5 🌶️ Spicy 🌶️ Comms Predictions for 2024
Because there’s no better time to launch these than mid-February
Mid-February: the winter doldrums. Dry January is over, the carcasses of New Year’s Resolutions left abandoned roadside. We’re all settling into the reality that this, and not the sequined bliss of early January, is 2024.
So what better time to share a few 🌶️ spicy 🌶️ comms predictions for the year ahead? (Okay, fine, it’s really the YEARS, plural, ahead because the wheels of change are not always as swift as we wish. But that’s not as exciting!)
1. Comms will get eaten by Corporate Affairs…
Once equivalent to media relations, “Comms” now refers to an ever-expanding Rolodex of functions. Comms teams are tasked with influencing not just customers but also regulators, judicial bodies, privacy groups, candidates, and employees. This, in turn, means Heads of Comms now oversee not just PR but editorial, social, executive communications, internal comms, corporate social responsibility, brand, and policy.
As businesses try to manage this increasingly unwieldy number of stakeholders, I expect that we’ll see more Comms teams rebrand to Corporate Affairs, which better reflects this big tent approach. (It also lacks the historical baggage of “comms,” which for better or worse has been conflated with a ‘90s, Samantha Jones version of PR. (No disrespect, of course, to Ms. Jones, an icon in her own right. She’s just not the person you want convincing the FTC to approve your merger.))
Teams within Corporate Affairs might organize themselves any number of ways, but I think the two clearest demarcations are by audience (employee communications, IR) or by tactic (content marketing, media relations). As always, the right choice will depend on the business outcomes you want to enable.
(My most 🔥 scorchingly 🔥 hot take is that the natural end-state of this expanding remit is for CCOs to eventually come to oversee HR and other internal operational functions as well, a result of the savvy they’re developing while navigating internal cultural issues and employer brand as part of Comms’ ever-expanding remit. In time (some of) today’s CCOs will even become tomorrow’s COO’s.)
2. …and eat Marketing.
Historically Comms teams have reported into Chief Marketing Officers. But as marketing becomes more singularly focused on customer conversion, we’ve started to see a move toward the standalone Chief Communications Officer, whom reports not to the CMO but to the CEO, COO, or President.
The CCO is tasked with reaching audiences beyond customers and with upholding overall company narrative and reputation—a skill that’s becoming increasingly important as companies find themselves dealing with more and more eyeballs on every move. This focus on narrative also bleeds into “Brand,” a function that has typically folded under Marketing but now seems better suited to the team tasked with overall reputational health.
I expect this to result in one of two outcomes for Marketing teams. One option is that they are subsumed into Comms orgs, where their expertise in particular tactics and audiences can supplement that of other Comms functions. Or Marketing will fold into Sales and Revenue teams to focus more narrowly on conversation and less on brand marketing efforts, the latter of which will increasingly become the purview of Comms teams.
3. Communications will need to start thinking about longer-term storytelling, like books and film/TV.
By now it’s a truism to say that communicators need to think beyond traditional media for getting messages out. The field has begun to consider podcasts, newsletters, and social media as legitimate vehicles for narrative development. (Hell, The New York Times is even hiring for a Media Correspondent to cover these formats alongside your classique newspapers and magazines.)
But our public imagination is increasingly shaped not just by the bite-sized content we consume every day but by the longer-form stories we watch on Netflix and MAX, as well as thicc takedown tomes we read (or read summaries of…) in book form. And those formats tend to have longer-lasting consequences on our collective memory than one-off news stories or tweets. Communicators are going to need to get savvier about all of these storytelling mechanisms if they want to tell stories that resonate not only today but into the future. Legacies are shaped in long-form, baby!
4. Spiky opinions will rule the day.
We’re living in a brave new(ish) world where there are more ways to get news into the world than ever before. Instead of going through an intermediary like a journalist, you can put your own news onto your blog or Twitter. This is good in the sense that it’s democratizing; it’s bad in the sense that almost all corporate content sucks. Literally no one needs to read yet another broetry-style LinkedIn post about return to office or whatever.
A ton of content strategists are out there selling services that basically amount to saying the exact same thing everyone else is saying while making sure commas are in the right place. But to actually cut through the noise, leaders need to have something interesting to say. Fuck the commas. You don’t have to be a good writer to be a great storyteller; you have to have a good story.
What is your actual opinion about the world? What is your differentiated opinion? What is the thing you believe about the present or the future that a meaningful portion of the world does not believe? THAT is what you need to be putting into the world.
This isn’t to say leaders should have “hot takes,” at least in the pejorative sense. They should have meaningful opinions, and often those are spiky or even divisive. But they aren’t divisive for the sake of being divisive. (SPICY takes like this newsletter, however, are SOPHISTICATED hot takes. Hot takes with a Ph.D. and a monocle 🧐. And they can stay.)
5. Comms teams will adapt a Business Partner model.
Comms practitioners are constantly dealing with the tension between their central team and that of the teams they support. Some centralization is necessary to uphold quality and make sure the business isn’t saying contradictory things. But too much is both hard to scale and flattens individual voices, preventing communicators and executives from engaging authentically with their audiences.
In response to this tension, I expect we’ll see more businesses start to adopt a business partner model. People/HR teams already use this structure, and we took a similar approach at Palantir, encouraging individual Comms Strategists to go work directly with their stakeholders “at the edge.” The result was more differentiated voices for our leaders and products (see above), as well as a startup-like ability to iterate quickly without bureaucratic roadblocks.
🤏 Micro-prediction
In the biz, as literally no one calls it, lots of folks have been talking about the rise of micro-agencies: very small consultancies, sometimes as small as one or two people, that can move more nimbly, with more focused expertise and lower costs, than larger shops. (I wrote a bit about this last week.) My hypothesis is that many of these agencies will fold once the tech market warms back up and their founders move back in-house, but that the larger trend of micro-agencies is here to stay as an option for folks who want to take a moment to catch their breaths, home in on what they like to do, and enjoy a bit more day-to-day flexibility in between jobs.
More interesting to me is whether some sort of roll-up or umbrella vehicle will emerge to help these agencies with overhead, make it easier to start up/shut down as people move more fluidly between consulting and full-time work, and perhaps find a way to retain some brand equity from these micro-agencies in the process. (The latter is a particularly interesting problem, and perhaps an unsolvable one given that for micro-agencies so much of the brand equity is bound up in the individual. But if there IS a way to solve for it, whoever figures it out is going to be at the forefront of the next evolution of the agency model.)
=sum()
The bottom line is that narrative and storytelling is becoming increasingly critical to companies’ bottom lines. At the same time, the surface of storytelling is expanding rapidly out from its center as new forms of media proliferate and more audiences come under the Comms and Corporate Affairs umbrella.
To accommodate these pressures, Comms teams are going to need to find ways to organize themselves that allow them to operate nimbly and retain (or in some cases extract) the spiky perspectives that are actually interesting and needle-moving.