Recently, I came across Olivia Webb Kosloff’s great communications wisdom regarding founder-led PR. Her perspective is steeped in experience working in healthcare with great startups and founders over decades.
I agree with much offered and similarly hold promise that the rise of AI search will be a game-changer in reasserting the value of media relations. Having lived through the ebb and flow of the role of media relations in communications, I can’t help but chuckle when considering how AI search is wresting back credibility to traditional media.
Still, there’s one key point from Olivia’s piece that I can’t help but question, and it’s really the raison d’etre for the piece, which is her support of the value of a movement gaining steam coined ‘go direct.’ Go Direct boils down to founders as not only the voice of their story, but the architect of it, and the connector to it. To be clear, Founders as the pitchers/sellers of their story to the media and presumably both the front-end (think targeting and prep) and back-end (think follow-up) with the press. While right-minded and reporter friendly (for the most part – but on and off the record is a HUGE risk for all parties), I believe it to be fanciful, and its downfall lives in opportunity cost.
Go Direct is industry agnostic, but given Olivia’s piece with respect to healthcare founders, I’ll conveniently use that industry as example. Healthcare, likely above all industry, is familiar with the charge to ‘practice to the top of your license.’ While not always successfully done, it’s inarguably one of the keys to ushering in a better healthcare system for patients, providers and others across the health delivery landscape. At its simplest, it suggests we’d all be better off if we could focus on the higher or highest order roles and responsibilities, we each encounter in our roles as part of the system – the responsibilities we can uniquely deliver best.
Founder/CEO media relations is not in the orbit of practicing to the top of your license – no matter how much a Founder may value the function or their investors may be in their ear about being seen. Founders, particularly Founder CEOs, have a responsibility to run and grow their companies. Within that, there are partner relations, employee relations, customer relations, investor relations, and all the strategy and operations that support those key stakeholders. Granted they have teams that support those functions and key audiences, but that in itself is the point: they have teams that support those key functions. How these functions are prioritized is for each company to determine based on a multitude of factors. But it’s clear to me, ‘go direct’ can – at most – only be a part-time job for Founders, and should be more aptly recast as ‘more direct.’
Still, there is inarguably some value in Founders connecting with highly select media in a direct way. At Sloane, we will often encourage Founders to engage direct with media if they have read something of interest from the journalists’ pen or have an idea. We will also get out of the way should a relationship bloom that does not benefit from our stewardship (you did not hear that internal PR :)) as there is real benefit in that connection.
What good can come from ‘go direct?’ Plenty. Three things come to mind..
- Founders are distinct assets and as such will see some success here. More success than a strong internal function and/or good agency, I don’t know. But success for sure.
- The two-way street. I am reminded every day that reporters are DEEP in knowledge. Founders who successfully build relationships, should they choose to appreciate them as a two-way street, will come by very good industry intelligence that will make them better. PR folks will lag here.
- Finally, Founders will find they may engage many times before they see their view white-labeled in a piece or Company coverage. The good news here is they’ll live and learn that media relations success is not easy. This is the simpatico benefit!
Still, the trade-offs of being a full-time pitch-person are too significant. CEO/Founders have more to do today, than ever before.
Granted, there is inherent bias in my view given a day job as CEO of a comms agency that on margin would be negatively impacted by ‘go direct’ gaining traction. Still, I am also a Founder and have recently been asked to be out there more raising awareness of my agency. As such, I see ‘go direct’ from many vantage points (and as a media relations professional, going direct is indeed very comfortable for me.) However, when I do it, it often pulls me away from higher order activity. I am not practicing at the top of my license – and every CEO must do so.
There is undoubtedly a place for ‘more direct’, but we’re not there yet on ‘go direct.’ Until AI changes everything about Founder roles and responsibility, let’s have this critical storyteller focus on building the story through company success and full-throated voicing of that story, as a key element of a communications program that counts many other contributors.