Part 1 of our interview with Alicia Thompson, President of Signature Leadership and experienced PR and Ad leader discusses how brands like Wendy’s are reinventing themselves, crisis management and great women leaders.
Hey, this is Rudy Fernandez from Creative Outhouse. Coming up on this episode of Marketing Upheaval is a great discussion with Alicia Thompson. Alicia has such brilliant insights, and maybe it's because she's worked in PR and advertising. She's been on client and agency sides, and she's worked for big companies, she's worked for small companies. In fact, she had so much fantastic insight, we had to make this two episodes. In this first episode, we talk about how some old brands are reinventing themselves. We talk about the new world for crisis managers, and women leadership in the industry, and what it takes to be a great leader. Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.
This is Rudy Fernandez from Creative Outhouse, and my guest this episode on Marketing Upheaval is Alicia Thompson. She's been in leadership roles at Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, the Coca-Cola company, Edible Arrangements, and also for Edelman, Porter Novelli. If anyone has a complete view of marketing spectrum, it's Alicia. So thank you for being on the podcast.
Alicia: Thanks for having me.
Rudy: So what do you think are the biggest changes going on here in the last five or 10 years from your point of view?
Alicia: There are a couple I think. First of all, I think it's the blurring of discipline lines. Like when I started in this so many years ago, PR was PR, and advertising was advertising, and digital was a blip in somebody's dream world. Then there was the creative side. What we found in the last few years is the lines between all of those disciplines has even blurred more than they had started to maybe 15 years ago. It's just marketing communications now, and there are no specific lanes to swim in. Everybody that works in this area has to be somewhat knowledgeable about all things, and it's interesting.
Rudy: We work with ad agencies who are PR agencies, but I've seen where there are ad agencies doing PR activations, there are PR firms doing videos.
Alicia: They have to to stay competitive.
Rudy: So where does that go? At what point does it become just one marketing agency?
Alicia: It has already started to do that. When I was at Edelman we had a very robust and were investing a lot of money in our creative shop, and hiring talent, and going after creative led business, and then buttoning on PR and other communications functions. We had a digital team, we have full robust digital team, we have social team. That was all completely separate from PR which is where Edelman has its roots.
Alicia: I think agencies and in house teams actually, the lines are becoming more blurred. I think other things that are changing or have changed in the space is innovation because we have to constantly innovate in listening tools and how we measure. Clients want to make sure that their investments have an ROI, and I think technology, the technology and the resources and the tools that this industry can use to prove its value has just grown exponentially.
Full transcript: https://creativeouthouse.com/2019/08/07/part-1-alicia-thompson-on-food-brands-crisis-and-women-leaders/