#26 The Truth About In-House PR with Sophie Mawby

Louise:
Much like in agencies, we know that a lot has changed within internal comms departments over the last few years. Roles can cover press, events, influencers, corporate and internal comms. It seems that these days you really have to juggle it all. But full disclosure, me and Steve have never worked in-house, so we’ve got in a seasoned in-house professional on the podcast. Sophie Mawby has nearly 20 years of internal PR and comms experience at brands like L’Oreal and Yoto, so is the perfect person to speak about the in-house evolution.

Steve:
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sophie. It’s a pleasure to meet you. As a starting point for our listeners, can you give us an overview of who you are and your career to date?

Sophie:
Indeed, I think I had about out-of-body experience when you said 20 years there. That really felt like that can’t possibly be me she’s talking about, surely not. So yeah, I mean, I really started wanting to work in PR very young. So at 16, when our school forced us to do those mandatory work experience placements, one of my placements was in a tiny PR agency in my hometown. And for one reason or another, I thought, I think this could be for me and stuck to it if I’m completely honest. So I had the pleasure of having an older sister who was three and a half years older than me and she was kind of going through the university stream and graduating and her and her friends were really kind of struggling with ‘what do I do with this degree’ you know ‘I’ve got a pure English or a pure psychology from a red brick uni and I don’t really know what I want to do now’ and they were all moving home and I could overhear all of their conversations about where they should go and what they should do, and I just really wanted to go for a vocational degree where I knew what I was doing, and so I chose to go to Bournemouth University to study public relations, which had a mandatory year in placement. So I did that in 2004, I think, at Elizabeth Arden, and that really sort of set me on my path as an in-house PR, particularly then in the beauty realm. So that’s where I stayed for 15 years or so within the beauty industry, working in-house at brands that you would know and recognise. So yeah, and then I had my second child, did a little sidestep into the influencer world, which I think we’ll probably talk about later as kind of why I made that shift. And then now I’m here at Yoto, the kids audio platform, looking after all things communications for the whole world of Yoto.

Louise:
So when you were 16 or a little bit older and you decided it was PR, what was it about PR that made you specifically want to do that?

Sophie:
I wish I could tell you the exact reasons. Honestly, they shouldn’t be asking 16-year-olds what they want to do with their lives. That’s utterly ridiculous. I think it was, for me, the kind of fast-paced nature. I loved that when I was in this little tiny office, the phone was always ringing, there was a real buzz, there was a real energy. And I do distinctly remember that my job was to cut out the press cuttings and glue them into the books. I remember that too, yeah. With my print sticks and my scissors. But I do remember those coverage books being around and being dead proud of the coverage book and it going to sit in reception and a really lovely feeling of being able to tangibly see the results of all those phone calls and all that busy work. So I think probably it was a little bit of that plus the team there were just very welcoming and made me feel really good about myself and I think it just ignited a passion for PR that stayed with me.

Louise:
Obviously now there isn’t any cutting out really. Well, I don’t know. Maybe some people are still cutting out articles. This is the digital PR podcast. That’s probably why we’re not so aware of that. But I would say things have probably changed since when you first joined. So do you think 16-year-old you now would still decide to go into the PR that it is like now?

Sophie:
Yeah, that does make sense. And yes, I think the answer is I definitely would stay in PR. I mean, I have had a little career break and really assessed, as everybody does, I think once you’ve got a family and things have changed and your passions and interests are evolving, I have a few times thought, is this still what I want to do? Do I still love it? And the truth is, yes, I do still really love the world of PR. I think there’s something super magical about the kind of intangibility of what it is that we do and that we’re in charge of, that there’s a kind of magic to PR and brand reputation and the kind of illusion, I guess, of the brand. And I love being able to try to, like, make that a tangible thing as opposed to this invisible thing that’s really hard to catch. I think there’s a kind of magic in that.

