Insights from Danny Franklin
Our social media team recently sat down with our newest partner, Danny Franklin, so we could get to know him a little better. We wanted to hear, in his own words, why he joined BPI, his take on the future of message creation, and what he sees as the future of messaging and research. Here’s what he had to say.
Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why did you join BPI?
I joined BPI because they are building the next generation of consulting — one that brings together all the tools of data, research, and analytics and applies them to the most difficult communications challenges for causes and candidates. I think that we have the opportunity to do something new, to build something that’s never been built before, and that’s an exciting opportunity I didn’t want to pass up.
My goal is to integrate the tools of strategy with the tools of execution. I want to move beyond this idea of strategy as something static, and instead implement it as a learning process — that way, we make each iteration of communication smarter, more persuasive, and more effective.
Why is the integration of message creation, research, and execution so important?
It matters because the world is changing more quickly than ever before. There was a time when communications looked like planning for a football game. There was the pregame, and then there was the game where you executed your strategy, then there was a postgame analysis. But that doesn’t work anymore. Now the pregame, execution, and postgame happen all at once. That’s learning as we communicate, then feeding those lessons back into our messaging strategy and messaging development process has become so critical.
How has crafting a message changed?
We’ve learned that you can’t ignore people’s narratives. You can’t go in and impose your narrative on your audience. You have to work with them and have a conversation. It’s no longer a matter of communicator and subject — it’s a conversation between brands, between ideas, between candidates, and between people who understand and interpret your message on their own terms and through their own lives.
Because we’re in a time where institutional trust is so low, when people find a brand, candidate, or cause that they trust, they reward that trust. They reward it to the extreme because they’re comparing it to so many other brands that they mistrust.
But if you can feel good about buying a product, and feel good about supporting a company, you’re going to let that influence your choices, and that has massive effects over time. We’ve seen lots of brands who ignore the importance of establishing their reputation and telling their stories; as a result, people begin to accumulate reasons why they don’t feel good about supporting those brands. However, once brands start telling positive stories about themselves, people can reengage with the reasons why they should feel good about supporting them.
Why does understanding how people are responding to content matter?
It’s so valuable for marketers to see how people are responding to content. There are focus group rooms across the country filled with marketers who are watching people’s response to their advertisement to make sure that they’re expressing their message just right. The real opportunity with digital communications is that we have massive amounts of data showing how people are interacting with your message. If you can see, in real time, at what point people tune out, or what specific words and phrases seem to drive deeper engagement — you can really understand the nuances of where your message is working, among whom, as well as where it’s falling short. Then you can make refinements to overcome any problems that you might encounter out in the marketplace of ideas.
Why do you think it took so long for this approach to communications strategy to take place?
Because the status quo is easier. Communications is difficult under the best of circumstances; it’s easier to imagine that you can create a strategy that will carry you through to the next campaign or the next challenge. It’s a lot more difficult to try to integrate new streams of data, new methodologies, new ways of understanding your audience, and then adapting on the fly. I completely understand why people have been reluctant to do it, because it forces them to change habits that have been formed over a generation of communications.
[But] the fact is that someone else is going to do it, and that person is going to eat the lunch of the person who doesn’t. The one dominant idea of modern communications is the need for constant change, constant reevaluation, and a nimbler approach to strategy — understanding the complex conversation that you’re in, rather than in a vacuum.
You can watch a clip of Danny’s broader interview below, and be sure to follow our social channels for more of his insights.
