about the new role and learning, learning new things, constantly learning new things, which is great to hear.

Louise:
A little bit of a chance to review the industry for a second. And also I want to say actually, Rise at 7 was such a big shift for the digital PR industry and you were very gracious to say you didn’t invent it. However, I would say that yourself and Carrie made it the kind of industry and the profitable industry that it is now from the way that you went about it. Yeah, so it’s an amazing thing that you guys achieved. However, let’s just chat broadly about digital PR. What would be your review of the digital PR industry in terms of how we use or think about brand? Or maybe we’re not at all and that’s a big miss-trick.

Stephen:
The big challenge that the industry is just starting to wrestle with now, but that’s been coming for a little while, is just the way that it trains digital PRs. Because the way that the industry has grown, there’s been a real arms race to get a lot of digital PRs into the industry as quickly as possible. Agencies generally, I think, find that they are able to get a digital PR person to do some outreach and get some links within a few weeks of starting their first job. And that’s kind of your first job. You do that for quite a while. You do a lot of outreach. You get very good outreach. Sometimes you’re involved in ideation but you get promoted and you have to talk to clients and you haven’t really done that before and you’ve got this very narrow view of what PR is because you only really know the link building thing because that’s the training that you’ve gone through. We see that quite a lot where we’re talking to comms practitioners who don’t really have a full picture of what’s going on in the brand’s performance, generally speaking. Links are important, right? So links are still important and links are probably going to continue to be important, more in some industries than others, but certainly going to continue to be important. I do think that we’ve trained a lot of digital PRs very quickly and missed some of the things that are going to really help them in their career. And that’s sort of like starting to cause problems for those people, particularly in the industry at the moment. So the fundamentals of client service and understanding marketing more broadly and just commercial stuff, like how does the company I work for make money? Those kinds of things are kind of missing off the training at the moment. Not always, but that seems to be the general trend in the industry. I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom though, right? Because I think that what we have done a very good job of is bringing creative people into the industry who are really good at solving problems, right? They’ve got a really good way of approaching any particular challenge. And that’s the fundamental skill. It’s like how you go to university, not to learn the thing that you do at university, but to learn how to deal with deadlines and manage your own money and, you know, socialise over alcohol and all that kind of stuff.

Louise:
Yeah, there’s a very good point around the fact that we’ve now a few years into the digital PR boom. And whereas previously, like myself and Steve, we came into it from PR roles and then adjusted to the kind of link requirements and the digital focus thing. Whereas, yeah, for the last, what, four years, it’s been people having that as their first job and that’s all they know. So it is interesting to maybe see the impact of that playing out. And it’s a point I haven’t really heard anyone else make recently in terms of are we training around just the basics of here’s how to pitch, here’s how to get a link, here’s how to make a campaign?

Stephen:
Well it’s true because it’s the way that agencies make money, which by the way is not a bad thing. Agencies have to make money, that’s what gives people jobs. You want your employee to make money, believe me, because I’ve been at employees that haven’t made money and I know the results of that and you get made redundant. but that is how the agencies make money. I think one of the trends that’s really bearing up from that at the moment is the whole decline of campaign digital PR and massive shift and emphasis on reactive PR. There’s a couple of big reasons for that. One is campaigns tend to require multiple people. You maybe have some kind of research maybe you do that yourself but you probably have a designer you probably have a copywriter or developer and several people who are coming together with a project manager of some description to make this campaign happen over a period of two or three months and that’s quite expensive in comparison to your PR exec you could talk to the client and say I’ve got an opportunity to put a comment in this particular publication can you give me two sentences yes i can like that’s profit there’s a lot of profit in that compared to what there is in a campaign but again all of these things as they become trends industry trends you see huge articles with 10 brand comments in them they’re all saying something pretty similar, and that’s not going to build your brand. If you’re saying the same thing as Tesco Bank, as Lloyds Bank Class A, and that other bank over there, and that bank over there, we’re missing out on some of the good stuff when it comes to campaigns, I think, and the decline of campaigns. So I think that’s, again, it comes down to the way that the agencies make money and therefore are kind of funneling staff and campaigns. And the PRs themselves have done the same thing, because it’s actually, I think most PR, digital PRs will have noticed that you get the same kind of results from reactive as you do from campaign PR, if links are the thing that you’re most bothered about.