Steve:
I would totally agree. What’s the best bit of PR for you? What still gives you that buzz? Because for me, I still go out and pitch to journalists. It’s something that I’ve really wanted to sort of maintain, even as I’ve got more and more senior. And I still get that buzz from securing a great piece of coverage. It’s never, ever left me. What gives you that buzz still?

Sophie:
It’s exactly the same as you. So I honestly, the Press Highlights Slack channel of any organisation I’ve ever worked in is where my happy place is. I think I absolutely love being able to see the direct results. I even more love that when you’re in-house, you know where that piece of coverage came from. You know, if you’re doing your job properly, it’s wonderful to be able to sort of preface where this article came from, who knew who that put us in touch with that, who in the team spoke to that person, at what event did we stand and chat to this person for 10 minutes. I think it’s, yeah, it definitely is the kind of little dopamine hits of getting coverage from all angles that makes me motivated and come to work every day.

Steve:
Yeah, it’s great for that because it is so much changes but that still kind of remains the same, you know, like an output that is really motivating. Talking of change, and sorry to reference again your two decades in the industry, Sophie, I’m fast approaching you there as well, but really wanted to talk to you about any kind of industry moments that stand out for you that have felt quite pivotal either for you or for the industry. So, you know, things like you’ve worked in influencer marketing, the emergence of influencers, closure of print publications, rise of social media as a few examples. But what stands out for you as being particularly pivotal?

Sophie:
I think there are a couple of moments actually. One moment for me was working at L’Oreal where we were trying to kind of work out this world of these social media stars that were kind of coming out of nowhere and garnering hits and YouTube followings that were as big as magazines and that was happening really quickly. And one of the first things we ever did with an influencer in that sense was a very classic marketing person wanting to control everything. We hired that influencer to host a microsite for us on our behalf, which is just classic, isn’t it? We didn’t think it was worth actually talking to their audience on the platform where they were. We thought we would get her to come across to us, which shows the kind of immaturity of the business as it was back then. But that was a big moment. We paid her a large sum of money to do that. It was probably the equivalent of what a PR event would have been. And I remember thinking at the time, wow, marketing are really believing kind of in the power of influencers. And this is the first sort of tangible moment there. And then the second moment for me was really coming back from maternity leave after I had my second son and noticing that the PR budget looked so different to what it looked like when I left. So, so much of the money that we had earmarked for the more traditional PR activities had all shifted into influencer marketing. And I really remember feeling quite discombobulated, as you do when you come back from maternity leave anyway, but feeling really confused as to how we were justifying that spend and how we were measuring the success of that. which was ultimately really what drove my decision to leave in-house PR for a couple of years and go and work on the influencer marketing side of things. I was representing talent and working on garnering their brand deals because I really wanted to understand from the inside, what is success in influencer marketing? What is a good campaign versus a bad campaign? How are we justifying the kind of money that we are investing into this space? Which is what I did then after the birth of my second son, and it taught me an awful lot.

Louise:
I was starting in PR when they started including blogger outreach in your kind of media lists. And I just remember, for me, I was like, I hadn’t been in it long. So it just seemed like, okay, you’re telling me to do this, this is fine. But the change, I used to be able to just kind of like, send them, I don’t know, a lipstick or something and it would be a lovely blog post all about this and that. And now, I mean, I haven’t worked in influences for a long, long time, but I know just from hearing about it, like you said, the amount of money is one thing, but also, you know, the contractual negotiations, it is in itself its whole new industry and rightfully so. But it is like a big adjustment to make, especially like you said, when you came back from maternity leave, it is adjusting to a new realm and getting your head around it, yeah, that is quite a shift.

Sophie:
Just to build on that as well, I think I kind of have lived through the evolution of press really disliking those influencers, right? So we had to honestly imply heavily to press that we weren’t talking to bloggers and influencers because they hated it so much. They were openly very confused about why an influencer would be invited on the same press trip or to the same dinner as they were. And it really took a good few years to kind of go from, well, we have to host separate events for these two groups because the twain shall never meet, versus those influencers and press basically becoming those content creators themselves. And that was a very interesting process to watch. There was a huge amount of backlash for a good few years before everybody really started to understand that the two were impossible to kind of pull away from each other.

