What would you do if your boss hired a former special forces Green Beret to help him flee the country in a private jet while hiding inside an audio equipment box after being arrested and accused of an $80 million swindle? That was just one of the many challenges that Travis Parman, the opening keynote speaker at the AMEC global summit in Vienna has faced in his career.

Parman was just one of many impressive keynote speakers and panellists where highlights and key themes included the launch of the Barcelona Principles 4.0; the importance of influencing GenAI and how it’s an opportunity for PR and communications professionals to seize a leadership position; and how benefiting from insight and analysis needs good quality, clean, comprehensive data sources.

This year’s summit – steered as ever by formidable AMEC global MD Johna Burke (pictured) – focused on Reputation, Reliability and Results and the consistent theme was emphasising how the case for professional planning, measurement and evaluation has never been stronger. In the room speakers, panellists and delegates came from dozens of countries and were joined by hundreds more delegates online.

Despite the strength of the case its telling indictment of the PR and communications profession that much of what we talked about isn’t prevalent throughout the industry and so many still lack the planning, data and analytical skills that are essential for success. There was also the undercurrent that those of us attending are outliers. We are already seizing the opportunities of AI’s impact on reputation and brand, but in a profession that’s notoriously slow to innovate how many others are?

Parman was CCO of Nissan when its chairman, Carlos Ghosn, was arrested and held in solitary confinement for 108 days. Nissan alleged that Ghosn had underreported nearly $80 million in compensation and misused company assets. Ghosen eventually fled Japan (in a box) to his native Lebanon, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Japan.

His keynote drew on his experiences at Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Nissan, Renault and latterly Philip Morris International.

Parman shared four key takeaways. The first was that CCOs need to be brave and should use “simple, elegant solutions” to educate CEOs about results focused metrics such as reputation, employee engagement and sales support.

The second is to be indispensable by solving problems and creating a learning environment for the team. He shared an example from Nissan where website analytics revealed pricing news was the most visited content. The insight wasn’t to issue more pricing news releases, but to proactively use pricing news to guide people to the content Nissan wanted them to see.

Parman’s third point was that it’s essential to understand the C-suite’s pain points and hot button issues so you can focus and make them care about what you’re doing.

His final point was the constant need to look at “What’s next” to improve and modernise communications. He talked about ‘Prismatic Message Reception’ where a message refracts across multiple stakeholders and how this could be enhanced with AI analysis, targeting and customisation.

Like most of the speakers Parman emphasised the importance of adapting what we do for the AI era. One example was the return in importance of trade media as AI large language models see trade media as authoritative sources.

Updated Barcelona Principles 4.0

The Barcelona Principles were launched in 2010 and have been updated every five years. They are an evolution, rather than a revolution. This year's updated principles, outlined by former AMEC chairman Richard Bagnall at the summit, now align more clearly with AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework including a simple colour coding system to help show where each principle fits within the refreshed framework. There is also an ebook that is meant to provide a more practical explanation of each of the seven principles.

Another important thematic improvement is greater emphasis on the fact that while business outcomes and impact are most important, that doesn’t mean measuring outputs such as media coverage aren’t important. Another is a greater focus on the fact that most communication is ongoing and iterative, rather than static campaigns. This is reinforced with a great emphasis on constant iteration and driving continuous learning for the future, not just measuring past success (or failure!)

Overall, the changes make the Barcelona Principles more relevant to corporate communications and not so biased towards marketing and campaign related communications as the original iteration.

There are two changes that I’m still considering and canvassing for opinions from clients and colleagues. The first is that principles now use the term “stakeholder audiences". The quick explanation is it is because "academics prefer to use the term 'stakeholders...” while “most in-house and PR teams tend to refer to 'audiences”. The problem I have is that the words aren’t interchangeable. Stakeholders are different to audiences.

The second is related and important to those of us who use the Barcelona Principles for corporate affairs and working for not-for-profit organisations. Principle two used to read “Outcomes and impact should be identified for stakeholders, society and the organisation.” It now reads “Defining and understanding all stakeholder audiences are essential steps to plan, build relationships and creating lasting impact.”

