La capsula Informativa: frankly… Episode 85: A Lot Has Changed (and Stayed the Same) Since 2016
The transcript below is AI-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies. Tune in to the episode audio to hear the full conversation!
Transcript
Dan
Hello, welcome to frankly.
Rachel
Hi, welcome.
Dan
So it’s just the two of us today. We’re running solo here and we’re going to take a look backwards. We’re jumping on the trend here. What was going on in 2016?
Rachel
Yeah.
Dan
So 10 years ago.
Rachel
Everyone’s like the golden year, right? Like I feel like everyone’s trying to bring back the energy of 2016. And it’s funny because before diving into some research, like I remember the feeling of 2016 and I loved it. But when you actually look back at like headlines and what was happening, you’re kind of like, whoa, that was like, there was a lot of things that you’re like woah.
Dan
Yeah, there was definitely things that, I think maybe we’re better than, sure. But I think there’s also a lot of like rose-colored glasses going on right now, 10 years in the future. So we’re going to think about, like, we’re going to think a little bit about, you know, where we were personally or in our careers at that point. what was going on in our world at Franco, in the city, and also just what were some of the things that were starting out in 2016 in the world of communications? What were some of the trends that we like, that we saw back then, and which ones stayed and which ones kind of fell flat in the past 10 years? So, you know.
Rachel
A decade. That’s a long time.
Dan
It seriously is though. Yeah. It’s weird to think about, but I know you have a really solid landmark at the start of 2016. Yeah, I do. This is, that’s nice. You can put some time.
Rachel
Yeah, 2016 was the year I graduated college in the middle of that year. So I think that’s where my rose colored glasses come from. I was not nearly as much in the news as I am now because I didn’t need to be. I was a 21-year-old with not many cares in the world at that point.
Dan
Yep.
Rachel
Enjoying my last semester of college. I graduated, I traveled Europe for five weeks. I came back broke and unemployed. And you know, what a marvelous time. I can’t say too many bad things about it. But I then started my internship with Franco in August, end of August, I believe, mid to end of August of 2016.
Dan
Okay.
Rachel
And my internship ran from then to the end of that year before I was brought on full-time in January. So the year’s kind of like broken into two for me, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
It was like college, graduation, Europe, and then come back and start my career.
Dan
Yeah, two very separate worlds.
Rachel
Yeah, it really, it was, and it was, Definitely like an awakening coming out of college and starting a career. Like I remember it very vividly. So yeah, so 2016 for me, I’m like, yeah, bring back the feeling. I like chasing the nostalgia of 2016, but my life looks much different now.
Dan
Yeah, also very different, but I was like, I was just starting. So at the start of that year, I would have been starting my 4th year of like full-time employment. But like, there was a lot different about a lot different, but a lot of similarity, I guess, in what I was like doing at the time. So it was still like on the B2B side of things, but it was a lot heavier in like the construction and manufacturing and surprisingly enough, like thinking back to it and looking back before we hopped on here, like a lot of big data and analytics type communications, which is funny to see like how big of a role that still plays in our live. Just like a different way, but we were, we had our probably very earliest like AI client at that point that we were working with as they were trying to launch mainly in like the retail space. So it was like a lot of, a lot has changed and there’s a lot of differences between what I was doing then and now, but there was also like a lot of setting the groundwork for some of the work that we do.
Rachel
Yeah. I think it shows the innovation from then to now, right? Or just how our world has changed, which we know then like the technology that kind of supports our world has to evolve with it. And smack dab almost in the middle of the last decade was COVID.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
So like you want to think about how much changes in 10 years through a global pandemic in the middle of it and things will change even quicker.
Dan
Rewire your whole system overnight.
Rachel
Yeah, I think a lot of the things that were happening, when we were looking at headlines from an auto perspective, it was big on self-driving vehicles. And even in the couple of years following, I remember, I mean, we created a virtual reality experience for a client that was in a self-driving vehicle and had that at auto show.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
Yeah. And, you know, we all know that didn’t really go anywhere. No pun intended. Those cars didn’t go anywhere. For quite some time, I think COVID had a big thing to do with that, truthfully, because everybody kind of went more EV. But Dan and I were comparing, there was an article that was kind of like recapping 2016 headlines and at that time, in the very beginning of 2016, General Motors announced a $5 million investment in Lyft, which was a ride share service, which was like just kind of starting to peek through at the time. And then they also said they were going to immediately begin testing self-driving bolts in Michigan and start building bolts so.
Dan
Yeah, and it’s funny, like you said, the focus kind of shifted and it’s COVID, it’s policy, it’s all these different things, but like self-driving cars kind of like came out of the spotlight for a little bit in favor of EVs. But now, with the latest policy changes, the latest incentive changes, all of these things and kind of investments changing direction on the EV front.
