The Mavericks of MarComm

A Quashspeak Series

 

8 Questions for
Adele Gambardella-Cehrs
President and Founder, Epic PR Group

 

As President of Epic, Adele oversees the development of numerous award-winning local and national PR campaigns. Epic’s clients include Fortune 500 companies, regional businesses, non-profits, associations and high-profile individuals. She is the author of the upcoming book SPIKE Your Brand ROI: How To Maximize Reputation and Get Results (Wiley).

WHAT DROVE YOU TO THIS BUSINESS?

I started as a journalist working at George magazine and Gannett. I was interviewing a person over the phone and they happened to be in public relations, an industry I knew little about. But they said that they were impressed with my interviewing skills. It was a Madison Avenue-based firm and soon after, they then recruited me, with an offer that was triple my current salary. Now, this was during the time of the dot-com boom. My first project involved landing the 1.800.Flowers account.

WHAT EXCITES YOU ABOUT THE P.R. BUSINESS?

I like the messaging. I like being involved in helping to shape the way someone talks about their organization. I also like dealing with crisis communication. The world is rapidly changing and it’s exciting to develop communications that reflect that.

WHAT TRENDS DO YOU SEE?

Real-time response in marketing and public relations. Organizations will have to be more nimble as predictive scanning becomes the norm. There is now a resurgence of learning how to understand when your brand is most relevant.

WHO’S DOING IT RIGHT?

It changes. It’s interesting that one day, Apple, for example, is this creative, innovative player and the next day their phones are bending and their reaction to this causes their brand to take a hit. I was struck by the reaction of the National Nurses United to the recent Ebola crisis. They jumped right in at the core of the issue – offered conference calls for nurses and resources on their website. More organizations need to be focused and optimistic. During the Ray Rice scandal, one of the pizza chains capitalized on this, using the hashtag #whyIstayed. They were opportunistic and this makes the whole profession look bad.

WHAT P.R. MISTAKES DO YOU STILL SEE?

We are talking, yelling entirely too much. The CEO may have what he or she believes is a hunch that he or she believes is a great idea. But communications professionals need to push back more. We need to change the culture of the people who are in charge of communications. We need to treat the CMO like the CFO. Money, like attention, is a finite resource and we have bad ways of measuring ROI. Rather than assuring that we did these one thousand things, let’s do 4-6 key things that we can do more effectively and then demonstrate the ROI, such as increased attendance at an event, so that we achieve better spikes in attention.

WHO DO YOU ADMIRE?

Women who have launched their own businesses and became game changers in their industry, such as Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, and Kat Cole, the CEO of Cinnabon. I motivate myself. I am constantly striving. I want to be the best author – I admire someone like David Meerman Scott who wrote Real Time Marketing & PR.

FAVORITE GADGET, WEBSITE OR APP?

I love my iPhone and the Harvard Business Review is my go-to site and app, for staying ahead of trends. The Flipboard app gives me a whole week’s worth of news in an accessible format, but I have ink in my blood, I guess, and still love to read the paper edition of the New York Times every day.

YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IN 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

Mother, business owner and author continues to seek success and knowledge.

 

 

© 2014. Tom Quash