My personal concern is that dropping the word society is a retrograde step. It was only introduced in the 2020 update and was a vast improvement as it meant the principles finally recognised that public relations and communications are about a company and an organisation’s licence to operate. This means it’s not enough to focus just on organisational performance, which is what the 2015 principle said.

The 2020 update to include society made it far easier to persuade corporate affairs leaders and not-for-profit organisations to embrace the Barcelona Principles. Removing them and just talking about “stakeholder audiences” appears to both confuse and narrow the principle. The ebook doesn’t provide an explanation of why the word society has been removed.

How Can Comms Influence GenAI?

How can communications influence generative AI was a recurring theme throughout the two days of the summit. It was the subject of two main stage keynotes and also featured on the second stage.

Hard Numbers’ MD Darryl Sparey shared insights from its Reputation in the Age of AI report which showed how earned media dominated AI answers about the world’s top 100 brands.

This was followed on the final day by Golin’s Jonny Bentwood who gave an informative and energetic keynote on why we need to rethink SEO and prioritise visibility in GenAI tools. He emphasised that this could be a golden renaissance moment for the PR industry as earned media is the biggest contributor to influencing GenAI answers.

Bentwood’s presentation contained the staggering figure that 90% of GenAI visibility come from earned comms-driven content. And it’s not necessarily the media titles you’d first think of. This means you need to do the analysis and understand the titles and sources cited in AI answers. This means the tier 1 list for AI won’t be the same as your existing tier 1 list.

Despite all the talk it’s still the Wild West. Such was the calibre of speakers that none claimed to have the magic bullet for manipulating AI answers. A quick search (or question to AI!) will uncover a plethora of articles and research on the topic. The reality is it isn’t a science and that everyone is learning how to do it.

In my AI workshops I use an AI generated video of a snake oil salesman to highlight the fact that if anyone is telling you’ve they’ve got the definitive answers for how to do it then they are being economical with the truth.

How Do We Measure When It’s Not Earned Media?

The AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework is fantastic, but it doesn’t suit all purposes. Because of this we strip it back to its basics of the Kellogg Foundation Model and program logic. PR Academy’s Dr Kevin Ruck explained how he has adapted the framework for internal communications. This means doing away with the PESO model for activities (as internal comms is mainly owned and rarely includes paid or earned). He replaces it with Channels, Topics and Listening.

The Pitfalls Of Using AI

One of the most refreshing and revealing presentations was by Commetric’s Maya Koleva. She told a candid story about using AI to help answer research questions from clients. What made it stand out from the usual case studies is her honesty about what went wrong with their approach and how they quickly learned from their mistakes and fixed it. The key point was AI doesn’t work without quality data and expert, trained users.

Off The Main Stage

The second stage also featured some fantastic speakers and panels. Amongst the highlights were Iskren Lilov, head of marketing and comms at Ruepoint, talking about the need to innovate PR practice for tomorrow. Instead of the old stop/start campaign approach which was like installing software and waiting until the next big release we need to update the ‘CommsOS’ to create a perpetual update cycle with constant improvement and innovation. This is only possible with AI and the right expertise.

Smoking Gun strategy director, Hayley Peters, told a captivating tale about the power of creative storytelling was used to turn a potential crisis into a fan appeasing masterclass of audience-first integrated communications. The 18-month saga started with the announcement of the closure of the iconic Nemesis rollercoaster at Alton Towers and culminated in national coverage that sky-rocketed bookings.

Disinformation is one of the biggest threats facing communicators. Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy explored its ABCs – Actors, Behaviours and Content – and how to use them to create actionable strategies to detect and mitigate emerging threats before they escalate.

Resetting Our Approach To Public Communication To Change The World

A summary of an AMEC summit wouldn’t be complete without a roundup of the keynote by Distinguished Professor Jim Macnamara. This year he spoke about why communications – both listening and transmitting – needs to be embedded in public policy. He emphasised the need for moving beyond megaphone broadcast communication to focus far more on using communication to understand the issues and concerns of stakeholders.

You can download the Barcelona Principles 4.0 ebook from the AMEC website.

Stuart Bruce, PR Futurist and Joint MD of AI and communications transformation consultancy Purposeful Relations.