Rachel
Even consumer, I think.
Dan
Oh yeah, for sure. That’s a big part of it. But like, we’re also seeing the self-driving conversation like blast right back to the forefront. I mean, it’s been in the software defined vehicle and like there’s all of this, all of this conversation that’s happened around it lately. But now, even recently, you mentioned the GM announcement before and now they’re talking again about, you know, eyes off driving by 2028, I think it was. So it’s, you know, we’re back into this cycle and kind of.
Rachel
Fashion is cyclical and automotive trends are cyclical.
Dan
That’s funny. But I mean, the other thing that we saw a lot at this time in the auto world too, when we think about the communication side of it, we were still in big time auto show mode.
Rachel
Yes, that landscape looked so different. I mean, like big investments, you were still seeing. all major OEMs at auto shows with big displays, tons of, I mean, the press conference schedule, I remember, like bopping around to some of those. I mean, yeah, those were, companies are making big investments. You and I both spent multiple years at auto shows with clients that had displays.
Dan
Yeah, and I mean, that’s like, we’re just, we’ll get to this in a few minutes, I think, but we were just kind of like at the, very earliest points, or not the very earliest, but very early points of using social media to make some of these announcements or to drive news really through social or streaming or some of these other like relevant news. Ford very specifically. Yeah, I remember there was some big stuff while they still did a major press conference at Joe Louis as part of the Detroit Auto Show. I think we were just at the point where they were also streaming that on their channels so that you didn’t necessarily have to be in the room. And I think that was like really an early indicator that we were going to be shifting towards that stuff later on. And maybe where we are today, where auto shows are heavier on the consumer side, lighter on some of those big, you know, multi-million dollar investments in a reveal.
Rachel
I even think it kind of started to signal the change of the media landscape from always traditional media to people actually like breaking their own news and using their social channels as like their own voice. And then also you start to see this shift to non-traditional media in the form of like the early blogger and influencer. I would say there over the next kind of like from 2016 to 2018, you really started to see the consumer appetite for reading more of these blogs, companies were creating blogs, right? It really got like owned media, non-traditional started to become very prevalent and companies were having to figure out how to get their message in with those people, right? Versus just the traditional media and their own social channels were a great way of partially doing that.
Dan
Yeah, and that’s one thing that I think, you know, when we talk about trends from that time that are still relevant today, It looks so much different, but that really was the earliest point of probably what we would call now integrated communications, which has become such like a piece of the foundation of what we do now with, all of our clients, what we talk about. But that was, looking back at some of the work we were doing, we were just starting to do some of this some of this integrated work where we weren’t just looking at a press release as a way to distribute news, but we were looking at like, okay, how do you package that with the social posts? How do you package that with infographics or, you know, like a direct newsletter or things along those lines? And how did all these things start to work together? And I think that’s one of the things that has really, really like built and grown and become so core to like the communications profession over these last 10 years that really we’re just starting to see at that point.
Rachel
Yeah, it’s like the very early days of content maximization. I think a lot of companies are making, they were having to invest more specifically in like social channels and blogs, right? They had to hire somebody to manage and create that content. So their investment became much larger. And so just doing one release and not putting it anywhere and them making the investment in socials. It was like, why wouldn’t we use it in all these other places or make it into something that fits somewhere else? Like it was almost, I mean, for a lot of reasons, but driven by having to make a larger investment in their communications to keep up at that point in time. It wasn’t an option to not be on socials. It wasn’t an option to not have like your website or blog or something like that.
Dan
And I think another piece that really, and I don’t know, it’s kind of like a chicken and egg thing, like what came first, the need to show value in the reporting or the ability to use some of these other channels that were a little bit more traceable. I don’t know, you could probably go either way on that, but whichever, whichever drove the decision at the time, we also started to see more emphasis on being able to show your value and draw a line between communications, public relations, marketing and ROI at that point, so… I mean, the tools that we had looked vastly different, but we were just starting to get away from, or not just, but we were starting to get away from the ad equivalency value on the media side and start to try to put some valuable metrics behind that.
Rachel
We were convincing CEOs and CFOs that was a bad value. Like some of them, I will never, like I just remember back then for the few that were like hanging on to it, we were like, can we talk to your CEO? Like, can we we get in and explain there was so much education around why it wasn’t a good metric. And then we were like, but we’re going to replace it with this metric that we still can’t track really well either, but it’s going to be better, right? Like at that point in time, you’re kind of like fighting for your life of like, we know this isn’t good, but we also like the data that we can like the tools have was still so, it felt very early on, right? Like we were just talking about sentiment and like share a voice and how at that point in time, the tools just couldn’t read nuance or say, there was no like in context. It was very much just like, was it mentioned? Was it not?
