In today’s media landscape, public relations and communications agencies must do more than send a press release or write a social media post. With rapidly evolving technology and modes of communication, a successful agency must become a jack-of-all-trades—providing an array of services across several sectors and specializations.Newsweek, in partnership with data intelligence platform Statista, recently ranked 150 of America’s Best Public Relations Agencies. The final ranking included companies with a rating of four, four-and-a-half or five stars based on several factors. Agencies were evaluated based on a survey of PR agency employees and owners, as well as people who work in the PR, communications or marketing department of a U.S.-based company.One of the top-rated companies on the list is Weber Shandwick, a marketing communications firm and part of the global Interpublic Group (IPG) that formed in 2001 after the merger of three PR companies—the Weber Group, Shandwick International and Bozell Sawyer Miller Group (BSMG).Susan Howe is the president of The Weber Shandwick Collective (TWSC), a strategic communications and consulting network that is comprised of specialist creative, marketing, communications and consulting firms, including Weber Shandwick.She told Newsweek that the communications industry is a “much broader field” than in the past. She said the agency’s role is to counsel clients, impact culture and add value to society.”Our strongly held position is that businesses must contribute value to earn value—if you want people to care, you have to contribute value to their lives,” she said in an email to Newsweek.Howe describes TWSC, which she refers to as simply The Collective, as a deliberate and strategic plan to bring together specialists the company needed to help anticipate client needs.”The Collective gives us an incredible asset base and the ability to pull in the right kind of thinkers, analysts, producers, creators that we need based on our client’s situation, the opportunity or challenge,” she said in an interview with Newsweek. “For our clients, it gives them much broader access to earn-first specialists across a broad range.”Weber offers a diverse range of services in various sectors—including strategy and analytics, creative, design and content, and marketing and crisis management. The company operates across a dozen sectors. According to Newsweek’s ranking, Weber earned a five-star score in nine sectors and specializations, including AI, technology & telecommunications, consumer goods, retail & fashion, media, entertainment & sports and culture, lifestyle, leisure & tourism.Howe said The Collective’s “superpower” is its ability to bring an “unparalleled” diversity of expertise and offerings to clients.”We are proud to have a unique balance of strength on multiple fronts—from corporate affairs to health to creative and brand marketing,” she said. “I can’t think of a problem that we haven’t been able to reach into the agency and find the expertise to solve.”One recent campaign Howe is particularly proud of is their work on debuting the first-ever edible mascot at the Pop-Tarts Bowl last December.The campaign included a mascot of a strawberry Pop-Tart, one of the products from client Kellanova. The mascot, named Strawberry, was around the football field during the match between Kansas State University and North Carolina State University. At the end of the game, the mascot joyously descended into a giant toaster. Moments later, Strawberry emerged in his edible form to be eaten by the winning team.The mascot went viral on X, formerly known as Twitter, and other social media platforms as users made several posts with images and videos of the Pop-Tart, who held a sign that read “DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE” as he was lowered into the toaster.Howe describe the campaign as “an incredible cultural moment.””We wanted to make this a conversation starter, a meme, that would go beyond those tuning in to the Pop-Tart Bowl and [we] had an incredible partnership with a very brave client to say, ‘Yes, let’s do it,'” Howe said.Internally, Weber Shandwick’s core values of curiosity, inclusion, courage and making an impact, as listed on their website, empower staff to deliver their best quality work for clients.Chief Innovation Officer Chris Perry said Weber is “a very entrepreneurial place” that rewards people who are “looking around corners and thinking about solutions in a different way.””Beyond the smarts and the creativity and all the things that are a part of this company, the culture is the difference maker,” he said.Howe described the company culture as one that exudes ingenuity, innovation, passion and empathy.”We are thousands of people from every region around the world, all working together to make an impact for a wide variety of clients across a wide variety of challenges and opportunities, and that requires a lot of curiosity and connectivity,” she said. “We strive to create an environment where our people can be at their best—and we continue to evolve.”Howe said Weber seeks to employ people with diverse perspectives and skill sets who are in tune with the broader political and cultural landscape and can translate those movements into creative and impactful work for clients. Delivering on a client’s goals is the ultimate measure of success, she said.”The role of an agency like ours is to be really tapped into these megatrends, being able to help our clients navigate the change,” Howe said. “And also finding the intersections between what’s happening in culture, what’s important to the brand and finding ways to contribute value for the ultimate consumers and buyers of our clients.”This includes helping clients solve their various business challenges through C-suite consulting and using analytics and intelligence teams to help show company value and impact with clients.As a PR and communications agency, Weber Shandwick experiences many of the same challenges as their clients. For Howe, this includes the volatility of geopolitics, the early integration of generative artificial