Steve:
Yeah that’s so true and I agree it’s a real shame in so many ways because I think the most interesting brands, the brands almost coming back to how you measure brand, the brands that I remember and that stick in my mind that I’m more likely to buy from are the brands that are really sure about who they are, their tone of voice, they take a risk, they do something interesting rather than just building links for a bit more revenue, which is, as you say, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s completely understandable. We touched on training though, and I actually made a few mental notes in my head about things we could do better in terms of training new staff. So thanks for the tips on that one. But I want to come back to you because we saw on LinkedIn that you recently completed the Mark Ritson Mini MBA in marketing. Did that change any of your thinking for you? I mean, how was that broadly? But yeah, like you’re obviously keen to always learn. How was that?

Stephen:
I would recommend it. I did the mini MBA in marketing and the mini MBA in brand management as well. Personally, I did it because I’m not a trained marketer. You know, I have a master’s degree in Shakespeare. I do not have a degree in marketing. That means that what you do at university and what you do in that kind of formative education is learn a lot of theory. That kind of feels like you don’t need it early on in your career. And you probably don’t because you’re doing something quite narrow. But as time went on, I found that I was kind of making stuff up as I went along, things like the mini MBA. And again, there are some other good courses out there. I did like Margaretson’s one. I found it was talking about concepts that I’ve been using, but not really understanding why I’ve been using them. And the real value of it, and I think the value of it to someone in the digital marketing space especially, is just being able to make your language a common language with trained marketers. Because trained marketers, Tend to be in bigger organisations the one with the budget the one that is the CMO the marketing director whatever said being able to use the same kind of terminology pull out the same kind of diagrams that they used to even though you’re not really changing anything that you’re doing it’s being able to hang with those people but I think it’s the value of those things so I did find it really helpful I did learn a bunch of stuff I thought I knew quite a bit of it didn’t know why I knew quite a bit of it but that’s just kind of the things that you pick up when you’re in meetings right so it was handy from that perspective but it was really handy to be able to say this is why this works and this is why you know we’re doing the thing that we’re doing.

Steve:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m going to look into it for myself because I’m not a trained marketer, similar to you, Steve, and I’ve got a master’s degree in I think comparative literary studies, which was great, but didn’t teach me anything about marketing necessarily. But it comes back to your point from a while back that you were saying when you see it from almost like the brand side, you understand why, oh, maybe this is why I couldn’t sell in that idea because I wasn’t maybe talking in the right way or thinking about it in the right way. So that’s really, really interesting. So I’m making quite a lot of notes here, which is great.

Louise:
With performance marketing, particularly paid media, you have a very clear ROI where it’s like you pay for this and you get this in return. And PR often gets said that, you know, what’s the ROI? And the same thing kind of happens when you talk about spending on a brand. How do you measure brand work? What’s your advice around that?

Stephen:
Returning to those brand trackers, that’s one of the best, most useful tools for doing that, because it gives an idea from real people about what they’re going to do and not going to do. So if we can, you know, if 20% of people would consider buying from us or have bought from us in the last year, And we are able to shift that to 30% of people have bought from us in the last year. There’s a really clear commercial impact from that. The ROI of performance marketing is a really interesting one because we think it’s a lot clearer than it is. We know that we’ve spent something, but the tools all attribute things a little bit differently. Facebook says it was the reason. Google says it was the reason. And Google can’t even agree between Google Ads and Google Analytics either. So it’s not really clear what’s happened to the degree that we think it has. And just the scale of sampling and the number of visits that are obscured since Safari started doing its thing, et cetera, et cetera. It’s just not as clear as we think it is. It used to be more clear, right? Cookie-driven analytics made things quite easy when everything was desktop and it was all very straightforward. And that’s just not quite the case anymore there are a lot of really useful studies and the most famous one being the long and the short of it by Les Binet and Peter Field which really just says this is the optimum way of doing this it’s not an all or nothing it’s not you should do this instead of doing this it differs from industry and it differs from the life cycle of a brand as well when you’re first starting if you are a start up you probably wanna be spending on performance marketing quite heavily because you’re capturing some demand that you’ve spotted that there is in the market. And so you can grow to a certain stage very cost effectively by spending on performance marketing stuff. When you are a market leader, that’s very difficult. Your clicks are getting more and more expensive all the time. And the only way to make them cheaper really is to increase brand search to get more people to actually want to find you. There’s a really interesting study that ITV did a couple of months ago as well. with when brands are actually spending on TV. And I know ITV office is going to be biased here. So when brands are advertising on TV, they actually have a higher quality score on their PPC ads. So they show up first more often than brands that aren’t doing that. It has such an implication on your performance marketing that it’s just not an all or nothing thing. It’s really difficult to attribute the full funnel like so many brands the majority of brands can’t do that and it’s only some a couple of clients who are doing something way too fancy to allow agencies access to with first party data platforms and all that kind of stuff. Generally speaking we’ve got to work with what we’ve got and we’ve got to have an enormous budget for measurement if we really want to measure things using econometrics for example. I appreciate that’s a bit of a woolly answer but what I would say really is that measurement of brands using things like brand trackers is not really any less accurate and arguably more accurate than things like Google Analytics but there to be used in conjunction it’s when you have Google Analytics it can tell you what happened over the last 30 days and a brand tracker can tell you why it happened that way.

