Global Comms Insights | Canada

For the past 25+ years, we’ve been a member of Worldcom, the world’s largest network of independent PR firms. A great part of this organization is building deep connections with colleagues at our in-person meetings. These meetings rotate annually through different locations in the EU, Asia Pacific and the Americas. The last two years we were in Brussels and Hong Kong. Toronto was our destination this past week, and the meeting content and the city were both spectacular.

Three observations from the meeting:

1. AI is taking market research to a whole new level. Organizations are spending $70 billion a year on market research to tell them what people are doing today, but what they really want to know is what people will be doing tomorrow. Put an extra $20k U.S. in your budget and use a service like Advanced Symbolics, which provides descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Their system, called Polly, evaluates what people are saying online, giving you natural engagement and real opinions that provide answers free of bias.
2. Those of us in food and agriculture communications shouldn’t expect a slowdown in consumer interest anytime soon. When Abacus Data surveyed millennials, their top response to “Which of the following are you interested in?” was “Food & Drink.” Millennials are keenly interested in how what they eat was raised and brought to the table, so we can expect to be addressing sustainability and animal welfare issues well into the future. Not unexpected, but 37 percent of millennials are first going to read a news article about your product or service on Facebook versus hearing about it on TV (10 percent), radio (7 percent) or seeing it on a news website (14 percent).
3. The NHL Hockey Hall of Fame is awesome. We visited great restaurants and had opportunities to talk business and family with our Worldcom Partners every evening, but for sheer entertainment it would be hard to top the experiences at the Hockey Hall of Fame. The trophies, exhibits and sweaters (I called them jerseys until corrected) were a great overview of the history of the NHL, but the skills competition was the best. It was very entertaining to watch non-hockey players try to slip wrist shots past video goalies (I was shut out) or don pads and try to stop goals (foam covered pucks, fortunately) from some of the NHL’s top scorers.

Overall, our meetings are a great mix of business development and networking with our peers, sharing information to keep our agencies in front of the curve, experiencing different cultures and developing friendships. I’m looking forward to our next get-together in Lima, Peru.