intelligence and the threat of misinformation. Howe notes, however, that Weber has been intentionally built to navigate this new and evolving global landscape with an agility that she said allows the company to “stay ahead of shifting tides.””We are taking these challenges head on, fundamentally changing the way our teams work, solving for clients and developing best-in-class, industry-leading tools to deliver insights,” she said. “We’ve embedded our AI capabilities, data and technology into the core of our work. We’re addressing the changing media landscape to best deliver value to our clients.”According to the survey Statista conducted for Newsweek’s ranking, both owners and employees of PR agencies as well as other PR experts said social media risk is one of the top challenges the public relations industry faces. That includes negative comments online and viral misinformation.In recent years, Weber has taken those obstacles and turned them into opportunities to pioneer new avenues of consulting for clients struggling to confront the changing media landscape. Generative AI has emerged as a useful tool for businesses but also poses a risk when bad actors use the technology to negatively impact the marketplace. At Weber, the company has focused on creating a specialized team to help clients navigate this space.Chief Innovation Officer Perry also serves as the chairman of Weber Shandwick Futures. He said his job over the past 25 years is “helping very busy executives see problems that don’t exist yet or opportunities they can’t see.” This includes the threat of misinformation and disinformation that has grown since 2016.About 18 months ago, Weber launched Futures—a lab within The Weber Shandwick Collective that helps clients, including health care providers, professional services firms, global consumer brands and nonprofit organizations understand the impact and opportunity of generative AI, according to Perry.”When consulting clients, we have to think about both application and implication of AI becoming more pervasive in the communication mix,” he said. “Many clients know ChatGPT is an important development, but they don’t necessarily know what it means to their work or operations.”Weber Shandwick Futures helps clients by hosting workshops to consult with teams, run daylong exercises, create campaigns and run simulated programs and scenario planning to use an array of generative AI tools to build new applications.Perry said he’s shocked that more companies are not better prepared to deal with the onslaught of conflict-based communications.”They’re still using social-listening tools that were born in 2005 to 2010,” he said. “They look at things like reach and sentiment in their measurements, and reach and sentiment have very little to do with intention to inflict harm or intention to gain media for a particular end game.”Dealing with AI or ChatGPT, Perry said, is about proper change management and helping people apply tools that are relevant to their business. The key to being a good change manager is to invest in it, he added. Adapting to change is not something that one can learn in the day-to-day work a company does. Companies, therefore, must create an environment where people have the capacity to test and understand the implications of the applications they use.And Weber is no exception to this. When Perry joined the company two decades ago, he said Weber was a “classic PR firm.” He has since seen the agency evolve into a hybrid digital communications PR firm and add more marketing capabilities to become a full-service integrated communications agency.Adding consulting capabilities to the firm not only helped clients with the technological complexities, but the social complexities as well, and added a whole different dimension to the firm, Perry said.”We have seen the energy around this become very positive,” he said. “We are creating new revenue streams for the business, we’re creating new opportunities to serve different clients and different parts of the organization, and we are seeing the momentum behind it.”In the past decade, Perry said Weber has started to blur the lines between innovation and invention. In a world of agents who will lead, he said, those who really understand what clients are seeking in terms of knowledge or information and are able to package that in a straightforward and seamless way will succeed. But that requires both technical and communication skills.His goal, therefore, is to promote more education and exposure for new software so that more companies are in a position to make adjustments and be informed consumers of media. Many traditional public relations tools and methods will also need to adapt. Perry said the industry has been lamenting the death of the press release for 20 years “and somehow they just won’t die.” But the proliferation of AI technology might be the final nail in the coffin.”They will die when we have to communicate to not only reach people, but to have our work machine-readable by learning models,” he said. “You’ll see the complete reinvention of how companies and organizations and brands convey their stories, and it’s not going to look like a faux-story packaged in a press release.”As technology continues to change, The Weber Shandwick Collective President Susan Howe said the agency will evolve as well.”Our intent has always been to be curious about what’s next,” she said. “And I think that makes a big difference in our ability to navigate with our clients all the challenges that they are experiencing.”Amid “incredibly widespread” changes in the communications industry, Howe said the company has remained at the forefront of those developments by predicting where the industry will go and having solutions at the ready for clients.”We have stayed the same and stayed true to our mission of being change agents,” she said. “We believe that you have to keep looking out ahead to see what will come next, and our clients are really seeking for us to solve more connected and complicated issues than ever before.”
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