Louise:
Yeah, that’s very interesting. I have a journalist friend who literally went on a brand trip. I was talking to her just a couple of weeks ago and she wasn’t coming across negatively but she was still saying that it is quite different. We are journalists, they are influencers and their approach to creating their content, whether that’s a video or an article or whatever that might be, is quite different. And how they talk to brands is quite different. My journalist friend was talking about how she wanted to ask a few more awkward questions to the brand around things. And it’s one of those things which, although has been going on for a number of years, still is a topic that seems to be still widely discussed.

Steve:
Yeah. Do you think it is because there’s a, there was or is still a fear there from journalists as well that influence, you know, like the gaining power and so much influence and large audiences. Is that like a part of it or is there something else at play?

Sophie:
In the kind of late noughties, definitely, I think there was a concern from press that there was a power change happening and they were not comfortable with the kind of way that it was going. But also there was a genuine level of concern that perhaps the content creators weren’t as expert in the areas that the press were, obviously and understandably, because they were looking for completely different things. and that they were receiving the same kind of attention as a journalist who has had years and years of experience, particularly in the area that I was in, in beauty, and had stratospheric levels of understanding about the beauty industry and skin and hair and nail artistry and makeup artistry, which just wasn’t the same from the content creators in their perspective.

Louise:
Are there any new skills or tools that weren’t even invented or on your radar when you first started PR that are now really essential to how you work in your in-house role?

Sophie:
I mean, absolutely. So because I started up in large in-house organisations, evaluation was always really important and we did have really great evaluation tools, but we were basically only looking at number of mentions in AVE. That was as far as our reporting went. We were only really concerned about those two metrics. I can remember all my KPIs were to do with volume of coverage and the AVE that was associated with that. I think obviously the tools now can measure so much more and we understand so much more about the importance of looking at the quality of the coverage as opposed to the quantity. So I think that’s been huge, the kind of tools that we’ve used. But then also, of course, you know, there was no social media. I can remember in my very first role, we had an intern who had a Facebook account because she’d come over from the U.S. and Facebook was only available in the U.S. at the time. It was just for U.S. college students. So yeah, Facebook hadn’t even launched when I was first interning. And obviously now social media platforms are just absolutely enormous. They can’t be managed in the same way that that kind of traditional press coverage is managed. So they require a whole new skill set.

Steve:
Yeah. That’s wild, the birth of social media. And now we’ve almost gone full circle, like we’re recording this just after, a handful of days after The Guardian has left Twitter. So we’ve had the full, you know, in terms of like news platforms and their use of social media, it’s pretty wild how quickly it’s evolved. How do you stay adaptable yourself? Because it is a challenging industry for many, many reasons, but one of the things that personally I’ve struggled with since I’ve had two children myself is like, ah, there’s so much going on. Now there’s AI and there’s sort of like new stuff to think about all the time. A bit of a gift and a curse is the way I see it. It’s like sometimes you just like want to go, if it could only just stay the same for a little bit. But how do you personally, Sophie, stay adaptable in this kind of industry that’s constantly evolving?

Sophie:
OK, so I think there’s two real things that I lean into for staying adaptable. I stay really, really curious. So I want to understand where people are spending their time and effort, where people’s attention is. So really, that was a huge moment for me when I noticed my own attention going from I’ll pick up a magazine when I’m in a waiting room to I’m going to watch Instagram while I’m in a waiting room, noticing all those kind of behaviours in myself and my friendship groups and sort of following that attention and being really curious about what’s happening and why. And then I also think the second thing is I think staying, I don’t know if it’s humble is the right word, but staying super non-judgmental I guess. I think it’s really dangerous to sort of put your stall out by one of the areas of PR, whether that be, you know, I’m really a print PR kind of person and not respecting the fact that this influence comes from absolutely everywhere in this day and age. And you need to be as concerned about a trust pilot review or a Facebook community that’s popping off about a particular issue, as well as, you know, a piece of coverage that’s just come out. All of those things need to be treated fairly equally in my mind in order to make sure that you’re doing your communications job properly.

