The Copper State of Mind podcast has won a prestigious Copper Anvil Award, one of the highest honors in the PR industry. 🎉

Abbie and Adrian discuss the significance of such awards before moving on to the main topic of the episode: the evolving role of PR professionals amidst changes in media.

As traditional media platforms continue to evolve, Abbie highlights the increasing importance of cultivating relationships with niche content providers, such as digital creators and influencers, to effectively reach targeted audiences.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on our website.

Key Takeaways

• Winning awards, such as the Copper Anvil, acknowledges the excellence of PR strategies and provides recognition from industry peers.
• Preparing award entries is a beneficial process, helping firms articulate their strategies and evaluate the success of their campaigns.
• The shifting dynamics of the media industry require PR professionals to adapt by leveraging new platforms and building relationships with emerging content creators.
• The traditional concept of media relations is expanding to include engagement with digital and niche content providers to effectively share stories.
• Effective PR involves finding credible voices to engage with content producers, ensuring valuable messaging reaches the right audience.

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Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations firm in Phoenix, AZ.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a strategic communications consultancy for PR agencies and marketing firms, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

If you like this podcast, you might also enjoy PRGN Presents: PR News & Views from the Public Relations Global Network, featuring conversations about strategic communications, marketing, and PR from PRGN, "the world’s local public relations agency.”

Welcome to another episode of Copper State of Mind, the award-winning podcast on media, marketing, and public relations in Arizona. Award-winning. Abbie, congratulations. What’s this all about?

Well, thanks and congratulations to you too as well. So our team submitted to the Phoenix chapter of the Public Relations Society of America’s annual Copper Anvil Awards, which is our industry awards. We submitted the podcast as an innovative marketing tool and we were thrilled when we received the highest honor in that category. So we can now claim to be an award winning. The Copper State of Mind has a Copper Anvil seems rather appropriate. So kind of fun. Kind of fun to be an award winning...

Yeah, I don’t know that we would ever claim that. It seems a little bit much, but awards are important in the PR industry, not just for agencies, but also for clients.

And so we did take a few home for our clients as well. So really there’s a lot of debate around submitting awards, whether it’s public relations awards or any others. And I think the value proposition in doing it is with those that are being judged or evaluated by your peers and, and being recognized then for, in this particular case, for strategy, for thought leadership, for execution.

And it’s being evaluated by those that understand what it takes to put something together. And we certainly do that for our clients in their particular industries as well, or in business leadership opportunities, because these are ways to further amplify, you know, the business’s message and their positioning in the marketplace. And as we know, that becomes and is continuing to be increasingly more difficult to do as our more traditional ways, talking with the media, pitching stories to be written about or talked about, is becoming more difficult in the sense that newsrooms are shrinking, that there are fewer and fewer reporters out there, there fewer and fewer newsrooms and media outlets. And so smart public relations practitioners have to find and take advantage of other opportunities to be able to get their organization’s messaging out there.

Award entries is certainly one of them. Podcasting is certainly one of those ways. And I really think as we look to the year ahead and what’s going to be on the landscape for PR practitioners is an even more and deeper understanding that we have to build out these relationships in a different way, that we can no longer rely on big media to tell our organization stories and we have to be thinking about diversification and different channels that are available to us to tell those important stories.

Yeah. And that is the topic, the focus of our conversation today. I do want to say one more thing about awards before we move on. I was pleased to learn over the recent years that I’ve gotten more directly involved with public relations industry, that award submissions are a structured presentation that really has to lay out the, as you said, the strategy, the tactics, the results. And that this is a kind of professional practice that is not just like the Academy Awards where a bunch of people watch the thing and then decide what they like.

There is a well organized and thoughtful way of presenting and submitting different campaigns, different approaches, and I think that’s really neat. I think it’s a form of professional development even to go through the submission process. So I just wanted to say, as a somewhat outsider looking in the window of your industry, that’s a notable thing. I don’t know that that’s widely understood. I think it’s pretty cool.

And you know, there’s as much value in submitting as there is in not submitting because you often learn in that process. And we spend a lot of time with our clients talking about that is if you’re ready to win, then there are certain things you must have already accomplished. And if we’re not there yet, that really becomes part of our strategic plan for the next quarter or the next year is if this award opportunity is valuable to you, what do we need to do to set you up for the best opportunity to be successful in it? And we use the information we gain from that process for all sorts of things. So the time invested is definitely worth it. But.

There is a strategy to enter and a strategy then for what you do once you submit and if you’re successful in being selected, what you do with it to make that investment worth something and have a little bit more shelf life than just hanging it on the shelf. There’s actually something that you do with that information and it’s interesting that you.

