Gini Dietrich Transcript

Susan: Gini Dietrich is the founder of Spin Sucks, an online community for PR people working for a better industry.

She is also the founder of Chicago based Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing and communications firm.She’s the author of books, including “Spin Sucks” and “Marketing in the round.” She’s also a very popular speaker, and she joins me today. Thank you Gini.

Gini: Thank you, Susan. I’m very happy to be here.

Susan: I absolutely love the name “Spin Sucks” because it says exactly what so many people feel, and increasingly, people associate that with PR in general.

Gini: You’re right, they do, and I think it’s two-fold. I think that business executives who didn’t come up through the marketing ranks to get to the top seat don’t really understand PR. They think of it as magic. They know they need it, but they don’t understand why or how it works, and the other piece of it is the measurement.

You know, for so long we measured, and I put “measured” in quotes, by media impressions and advertising equivalencies, and the industry as a whole has done a terrible job of saying, “This is how we affect sales.” And some of it is hard to do, because it’s more of the softer stuff, you know, the awareness and reputation management things, but today, with the web and analytics and access to data, we have the opportunity to really dig into some of that stuff, and I don’t think as an industry as a whole, we’re not doing that.

Susan: That’s really true. Creating objectives that are actually measurable, I mean, you have your goals and objectives that are clearly measurable against things that you can really look at and say, “Okay, did we drive this many people to a website?” Finding those things is hard, and it’s very hard to even get, because it’s a profession, well, I think that’s the way it is in so many professions, there’s this digital divide, those who came up before and those who are willing to embrace it. It’s very hard to make that transition for a lot of people.

Gini: You know what’s funny, because I was in a meeting with a client, and he said, “The problem is that I’m a digital immigrant, so I’m having to translate my experience into the digital web,” and sometimes that’s really hard. And when you think about it from that perspective, as if you were an immigrant coming into a new country…excuse me…wrong tube…

Susan: Wish I could hand you some water. But you’re right about the digital immigrant perspective, and that’s a fascinating phrase. I was doing a podcast with somebody, and he was talking about digital natives, and he said, “Yes, the rest of us are just tourists here.”

Gini: Right.

Susan: So, you know, we’ve been in the digital space for a long time, but it does take, if you were not raised with it, you have to immerse yourself in it the way you would have to immerse yourself in another culture.

Gini: You’re exactly right, and that’s a great way of looking at it. You do have to immerse yourself. And people look at it from the perspective of, “I don’t have time” or “I don’t see the value,” and really, until you do it, you’re not going to see the value.

So you fight this uphill battle of, okay, you’re not going to see the value and you’re certainly not going to make the time if you don’t see the value, but you’re not going to see it unless you do it, and so you fight that, “I need you to make some time to test it out and do it,” you know?

Susan: Yeah.

Gini: So you’re fighting this battle all the time. We fight it with clients quite a bit.

Susan: Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit like saying, “I’m going to fight that the world is round.” I mean, the world has moved on. It’s your choice whether you want to live in the now, or whether you’d like to live in a past that doesn’t exist anymore.

Gini: Right. You know, the other thing about it is I think, you know, right now, of course, we’re straddling through a different generation.

Susan: Yeah.

Gini: And so many, and I’m going to make a gross generalization, because it’s certainly not the case for everybody, but so many of the business leaders are baby boomers.

Susan: Yeah.

Gini: They say, “Okay, I understand that this is the way it’s going, but the people who make the purchase decisions right now are my peers. They’re my age. They’re not using the Twitter or the Facebook. They’re not on the internet,” which is baloney, but…

Susan: Yeah, that is, yeah.

Gini: They think about it from that perspective, and what they fail to understand is that the millennials and the Gen-Y, that’s how they make their decisions is all online, and whether or not they’re the decision-makers today, they’re influencing the decisions.

And they’re the ones doing the research, they’re the ones looking for the companies. They’re the ones that are doing all that.

Susan: They’re the emerging leaders, and not only that, what we see and what we are even involved in is they create alternate realities, so if you are not embracing your next and the current generation of customer that you’re just ignoring, then they will literally just create something new and better that speaks to them.

Gini: Right.

Susan: And your company will become the dinosaur. You will go under. It is as simple as that.

Gini: It is as simple as that. I totally agree.

Susan: But it is a fascinating time, and also a fascinating, we are at such a critical time, we have all of these issues and we can discuss them more now, so they’re more in the open, but we’re also at tipping points on the environment, on wealth and equality.

We have these issues that really threaten to dismantle everything that are in place right now, and I’m seeing a lot of head in sand, and PR being used to support head in sand.

Gini: Yes, yes, and yes. Part of it, I think, is, and this is more on the agency side, you know, you have these big global conglomerates that it’s hard for them to change, because they’re so big, and it’s like, you know, having the Titanic move in a different direction.

Susan: Yeah, slow boat.

Gini: Yeah, so they’re the ones that are still leading the charge. Now, there are some agencies that, you know, have added on digital capabilities, but what I see over and over and over again is the agencies that have done that, those departments don’t talk to the, what I’ll call “traditional” PR departments.