Louise:
That actually touches on a question that I wanted to ask around, do you feel that companies, brands are looking for their PR team to do more these days rather than just focusing on journalist relations and getting coverage? Is there an expectation that your job role internally is going to be much broader now?

Sophie:
Yes, I would say so. I would say in the olden days when I was hiring for somebody in my own PR team, it used to be about who do you know? Who do you know? Who could you call? Who would you pitch to? Who would you take this story to? And that was just so important, you know, I don’t know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And now it’s really about what brands have you worked for that have similar problems to ours. So have you worked somewhere with a product that’s incredibly difficult and complicated for people to understand? Or have you worked in a company environment where you’re CFO is very skeptical about all things PR, or your CEO is very trigger happy on Twitter. All of those kinds of individual skill sets are so much more important. And definitely the expectation of PR is not just securing press coverage anymore, which it shouldn’t be. I’m very glad that it’s not just all about what press coverage you’ve achieved that month. It’s much more about being in the room when big decisions are being made to make sure that we’re strategy and not storytelling.

Steve:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you’re a trained PR professional and that you mentioned in the intro, you went to Bournemouth University and studied it. When you’re building your team and looking for kind of comms professionals, do you always get what you need or do you see like a skills gap there that needs to be met? Because again, with so much changing, when we’re hiring at Propellernet, we get some amazing applicants but sometimes you’re sort of like oh you maybe haven’t worked in digital PR for that that long because you know it’s still a fairly new industry and obviously you’re looking for more and more broader broader like how how do you find that?

Sophie:
Yeah, I would say that’s definitely tricky. It’s very rare to find somebody that does have the experience in all areas. I think it’s about hiring the right person for the role and if there’s a skill set gap, making sure that other members of the team are able to kind of fill that and all training each other. I have an amazing UK PR manager who’s a digital PR expert, that was her background, and she teaches me every day all these new tools that we need, and I find that to be a really important part of the way that we’re all working, that we accept, I guess, that there are different skill sets, different gaps, and we all kind of plug in together.

Louise:
When you get applicants through, are you thinking about if they’ve had an in-house role or if they’ve had an agency role? Do those backgrounds bring different skill sets? And is there any advice that you have for people who are looking to move from agency to in-house?

Sophie:
Yes, now this is a tricky question. There’s so many different parts of this that we could talk about, but I do think that coming from agency, there’s a very high level of being able to kind of push back on what a kind of internal team might want you to do. So I think occasionally in-house can be slightly people-pleasing. I don’t know if you have experienced this as an agency side company, would you prefer to be managed by a marketing person, like a marketing specialist or a PR specialist? Do you have a preference on that side?

Steve:
That is a good question. I personally wouldn’t mind, but I always prefer someone who has ideally knowledge of and some experience in PR because I think intuitively then they kind of get what we’re trying to do and crucially some of the challenges that we’re going to face. Whereas I think a lot of people that haven’t worked in PR will kind of go, well, why is this coverage not appearing if it hasn’t appeared or why does this say this or the journalist hasn’t included a link? And it’s like, yeah, this can happen you know, and then it becomes more of a long-term education piece, I think.

Sophie:
That’s to my point. When you’re in-house, you’re working with a lot of marketing people who don’t necessarily understand that and who are all vying for their slice of the pie. You know, when I’ve worked anywhere in-house, we don’t just look after one brand. Generally, when people are moving PR in-house, it feels like it’s often a control thing and a budget cutting exercise, which I’m not saying is the right thing, but quite often that’s the kind of two behaviours that I’ve witnessed. I’ve taken PR in-house now for three companies. And those seem to be two large motivating factors. And we look after multiple brands within that kind of company. So I’ve looked after three, four brands within one team of three. And all of those marketing heads of think that their product and their launch is the most exciting, the most important, deserves the same level as another. And having to manage all of those expectations in-house is tricky. So I think it’s great hiring someone from agency because they’re excellent at that kind of advocacy and really explaining why that doesn’t necessarily deserve the same treatment or the same approach as a similar launch that a marketing person would like to emulate. And in-house tend to sometimes be a little bit more people-pleasing and kind of just take too much on, which is not the way forward.