Louise:
With the brand trackers, am I right in thinking that they’re quite expensive? Is it something that small medium brands can access or is it it’s just one of those things you just have to pay for and that’s the price?

Stephen:
You can do it yourself, right? Because it’s a server. If you are looking at how a brand tracker typically works, the things that make them expensive are it’s got a nice interface or a nice-ish interface. So that’s good. But they’re recruiting a bunch of people to answer a question or a set of questions. And because the brand trackers tend to be updated fairly frequently, they’re doing that all the time. So that’s why it’s expensive. if you want to get into this kind of thing early on you can just do a survey you can do the same kind of survey that you would do for PR and design the questions in a way to get a snapshot of how your brands performing so you really asking if i want to buy product text which is a thing that I sell what’s the first brand that comes to mind name the brand what’s the second what’s the third then you start to ask questions have you heard of this brand and you can start to get an ordering all those companies and which ones are gonna be the right kind of answer so it’s all totally doable yourself, and you only need to do it every quarter, every six months, depends on what your other activity looks like, at which point it becomes much more affordable, because if you’re a digital PR, you’re probably doing some surveys anyway that just kind of becomes part and parcel of how you work. So the things that you’re paying for from a brand tracker really are, they’ve got a panel who are always answering these questions. You can get the results really quickly and it updates really frequently. So you can get a picture over time. Whereas if you’re doing it yourself, you have to put in a bunch of work to design some questions and you need to do it and then do it again and then do it again. But every six months is probably fine.

Steve:
Yeah, that’s so true. You’re right in that PR people are so used to surveys, that’s not an alien thing for them at all. But I would also encourage digital PR people or PR people generally, if they’re not doing it themselves, they should be asking the brands they’re working with, are you doing this? And if so, share with us. We get a lot of great intel from our clients, don’t we, about who their audience is, how they’re thinking about them, which helps us to plan ideas beyond just our keyword analysis and our interpretation of what’s going to work for them. So it should be a combination of the two. I want to bring us back to Google, though, because your working life isn’t so revolved around Google these days, which is probably a very nice and good thing. But what are your current thoughts on Google? You’re an expert in the field. There’s been AI overviews, big shifts in the rankings with notable updates, chat GPT, TikTok becoming the new search engine. Will its dominance, in your opinion, start to decrease? Is that already happening? What do you see as the future for Google? It’s a big question, I know.

Stephen:
It’s been happening for years. And it really just depends on how you’re measuring it. Because TikTok is the search engine, if social is your thing. But I would argue that 10 years ago, you stopped going on Google to find a cheap flight. You started going on Skyscanner, and that was your search engine. And you wanted a used car, Autotrader is your search engine. And you wanted some used products, that was probably going to be eBay. So these search engines have been fragmenting for years and years. You can usually get a good indication of what Google’s most worried about at any point based on what products they’re launching. So they launched a job search engine just as Indeed was becoming the search engine for jobs and that kind of thing. TikTok is certainly very large and that’s one of the reasons it’s getting the attention that it’s getting. Chat GPT or the search functions thereof are well up the peak of inflated expectations in Gartner’s hype cycle at the moment so you know that’s why they’re getting a lot of attention but these things I’m not gonna say they come and go I don’t think they do I think they’re a little bit being bitten off Google all the time but when you look at search engines and just a roll how many people have gone on the desktop app and typed in a thing I need just comparing what you classically look as a search engine google pay dot go etc. Then google is gonna continue to look very very big and it’s also true google search volumes I think i’m pretty sick so it’s not a case of whether there are fewer searches going through google any given time it’s just becoming more complex what often happens I think this may be a little bit of personal experience I’m bringing in here you go on google first, that was crap I’m gonna go on this other search engine to find something better .There was a big, a whole trend going around Hacker News a few years ago about how if you wanted to find something on Google these days, you had to do a site colon reddit.com search to make anything good. And then, you know, Google solved that problem because now the only results it shows are Reddit anyway. So that’s, that’s been the case for a while. Like it’s not going away by any stretch, but it’s absolutely true that if you are, I don’t know, a property website, if you’re an estate agent, you should be advertising on Rightmove, the search engine for properties, et cetera, et cetera. It’s been that way for like a decade now.

