I’ve spent more than 25 years in communications—nearly all of it inside or advising large enterprises. I’ve worked in almost every discipline of communications, from traditional media relations to executive thought leadership and communications, to internal and employee communications, to being one of the earliest adopters of corporate social and digital media, and to crisis and reputation management.
I’ve seen and done quite a lot in my career; I’ll never say I’ve seen it all, because there’s always something new under the sun, and our profession is changing dramatically (more about that in a minute).
But I’ve seen enough to know the ups and downs of a corporate environment—the benefits of large enterprise budgets and resources, and the frustrations that such large, matrixed environments can engender.
Now I’m taking on a new role that, at the same time, is different from my experience but will allow me to leverage all 25 years of my corporate background.
I’m happy to share that I have joined Spin Sucks as chief strategy officer.
Maybe you saw Gini’s recent article (or podcast episode or video) about the leadership team expansion. I’m more excited about this career move than I have been about anything in a very long time.
First off, Gini and I have been friends for nearly two decades and have been talking about working together for just as long. When the opportunity arose, it didn’t take much convincing to get me to sign on.
It’s not just that I get to work with a friend, it’s that I get to work with someone whose thinking and approach I have long admired…who also happens to be a good friend. But there’s a bigger reason at play for me as well.
Changes In Strategic Communications
The communications and marketing world has changed dramatically since I started my corporate career in 1999. The long-held traditions and ways of practicing successful, winning communications that I learned coming up (at the knee of some of the old guard’s finest practitioners) are as outdated today as a compact disc or Netscape browser.
Good for their time, but they have been usurped as technology and society have shifted. 21st-century marketing and communications need a 21st-century model to be effective—and I’m 100% convinced that the PESO Model© is just what large enterprises need to maximize their efficiency and effectiveness in an increasingly competitive, fragmented, and challenging landscape.
When you think about the changes in the landscape for corporations and large enterprises just in the past 10-15 years, here’s just some of what we’ve seen:
- The decline of legacy media has been due to newsroom staff being decimated.
- The trust crisis has shifted to a post-factual society, where one source’s opinion is as credible as another’s fact.
- Shifts in corporate resourcing have shrunk communications teams that used to be in the dozens into what are often a couple of dozen or even fewer, requiring practitioners to do more with less.
- The rise of citizen journalism and influencers has reached a point where some of them are now more influential with their target audiences than the big-name legacy media outlets we once craved as comms pros.
- The sheer scale of information inputs we must now parse every day, and the corresponding reductions in the amount of time we have to grab and hold an audience’s attention.
- The formerly ironclad lines between earned and paid media are shattering, in the minds of perhaps everyone except old-school comms pros.
- The increasing importance of shared and owned media to modern marketing communications practice.
- The rise and fall of various social media platforms: what was king five years ago is passé today, and what is king now will likely be usurped within a few years. We need to keep pace.
- Most recently, the rise of generative AI and its ability in some minds to turn the art of message development into algorithmic science.
You could probably list more, but an exhaustive list is less important than recognizing that the marketing and communications environment is vastly different from what it once was and is changing as fast as, or faster than, we can keep up.
We need faster, more efficient methods and models for practicing our craft and promoting our brand or our clients.
We need to recognize the importance of paid media in cutting through the noise to generate awareness or action.
We need to broaden our perceptions of what “earned” means and who counts as third-party media in 2025 and beyond.
We need the message control and authority of our content to ensure that accurate stories live on the web, waiting to be discovered through search engines and backlinks.
We need to earn the trust of communities of audiences that trust one another and share content and information across platforms, while keeping track of which audience prefers which platforms.
And we need to do all of this while maintaining the message consistency and integrity that have always been the hallmarks of good PR.
The Power of the PESO Model
The PESO Model is the best way to do all this. It is today, and it will be even as the landscape and audience expectations continue to evolve.
As the ground has shifted beneath large enterprise communications and marketing, the PESO Model helps us keep pace. It forces us to break down the artificial walls we often build internally between marketing and communications, between paid and earned media, and between functions and brands within the enterprise, which are not accustomed to thinking about what the other is doing, much less working together.
Long-time readers of Spin Sucks know how the PESO Model enables us to do more with less—not through additive processes that we have to do in addition to our usual work, but through leveraging the content and efforts going on across all four media channels.
Big companies are matrixed and have for decades rewarded siloes, perhaps unintentionally, but certainly in practice. It’s not easy to do integrated, cross-functional, and cross-team collaboration, even when we want to, because most corporate systems aren’t set up to encourage or facilitate it.
I’ve banged my head into that same brick wall, believe me, at more than one stop in my career. However, the PESO Model, by design, forces this collaboration, rewards it, and incentivizes it.
You can’t do true PESO Model work without this kind of integration and collaboration.
(And let’s get one thing straight: having a string of disconnected or disparate tactics in each media channel is not what implementing the PESO Model looks like; it is the integration that defines successful implementation of the model.)
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Struggling to keep up with demands because your teams have shrunk? I get it. The first Fortune 500 corporate communications team I joined in the late 1990s was 400 people strong worldwide; the last Fortune 500 communications team I belonged to, over the past few years, boasted just 17 people globally.
The work hasn’t lessened, but the expectations and bandwidth demands have certainly grown.
The solution? Let the PESO Model make your content work harder for you, while you just work smarter.
Implementing truly integrated content streams and messaging helps ensure message consistency across channels, allowing us to meet audiences at any stage of the customer journey on any platform with consistent calls to action. This also enables better and more efficient tracking of which content truly drives our desired outcomes.
And I’m not just talking about vanity metrics like likes, click-through rates, and views. Using the PESO Model’s scientific measurement and metrics processes allows us to prove that communications and marketing tactics are tied to tangible business outcomes.
In 25 years of a corporate communications career, that last part has always been our bête noire: how do we show the value of communications efforts to the business? What do all those impressions mean, and what good did all of our old clip reports actually do?
With the PESO Model, it’s no longer a guessing game, and we no longer have to rely on our relationships with the C-suite and hope they take our word for what good looks like. We can prove it, and not just for marketing and communications goals, but also tangibly aligned with business objectives that the C-suite is striving to achieve.
When communications ceases to be a “know good when you see it” discipline and is instead a scientifically measured driver of business outcomes, that changes the value the C-suite finds in communications.
That’s what we’ve always worked for, isn’t it?
Delivering the Future of Integrated Marketing Communications
That’s why I am so excited to join Spin Sucks and evangelize the PESO Model as this company expands its focus to large enterprises. Because I can wholeheartedly and in good conscience evangelize this model to my colleagues and cohorts in the large corporate enterprise world as the most effective way to resolve the challenges I know they face, because I’ve experienced them too.
I know it works.
I know it does what Gini says it does (and what now the entire expanded leadership team at Spin Sucks says it does).
As the PESO Model has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the changing marcomm environment, it has become what large enterprises need to win at communications and marketing. The time has never been more ripe for corporate adoption of this model and its mindset. And I’m going to work to bring it to the corporate world at scale, across functional teams and sub-brands.
To those in corporate communications and marketing, I get what you wrestle with. I understand your frustrations and concerns. And I’ll be coming to you with a playbook and framework that will help you achieve results and look good in performance reviews.
Meanwhile, to keep exploring the ongoing evolution of the PESO Model as well as the work we’re doing with clients like you, check out all the content (both what’s already here and what’s to come) here on the Spin Sucks blog.
And don’t stop there; here are some other ways to connect with us:
- Join the Spin Sucks Community
- Follow Spin Sucks on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
- If we’re not already connected, connect with me on LinkedIn.
Let’s get to work!