Steve:
Makes sense. I mean, we wanted to talk a little bit more about the difference between in-house and agency. And hopefully this question won’t cause offence. It’s certainly not designed to. And I’m going to caveat it by saying that me and Lou do not believe this to be true. But there is definitely an assumption within the agency world that in-house roles are kind of you know, slower paced and dare I say it, like a tad easier. Is there any truth on that based on your experience? Obviously, there’s differences between the two, but is it slower paced? Is it easier? It doesn’t seem to be at all from my knowledge of it.

Sophie:
I’m probably not the best person to ask just because I don’t have a huge amount of experience in agency. I had a couple of years working on the agency side and obviously saw how difficult it is to manage that many different brands with those many different expectations. So I can totally see how the kind of sheer volume of clients could really impact how busy any given week is in an agency, especially when you then throw in new business and pitching and all of those kind of things as well. I think my experience from in-house is quite lean teams, and we don’t have the same kind of structure as an agency in terms of specialists. So when I’ve worked in-house, I’ve A, managed multiple brands, which all require a totally different hat that you wear when you’re working on that particular brand launch. And then we also don’t have kind of in-house support on events, copywriting, you know, any specialisms. We kind of have to just do it all. So yes, you might end up with some preferred suppliers that you go to for certain things, but generally speaking, if a company has invested in in-house PR, they sort of expect you to be able to just do it all. So it does tend to be incredibly busy. I think I’ve worked a lot of companies now, and I wish I could say that there’s ever been one where I felt like the pace is totally manageable, but the sheer volume of kind of product launches and the kind of explosion of all these different platforms where PR’s attention and expertise could be beneficial just means that it does continue to be very, very busy. And obviously, when you’re in-house as well, it’s very easy to be pulled into a quick meeting about something. Your time isn’t billable in the same way, so therefore you are dragged around quite a lot which is again really important because you want to be in those rooms and have that voice and be part of the conversation but it does mean it’s very busy all the time.

Steve:
Well you’ve definitely put that myth to bed and thank you for that because I genuinely, I’m just going to say outright, I find it staggering that so many people believe that to be true like, oh, agents are so busy, because as you referenced, Sophie, there’s so many brands you’re working across, and you feel maybe like you’re stretched thinly because you’re trying to work out all their different needs. But I’ve not worked in-house, but knowing a lot of in-house people, my experience is, or my knowledge tells me that, yeah, you’re going to get the same deal, but just with different challenges. And it’s going to be no less busy and no less challenging. It’s just a slightly different way of looking at things and approaching it. So, yeah, thank you for putting that myth to bed. We had to ask.

Louise:
As mentioned, I’m from an agency perspective, you talk about kind of being pulled into meetings when you’re doing your role. What exactly are you pulled into meetings for? What does more of your job entail that I might not be aware of?