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
Did they say something nice? Did they not say something nice? Like it was very… you had to then do all of the manual work of trying to, figure that out as you went. So it just a very interesting, and we started honestly saying like number of placements, and now we’re like this quality over quantity. And the evolution’s been interesting, but it’s just, we were like, no add value, but we’re also gonna try to figure out these other things that we swear mean more. We just couldn’t measure.
Dan
Yeah, and I think that was like, you know, you see so much consolidation in how you show that across That’s the different, integrated channels now. So, in our case, we use Agency Analytics is one way to look at that, where you can see, social, digital, owned content, all these results in one area. At the time, though, we were also seeing tools emerge to start to track these things. So we had media monitoring tools that would assign sentiment, whether that’s, you know, right or wrong. Who’s to say at this point, probably wrong. We also, you mentioned right before we hopped on here, that was also the time that we started to see tools like Sprout or social tools come into the mix and actually get, starting to get used.
Rachel
Yeah, it’s interesting. Now, I feel like we look for tools that talk to each other, right? We want all of our tools connected. We want fewer tools that can do more. And that just wasn’t an option back then. We were fighting, you know, you’ve had Cision on the… like media database reporting, Sprout Social on the social side, you just kind of had to have a tool and you had to figure out like how those all fit together. And, it’s just an interesting time. Because before that, a lot of what we were doing was manual posting, right? Like scheduling within each of the platforms themselves and using, having to pull, I mean, I remember pulling Facebook data and then going to Twitter and pulling Twitter data. And you had every individual client and piece and then putting it into a spreadsheet and, it was a whole different world.
Dan
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s like the natural progression of most technologies though. Like you see the need, you get like some early adopters who do one small piece of the puzzle. And then, you know, over time you start to see like, okay, you start to get a quote, whether they get acquired or whether it’s like they, build integrations where they can link with each other to kind of like combine and tell one story. Like there’s always that level of like the early adopters, this wide net casting. There’s 20 different companies doing 20 different things. And then eventually you get to where we are.
Rachel
Consolidation.
Dan
Yeah, there’s a couple different options that really allow you to draw a more concrete line between results and value.
Rachel
It makes you wonder where in 10 years with like the AI market, right now you’ve got Claude and Gemini and Copilot and ChatGPT and you know, then that ladders up to Google and Microsoft and OpenAI, right? Like there’s gonna, again, we’re at the point with this where there’s multiple doing multiple things and we’re starting to see them kind of like start to say like we got to work together to like do this. So in 2036, it’ll be very interesting to see where that kind of landscape lies. I think going based off of that rule that you just talked about.
Dan
Yeah. So, I mean, there was definitely the seeds, like some of these trends that we saw start then feel like you can still see the evidence of those today, those few things that we just talked about. But like, I don’t know, what were some things that you can think of that happened or like some of the trends that we’re starting to pick up that we were like all bought in on 10 years ago that you’re like, oh my God, why did we do this? Like what fell on its face coming out of that?
Rachel
Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I really think a big piece, first of all, Twitter fell on its face.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
It’s just as a whole, I think it’s like that. When we look at the social platforms, that one has had the most change in my opinion over like the years. Like Facebook still pretty much functions in a similar way. It’s gone through like ups and downs, but Twitter through buyouts and changes and all sorts of stuff like that one to me is very much It just looks a lot different.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
But social in general to me, like, it just… using it as like we’re still kind of in this like customer service area of social, right?
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
But less than it was like at first it was just strictly marketing. We’re going to put out our message. We don’t care. And they’re like, we should talk to our customers out here. And then people started using it that way. And now I think we’re seeing it really kind of almost not go back to the beginning, but like.
Dan
It’s definitely different. And I think like even beyond like the the way that we used it, also the channels, like you talked about Twitter, but like in 2016, we were thinking about like how to like have live streams of everything on these different channels. Yeah, that’s true. Or trying to use like Snapchat as a corporate tool for like B2B, like, you know, all of that. No, like we’ve kind of backed off from that. I’m sure for consumer brands and things like that, it’s still active, but like there were so many, Again, it comes back to that trial and error and consolidation that we were talking about with reporting tools, but it was like there were so many different platforms where you thought maybe this was the next big thing for marketing. And then it was like, well, let’s kind of like back off of that a little bit. And now we’ve kind of like found our way back around to a couple of like core platforms for each company that make the most sense.