Say that awards themselves are one avenue for sharing stories. The context here we’ve talked a lot about in various episodes of the award winning Copper State of Mind podcast. I’m only going to throw it in a few more times.

I’ll stop soon enough. But your point is really important. The media landscape is changing. We’ve talked about that. Everybody acknowledges that. But now there is a practical challenge for PR professionals, for communicators, whether they’re in house or in agencies looking for avenues to share stories that matter with the people that would care about the story. And that story may be overtly commercial in nature. You know, these shoes are incredible. You should buy them.

Or it may be cause-based, or it may be in the public interest in some other way. It could be a public health campaign, a mental health campaign, any number of things. How do you get these stories out in a world where big media, as you say, is not just shrinking, but what’s left behind is profoundly changed and you’re flagging the importance of relationships here. Now, that’s an old theme in the public relations practitioner world. How do you see that changing?

Well, I don’t think the concept of building relationships is ever going to change. I think it’s inherent in the work that we do. Where I think it’s changing is with who we are developing these relationships. So if we think about over the course of my career or that you have a great story, you, number one, think about your daily newspaper or perhaps your business publication in the marketplace. And that was it.

It was a print story and that was where it went. It might be a broadcast story because it had great visuals. Now, the storyline, first of all, has multiple opportunities because everything is written or spoken about across all the channels, right? We have the digital platforms, video, audio, we have podcasting, we have newsletters. Whatever it is, there’s an opportunity. So the relationships now are not necessarily specifically and only with an editor or a reporter, but with those titles.

We are also now thinking about these content providers that are journalists that practice the craft of communicating messaging. They’re doing it in a platform that might not be top of mind. Five years ago, Reddit, blogs, vlogs, all these other things are now equally, and maybe in some cases more so, the way for us to get our information across. Before you and I went on the air, we were talking about a couple of the newsletters that we subscribe to that are very industry specific and where those would come into my inbox as nice to haves.

Now, they are almost mandatory reading because I can’t find information specific to my industry or to a client industry in quote, unquote, mainstream media, the same way that I used to. And so those newsletters, those content producers are becoming the important influencers, the important journalists that we now need to engage with. But it doesn’t just stop with the one publication or the publication date when it appears is we need to also be thinking about what do we do with it on our own channels, how are we amplifying those messages to then directly reach our targets, those consumers that we’re trying to reach, businesses, consumers, whatever that is with this information that’s being provided by a third party credible resource.

So the question about relationships, we haven’t changed the fact that we need to develop them. What I think has changed is really with who we are developing those relationships and where do we focus our energy to then have the most and best opportunity for that story to be told? And it is as much a practice that we as PR professionals need to understand, but it’s also an educational opportunity that we need to express to our clients and organizations because they will, you know, without this deeper understanding that the we want to be front page of your local daily paper was sort of the rallying cry, and you do, you still may want to be there and that may still be the place to be. But let’s really consider who is reading the front page of your local daily paper and is that the audience you’re trying to reach?

And would our energy be better spent truly talking to who is talking to who we want to reach as opposed to the headline in the daily newspaper? Again, we need to evaluate audience and other things. So it’s an education opportunity for our teams for sure. And it’s an opportunity for us to advise and counsel the organizations that we represent about really where messaging lands and how it has its most impact.

I think there’s such a fascinating convergence happening right now of many different factors that are profoundly changing the communications landscape. Not in a superficial way. Some of these have been at play for a long time. I mean, certainly social media, which anymore seems almost an empty term because we’re talking about everything that anybody ever consumes. Pretty much when we use the phrase social media, you know, people are not watching CNN on CNN, they’re watching their Anderson Cooper clips on TikTok.

So is that social media or is that media? In any case, it’s. That’s an irrelevant kind of hair splitting debate. The platforms and channels that people consume, information, entertainment, education on are profoundly different. Audiences are fragmented. You don’t have the dynamics of mass media that you once had. You still have that in pockets. Radio is not dead. There are still people buying airtime on AM stations and seeing positive results for their businesses.

FM radio, although so much has become syndicated over the past 20 years, still has in some places a bit of a local dynamic, at least for certain hours of the day, not all day long. Podcasts, of course, are increasing in their consumption in every market on earth. Many journalists have left traditional media outlets and launched their own independent platforms. And that’s the journalist creator economy, which is still very much at play. I mean, some people are finding success with that. I think a lot of people are struggling with that because building your own audience and then trying to get them to pay you to do the work, you know, you’re entering into the subscription model. And now we’ve got subscriptions for everything. And I’m already paying for Netflix and Paramount plus and you know, HBO and you know, it goes on and on and on Sirius XM if you have that for your car.