Sophie:
Yeah, actually another one of your guests talked about this as well, about the joy of being in-house, kind of getting to see the drivers behind the decisions and it’s great to be part of those conversations rather than just being briefed at the end as an agency but there’s so many things I even tried to write them all down in preparation for this for this meeting but you could be pulled into a meeting to negotiate a strategic partnership or to you know find a great spokesperson for a particular topic or issue building relationships with internal departments which is a huge part of the job I know I mentioned it before but you know having to manage an awful lot of generalist or non-PR specific roles can take up an awful lot of time to explain what works, what doesn’t work, why we’re not going to email that journalist to ask for a different headline, which is annoyingly still a very prevalent conversation that I have. But yeah, it could be crisis comms or incident management, risk mitigation, internal comms for a bit of advice with your people team about how you work on something like that. So much more tracking competitors or industry relevant kind of competition to enhance somebody else’s piece of work to kind of prove a point about where people’s attention is or why people are interested in a specific topic. I’ll often get pulled in to kind of prove those points and then obviously there’s the kind of influencer relations, influencer marketing, content writing, exec profiling, trend spotting, media training, events management, there’s an awful lot that you end up having to kind of get involved with for all the right reasons, but it does mean that you’re shifting perspectives, putting different hats on from one half an hour meeting to the next. So yeah, that’s one thing about in-house as well is that all of that kind of going on before you even get to the nice stage where you’re briefing a campaign or writing a press release or really going out there to sort of tell the stories.

Steve:
I’m going to give this list to any agency people who perpetuate the myth that in-house might be easier or kind of quieter because it’s clearly not true. That’s so varied and so much to think about. So yeah, incredible.

Louise:
When you’ve been in a career for an amount of time, obviously your life changes. I have just come back from maternity leave. Steve’s got two kids. Obviously there are other life changes as well, but I know that you’ve mentioned before that you also have kids. You became a parent. How did that impact your career decisions and goals? Did you feel that there was a shift or is it exactly the same?

Sophie:
No, I think we don’t live in a perfect world and I read there was a study in 2023 which said that a woman’s career takes about 10 years to recover from having children to get to the same level of seniority as she would have been if she hadn’t had children. And I found that to be almost exactly correct. So my eldest is about to turn 10 in January. And I think it is unfortunately the truth that when you become a parent, especially when you become a mother, and there’s a level of kind of default parent that comes with being a mother sometimes, being truthful. And that does mean that what you need from your job is different. So flexibility for me has been really, really important. And I’ve been incredibly lucky to have always worked in companies that have afforded me the flexibility that I’ve needed. So I have worked three days a week in the early years when my children were very young and then gradually up to four days a week and now pretty much full-time, which you know, it’s so incredibly important in order to be able to do your absolute best at work, show up ready to work, you’ve made the right arrangements for your childcare and all that kind of stuff. For me, it just made me more keen and my attention was more honed on doing what I wanted to do and making a real difference. I think that the ability to zoom out and really see if I’m going to be this busy, this far away from my kids and all of that kind of stuff, it needs to make a difference. So really, yeah, zooming out, being able to look at things more strategically, understand where your attention and where your focus needs to be at any given moment to make the most out of a day.

Louise:
Your time is very precious. So, well, everyone’s time is, but it just feels more acute when you know that when you get home, you don’t have an opportunity to carry on doing a little bit of work or anything like that. You’ve probably got that kind of nine to five block and that’s it. And so you’ve got to make sure you use it very, very wisely. I can see that.

Steve:
Yeah, one of the other parents at Propellernet said that to me and I think it’s so true. It’s the headspace in the morning and the evening that I used to, well, God’s honest truth, I just took for granted because it was like giving some thought to like how the day’s going to map out and then decompressing at the end of the day and thinking about some of the challenges I’d faced and there’s none of that. Like, you know, this morning did kind of two hours with the kids before they went to nursery and school and then this evening it will be another couple of hours and it’s there’s an intensity to it, and PR or comms is quite intense as well, so it’s no mean feat at all. How have you found it so far, Lou? Not that I want to make this an interview, but it definitely warrants an entire podcast, but you’re just back. How have you found it coming back straight into podcast recording, a lot going on?