Steve:
I think that’s a nice analogy as well. Google’s the behemoth. There’s lots of players that will come up and take a little, almost like a massive blue whale or something, and loads of fish or sharks come up and take a bite. I’ve probably over-egged that. That’s my summary of what we’ve just discussed, but thank you for your thoughts on that, because I would agree with them. I think, Lou, we’re ready for our final question, which we’re now giving a choice for, which is exciting, an exciting development.

Louise:
We’re asking everyone either, do you have a really interesting digital PR campaign that you would like to share that you’ve really enjoyed recently? Or who is the brand that you would love to work with the most?

Stephen:
The brand I’d love to work with the most, one of the wonderful things about where I work right now, and one of the things that we did a lot at Rise at 7, every time someone new started, we asked them their five dream brands that they’d like to work with. We created a league table of everyone’s dream brands, and then whenever we won something off the league table, we made a big deal about it. One of my dream brands was Diageo and I’ve always wanted to work with Diageo for many, many years and now I’m doing some work with Diageo. I’m very excited about that. We’re doing some really cool shoots around the Scottish distilleries in the Highlands and that is a lot of fun. It’s a really, really interesting thing when you work in PR. I don’t know if you feel the same, so I’m going to throw a question back at you if you don’t mind. I always used to work with City Index for years and years, which is a spread betting forex trading company. And I always looked at IG and thought, Oh, they’re really cool, aren’t they? That’s a really nice brand. And they’ve got this Twitter account, rest in peace Twitter, that was like the stocks prices going up and down in a kind of a live updating way. I’d follow that. And so I’m curious, over the years, you worked with some companies where you’ve just seen a competitor and you go, oh, they’re really cool. I’d love to work with them.

Steve:
I’ve worked with like a lot of brands that I felt like I really wanted to work with and then the reality wasn’t quite what I expected. So, you know, that’s quite common. For me, my favourite brands, and I’m not sure I could name just one off the top of my head, but my favourite brands are the kind of really ambitious, I guess you call them challenger brands that are like making their way up and they’re really excited about the future. They’re not like a huge corporate that already established. They’re like young, hungry. I bought one of my presents that I bought for my wife was a piece of Passenger clothing and she absolutely loves it. And I went to Blue Earth Summit recently and met someone from Passenger clothing and she was absolutely lovely. And I just thought that’d be such a nice brand to work on. They do great products. They have a lot of meaning behind their brand. And I think it’d be a lot of fun to work on. So that’s one that pops into my head. There’s probably a whole list. We’re going to make sure that Lou answers this question.

Louise:
I’m not going to answer the question, but what popped into my head was, being on clients that you love the product of, I’ve always been disappointed by the lack of freebies. I really thought I’d get more freebies. That’s been a real bubble that’s burst while working in agency side. Maybe in-house is different, but the lack of freebies, the lack of discount codes, it’s real sad.

Stephen:
Yeah, I think it is different in-house, it is different in-house. But I do think that if you get the opportunity to work on a brand that really sort of takes that brand identity through everything that it does, it makes such a difference. I’ll draw the example of, I remember pitching for Topshop and going to Oxford Street and going into the Arcadia office and it was like being in a shoe cupboard. It looked like the 1970s Marks and Spencers. Oh my god, it was so grim in my opinion. Maybe you loved it.

Louise:
No, there were rats and mice in that building. It was not the glamorous fashion life that I thought I was meant to be leading.

Stephen:
But then I remember going to Misguided and thinking, wow, this is the building that Misguided should be in. It makes complete sense. And I think like the brand, you know, just to kind of bring it around a little bit, that’s something that the employees have to experience as well, right? It’s not just what the customers say about you when you’re not there. You’ve got to walk into a, into a building and it just should just make sense. It should feel like that company. I think that’s part of brand as well.

Steve:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s so true. Yeah, again, haven’t really thought of it in that way, but often at the Propellernet offices, we get people walking and going, oh, this is such a nice space and it feels very us. We’ve made it very us, and it’d be weird if everything was all like brushed steel and like super, super modern, you know? We could talk for hours on this, but you have already been very generous with your time, Stephen, so we’re going to say goodbye and thank you. If people want to get in touch with you, we know you’re quite active on social, but if they wanted to talk to you about working with Ride Shotgun, getting some information, advice from you if they’re making their way in the industry, what’s the best way to do so?

Stephen:
Definitely LinkedIn. LinkedIn is pretty much the only social I do nowadays, or you can find us @rideshotgun.global

Steve:
lovely. Thank you so much Stephen, an absolute pleasure to talk to you about all things brand. It’s been hugely enjoyable so thank you very much.

Stephen:
Thank you both, absolute pleasure.