And now I’m going to pay 16 other creators or I’m going to get a Premium Patreon or YouTube Premium subscription. So I get your bonus content. And now if I look at it, I cut my cable in 2003. I literally have not had cable TV since 2003, but I’m paying double or triple what I used to pay to get all the stuff that I want. So do I have more flexibility and more choice? Yes. Is it more expensive? Yes.

Now back to the point. How do you as a PR professional engage with that variegated, motley set of outlets? How do you find them? There are niche industry publications, there are individual creators. If you wanted to get a message in front of B2B SaaS folks, there’s a handful of people on LinkedIn, you would want them to be saying something about your brand in their feed. That’s a very different kind of relationship than the business reporter or the commercial real estate reporter at the Business Journal. It’s very different now.

It is. But I want to go back to what you said though, in that you are, you have all of these subscriptions, you potentially are paying more for your content than you were before, but the value in that content for you is worth what you’re paying because you could easily say tomorrow I’m going to cancel this subscription because there’s no longer value in it. Right. So the, the distinction for me right now in all of that, and I would say the same thing, I cut cable so that I could have more control over what I was getting. And I’m getting everything I want and it’s costing me more, but it’s what I want. Like I was able to curate information from places that I wanted to get information from.

So, the receiver of that information on the one hand is looking for what is coming across the airwaves in those newsletters, in those podcasts, whatever it might be. I’m very intentional about wanting to listen to something specific about and I go and I find that and I’m happy to pay if it requires me to do so to get the full value of the, of the information. So flip that around. So how do we get that information into those individuals hands? Well, let’s, it goes back to the relationship. But those content producers and let’s just for the purposes of the conversation here, talk about those things that are imparting news information or not entertainment, so to speak, but information, whether it’s about meditation or about diet or about breaking news, it’s information.

The, the individuals that are creating that content are also eager to have valuable resources, credible, knowledgeable individuals to help them bring across the information that they want to share. We’ve done that here on this podcast where we have brought in others to talk with us about a topic that they have more information about than we do. We could certainly do it, we could do our own research, we could find it all out. But we there’s somebody out there that was smarter about a topic and wouldn’t it make more sense for us to engage them in this information?

So we sought them out. We wanted to do a story about a particular topic and we found someone that we felt was worthy of joining us and had information to share. PR people are the conduit for that. Right? We put smart people together with people that want to talk to smart people and we make that happen. What we need to be doing now is no different than what we were doing before, which is finding the best places for those stories to be told and to develop a relationship in such a way that our information is seen as knowledgeable, credible, intentional, and that that content producer says, I want to speak with X Company and their spokesperson because what they bring to the table is valuable.

That interview happens, the content gets produced, it’s out into the world. Now what do we do to make sure that we get that content amplified? So that’s in part on the producer side of things, right? We have to promote the podcast, we have to share so people will listen to it. But going back to our guests that have joined us, we highly encourage them to do the same thing. Here are the assets you need to share about your episode.

Here’s the transcript, here’s some social media posts, here’s some static imagery that you can share. The best podcast episodes are the ones that someone else amplifies besides us. And so all of this is exactly the same what as we’ve been doing as PR practitioners forever. We just have more and different and more specific places that we need to develop those relationships. And quite honestly, I think it’s fun to be challenged again in this space to be finding where those opportunities are.

I think we are seeing the results of that hard earned relationship research and efforts to find the right places. And as we continue to have discussions with the clients that we represent and helping them understand that those niche media outlets are valuable and in maybe some cases more valuable than where we have traditionally thought to put our information. Now I think it’s important to say that doesn’t mean those other publications and media outlets aren’t important.

They are and they will continue to be and we need to continue to support them. And that’s a whole other topic about remembering to subscribe to your local newspapers and to watch your local news channels and listen to your public radio stations, because those are important in our community, and we’ve talked about those before. We just have more opportunities now in very specialized ways to further share our messaging and we should not forget the traditional ways of doing things while we are adding in these new and specialized opportunities that are important to our clients, important to the organizations that we represent, and that it creates this more well rounded messaging model that I think we all need to do and what we’re all looking for into the coming months as something to introduce and fully embrace into the new year.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It’s easy to do, just click the "Share" button in the app you’re listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.FM, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona. For all of us here at Speed of Story and PHX.FM, I’m Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you’ll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.