Louise:
I underestimated what it would feel like. I was very excited about coming back and I still am excited about it. I’m still enjoying it. But I think that excitement clouded the reality of what it was going to be like. And actually, I don’t feel you said you mentioned about how when you came back from one of your maternity leaves, you know, there had been quite a big shift in the industry. I don’t think anything has been quite as sizable as that, how you described it. But there has been changes. It’s been 10 months. And that threw me more than I was expecting. I kind of thought I still had had a little toe in the water and things like that, and I was aware. But just very small things about how our team works now and how just I’ve then made a mistake because I haven’t, I wasn’t aware. And then, you know, no one can brief you on absolutely everything. And I think those little mistakes can really knock your confidence a little bit because you’re like, hey, I’ve been doing this for years. I used to not really make that many mistakes. And now I’m back to feeling like, oops, I did that wrong. So it’s not been how I expected. I don’t think anyone can really prep you for it. And I am very aware that it’s just early days. My daughter’s not even gone into nursery yet. So the kind of onslaught of illnesses hasn’t even happened yet. There’s no doubt going to have to come. So yeah, embracing myself. But that would be my review. I had not prepped myself fully, but I don’t think there was a way to prep myself.

Steve:
Thank you, Lou. It’s the first time we’ve done that, sort of just gone and almost interviewed each other. Coming back to you, Sophie, you talked about your career path and it’s been really fascinating to learn about all the things you’ve done and all of your knowledge and experience. Has how you define career success changed at all over the years?

Sophie:
I think in the past my definition of career success was what I had delivered for the company and for the business in terms of AVE, number of mentions etc, and now I’m probably a bit more focused on what was a good year for myself, what new skills I learned, what new kind of hurdles we’d overcome, how the team feel, how the profile of PR has grown in the last year, the kind of bigger, more strategic wins are more important to me. And I think losing those kind of KPIs around quantity of coverage and that kind of obsession with the AVE that used to just be so prevalent has really helped in that.

Steve:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense because it’s almost accepting some of the things you can’t fully control and like just focusing on you and like what you’ve achieved, which is going to be a lot within a year. And that’s a great way of looking at it and great advice for our listeners, whether they’re starting out in their career or are more senior and sort of advanced in the PR comms profession. What do you think the future holds for the comms industry? Any predictions on what’s to come? We always like to ask our guests to do a bit of future gazing. And I’d say it’s a really, really hard question that I wouldn’t want to answer. So sorry to throw it over to you, Sophie.

Sophie:
I think there are a few things. I think obviously all the advancements in technology mean that we’re just so much more able to demonstrate the impact that PR results are having on various different streams of the business. So really making sure that we’re using all of those tools and those data points to prove wherever we can, the difference that we’re making on the bottom line or the awareness of a particular topic I think is becoming so much more possible. I also think that there’s just an ever-present kind of growing demand for authenticity, so making sure that your communications are… I heard somebody describe PR as the itty-bitty make-it-pretty committee and how we kind of… We fight against this very long-held regard that the PR team will help to clean up something that’s gone awry, or to reframe something that isn’t as great as it possibly could be – just doesn’t fly anymore. There’s no way that companies can get away with that kind of thing. People can smell it a mile off and it’s just not the right thing to be doing. So I think that having those tables where the decisions are being made is increasingly important. And the more that PR professionals can ask those questions, be curious, make sure they fully understand the picture of things before they start to even engage in the the messaging process, writing those kind of key messages is really, really important. So I hope we see a lot more of that in the future and that the seat at the table that we get is bigger and that we use all those advancements in technology to make sure that people understand the true impact that a really good PR team or comms team can have.

Louise:
We’ve spoken a few times about 16 year old you. But one of our last kind of questions, what advice would you give to 16-year-old you now if they were starting out in the industry with all your years of hindsight?

Sophie:
I think definitely the kind of topic that we talked about earlier about not getting stuck in your ways, not getting stuck in the belief that there’s only one way to do things or that magazines are the be all and end all and just getting coverage in one piece of magazine is going to be the thing that you do for the rest of your life and just understanding that there’s so much evolution of but kind of where that influence is coming from and to just stay aware, stay agile, watch what everybody’s doing, where the attention’s going and make sure that you kind of keep up. I think, I suppose it would probably just be make sure you keep up, like this is such a fast paced environment and there’s never gonna be a quiet year.