So you still have it siloed, you still have it completely separate, it’s its own profit center, they’re not sharing best practices, they’re not sharing profits, they’re not sharing revenues, they may be sharing clients, but they’re not sharing budgets very well.

Susan: Yeah.

Gini: They’re certainly not talking one another, and I think that’s part of the issue, and until you have more organizations like Johnson & Johnson and Proctor & Gamble that are really sophisticated and ahead of the curve and demanding that their agencies behave differently, it’s not going to change. It won’t change.

Susan: Well, and the baseline we start with is that every organization is being re-imagined from the outside, whether it wants to be or not.

Gini: Right. You’re absolutely right. It’s not up to the PR people to message and tell people what they should think, it’s up to the people now, who say, “Wait a sec, you may say that your company does this, but actually my experience is this, and I’m going to go tell all my friends about it.”

Susan: Exactly, and you may say that you do this, and you’re into social responsibility, but in fact, you’re putting $1 million in for the billions that you’re spending to actually create the problem that you’re putting the $1 million against.

Gini: Right.

Susan: And you know, there’s this concept that the PR department can and should be the contents of an organizations, and we really like that. We just think that it’s been given a lot of lip service over the years.

Gini: It has been given a lot of lip service, and you know, I think it does boil down to that whole, you know, “People don’t really understand what PR does.” I mean, it’s been glamorized in Hollywood. You know, Wag the Dog came out probably 20 or 25 years ago, and I remember people saying, “Well, wait a sec. You go and you create a way so that people don’t ask about the President’s affair?” And you’re like, “No, of course that’s not what I do.”

But it has come down to that, and I think the other thing that’s happening is there are some people who have an enormous amount of time and like to find reasons to prove people on the internet wrong. They’ll go to organizations to your point and say, “Well wait a second, you may be putting $1 million into this, but I’ve done all my research, and I’ve found that you’ve spent billions of dollars to create this, and you’re part of the problem.” People will do that research, and it’s astounding, but they will do it, and they will find it, and there’s no amount of PR that can get you out of that.

Susan: There isn’t, and there shouldn’t be. You know, I’m actually grateful that we’re moving towards a time where everybody can be held to account, because I think we’re out of time.

Gini: We are out of time, and you’re right, there’s so many things happening. I mean, with the environment, women’s issues, all of these things.

Another thing that’s happening is kids are growing up in a completely different realm than we did. It used to be that we had mean girls in high school and we were going through the whole self-esteem issues and hormones and all of those things that teenage girls go through. Now, they have that, and they have the mean people who get behind computer screens and tweet or email horrible things. I mean, it’s horrible.

What you’re finding is that administrators are saying, “In my 20 or 30 years of experience, I’ve never seen kids have to deal with something like this.” So, we’re dealing with all of this new stuff, and nobody really knows what to do about it.

Susan: Our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Gini: I think you’re right. That’s a great, great quote. In fact, when you tweet this, use that quote.

Susan: You know, we have the capability, but we don’t have the nuance to really understand how you resolve this safely. Even now, they’re having symposiums on killer robots.

We’ve created technology that we know will exceed us, in terms of capability, and we’re now having to sit back and think, “Okay, we’ve unleashed this on the world, but there’s a very good chance that it’s going to turn around and realize that we’re part of the problem, since we’re threatening the atmosphere, so how do we protect ourselves from our own creations?”

Gini: You know, I think it goes to the conversation at the PR level, which is a very macro level in and of itself, but at that level, it’s the honesty, it’s the transparency, it’s being accountable to our actions, you know.

It’s not saying, Penn State comes to mind, “We’ve discovered that we have this coach who’s abusing our athletes, but we’re just going to pretend that it’s not happening until it comes out.” You can’t do that anymore. You know, it used to be that a crisis would happen in an organization maybe once, twice if it was horrible, you know, some organizations never had a crisis ever, and now, you could have a crisis every day if you’re not doing things the right way.

Susan: I think, too, of McDonald’s, who’s really embraced trying to open up their processes and film them so people can actually get behind the curtain, but they’re still plagued with some of the old thinking.

I think particularly of the older woman who was badly burned by the coffee and how vilified she was, and how she became the punch line. Then with the internet, all of a sudden, you could actually see the pictures, and they became widely shared, and the video that went around. The whole story changed, and they never counted on that. They counted on being able to dismiss on old woman as being money-grubbing, and did that.

Gini: And did, you’re right, did.

Susan: But, we live in a time, where the truth will out. You and I are both fans of Jay Baer, friends with Jay Baer. I love his concept on that, the truth will out, always.

Gini: Always, it always will, and always has, it’s just going to come out more quickly now.

Susan: Very quickly, at the speed of a few types on the keyboard. You mentioned something about women, and cyber bullying being such an issue, but I’m also fascinated by PR and journalism, as well. I mean there’s the Joel [inaudible 00:13:22] case, but just generally, we’re in professions, well particularly PR, dominated, well at least, most of the practitioners, and I don’t know what the stats are, but that are wildly overrun by women, and most of the leaders are men.

Gini: Correct.