Steve:
Yeah, which is partly why we love it, right? But it’s important to know that before you’re delving into the industry. We’re going to ask our very last question now. And as ever, we’re giving guests a choice of which one they answer. So I’m going to broaden it out for you, Sophie. So could you either share a PR or comms campaign or story that you’ve loved recently? Or which brand would you love to work with or for and why?

Sophie:
So for me, the one that I’ve been watching really closely is the Stanley Cup. So not only is that, it’s just such a great example of a company whose CMO really understands comms, understands PR, like fully gets it. I know that the CMO was ex Crocs and he did a really similar job there as well in terms of like making sure that the comms mix was just absolutely spot on for the brand. And the moment that we will have all seen in kind of on digital and platforms was the moment where the customer had had a car fire and they kind of shook their Stanley Cup that was still in the car and there was a tinkle of ice still in there and within two days the CMO had done a video to say like obviously we’ll replace your Stanley Cup and we’ll replace your whole car that kind of agility the the speed at which they were able to see that acknowledge that it was really a viral moment I think it had something like 95 million views in the end and to jump on it and to do something with it I think was a perfect response and it was really smart and I’ve been watching them closely.

Louise:
Can I, this might be a naive question for me to ask, but specifically about the Stanley Cup, do you think that this has been planned by them all along? Like the fact that this cup that was just used by, I think like, you know, people going camping and stuff has become this it product. Do you think this was the plan all along? Or do you think for whatever reason, people started being like, this is a pretty good cup, I like drinking water now. And they just built on it. How much do you think they controlled it from the beginning?

Sophie:
My understanding was that they really looked at where their successes were and they saw that they had an incredible audience that were within the affiliate marketing kind of platform that they were using of Utah-based mums who were stealing their, I think it was literally Mormon mothers who were kind of stealing the sandy cups of their husband because they realised the product was just excellent at what they needed. Specifically the Quencha, which is that really huge one that fits in the car so nicely, which had had no marketing support for many, many years until somebody, CMO, very clever, who really paid attention to where is this doing excellently and the affiliate marketing platform specifically in the kind of Utah area was just astronomically flying and they were able to kind of build it out from there to really explode it away from just that regional success of Utah and launch it in a pink colour and make it more girly and make it more friendly. And yeah, I mean, the growth has been totally stratospheric, but it’s that kind of attention to detail that really comes from somebody that understands communications to be able to see, I guess, like really where is the audience, where is it over-performing, and then what can we do to exacerbate that tenfold. I think it would have been very easy for them to see that piece of content or see that success in Utah as just a one-off or not even pay attention to it. But I think it clearly worked for them.

Steve:
I am going to check out more of their marketing, and not that this adds anything to the conversation, but my wife asked for one for her birthday back in April, so I bought her one, and I was staggered by how large the cup actually was. It’s enormous. When I unpacked it, I was like, why do we need this much liquid all in one go? But great, and she loves it. She’s really quite attached to it, more so than any other water bottle that she’s ever had. So yeah, if you’re not aware of the Stanley Cup, check them out, check out their marketing. It’s come to that time, and Lou, I’m going to ask you this question. Who is going to do the outro and how badly are we going to do it? Because Sophie, we tend to do quite a nice smooth intro and then completely botch the outro. So do you want to do it?

Louise:
I’ll give it a go.

Steve:
Lou’s going to give it a go. Here we go.

Louise:
Sophie, thank you so much for joining us and spending your time with us talking about your career to date. Really, really interesting and amazing to get that in-house perspective. So, really appreciate you coming on. If anyone would like to maybe pick your brain about in-house or anything that you mentioned on the podcast, how can they get in contact with you?

Sophie:
LinkedIn would probably be the best one, so you’ll find me, Sophie Mawby, working at Yoto.

Louise:
Well, thank you again for joining us and thank you everyone for listening.

Steve:
Thank you, Sophie.

Louise:
Thank you so much.