Rachel
And then how we use them, remember, like hashtag strategies. I remember that we would use that as a selling point. Like you would be searching through all, again, other platforms and tools that we had of thinking hashtags were like, was it all a lie? Were they really ever doing anything? Like people really tried to make community out of hashtags. And where it really has led us now is like, you have a community as a creator or as a company or right? Like it’s not around larger topics than the hashtags we’re trying to. Like I get the point and why we were trying to go that way and to have more of a community that multiple voices could get involved in, but it just never really took off, I don’t think.
Dan
Well, yeah. And I, and I think that also, that is also something that maybe has evolved into something else because the hashtag specifically was like the rise and fall of Twitter. at the time, like very correlated with that. Because with that, like you could follow a conversation, you could have real time conversations. And that was like the real like conversational era of social. Now I feel like the hashtag now where you want to have that type of conversation is almost like the new like Reddit feed. Like it’s not, it’s not in the hashtag format. It’s in the, it’s in your, it’s in your board, but it’s like,
Rachel
It’s in reading even to like your captions. Yeah.
Dan
So I think there’s like different uses and different ways that it different ways that it happens. But yeah, the time of like clicking into a hashtag and really like engaging fully in a in a conversation, I feel like that’s kind of.
Rachel
You know, the only times I did this and that this is very 2016 is it was like on Twitter when there was the like live TV airing of like the Bachelorette finale or the Bachelor. Like when I would be watching those things, the Super Bowl halftime show, the like the Olympics, like when these very cultural things were happening and there really wasn’t like you weren’t watching it later, right? Like you people would get together and you would watch that live event happen. And if you wanted to know people’s thoughts in real time, like that was where the hashtag for me is when I actually use them. I was never clicking into a hashtag, right? Like it wasn’t happening. Yeah.
Dan
Yeah, that’s fair.
Rachel
And that’s very 2016, too. So.
Dan
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s so much that, you know, you don’t think about in that time period until like you actually sit down and think about what was going on ten years ago. Like it’s hard to put the timeline to that because time just seems it doesn’t work these days. But I mean, I think there’s some core things that like I think we can confidently say like started around this time and really like are here to stay. I mean, it’s the, it’s that, being the start of like this move towards integrated communications and really like finding people where they are, understanding your audiences and like how the things that connect with them drive Value for you and your company, and also it’s just like, I think we left behind some of the things in communications that were less authentic, maybe, and trying to put this very… I don’t know, trying to put more of a personal voice to a brand almost where it didn’t belong. And now you’re like kind of going back to this point where you’re like, okay, we play in this lane and we have to be okay with that. And we build our messaging based around that because that’s what our audience wants and expects. We’re not trying to be things that we’re not maybe in the same way that I think I remember from 10 years ago.
Rachel
Yeah, and I think people just demand more of brands in 2026 than they did in 2016. I don’t remember people being so hypercritical and like really diving into, the sides of politics that these brands supported or who did they donate to, like some of those like behind the scenes things. And we’ve got like brands basically have like activism playbooks now of like, how are they like these campaigns that they’re running just during the Super Bowl, I think it was Nike, that did like a women’s campaign, like women in sports. Like people are just demanding more of like, instead of like, oh, I like that shoe, that Nike shoe. It’s like, well, what is Adidas doing versus Nike? And do I support what they’re doing to make even like purchasing decisions, which is just, it puts more on the brand. You do have to be a little bit more human because people are just demanding more of brands today.
Dan
Yeah, and it’s so much more opportunity for for back and forth, like there’s so much more opportunity for individuals to kind of like voice those opinions, whether it be on social, whether it be in other areas, but like there is a much louder like individual voice that you can have to bring those concerns up. So you’re right, like if the point’s being raised, like brands need to have a response to that to a certain extent. I mean, it makes more sense for some than others, but but at least the opportunity is there for people to really like speak up in different ways.
Rachel
We also talked about like 2016 when Trump got elected for his first term was like the start of the fake news era. And so it, I think over the last 10 years, again, like this was the trust in media kind of like eroding and then having to be rebuilt simultaneously. which has been like interesting as the landscape has shrunk and changed. And like we said, introduced like non-traditional medias that companies are investing in. But I mean, there was like reputation management across the board being done as a result of like kind of that fake news era.
Dan
Yeah, and I think, I mean, that’s another piece of the, what we were just talking about too, of like everybody kind of having a platform. You know, more people were, and getting their news from social than from other sources in every year since then, probably.
Rachel
Yeah.
Dan
But that also opens up the door to the ability for, non-credible outlets to position themselves in a way that looks very credible. And so it’s kind of like the natural progression is more people have that platform, more organizations, whether good or bad actors, like you have more opportunity for for questioning what you see, I guess. There’s not any like single voice of truth anymore. And that is a huge thing that’s changed in the way that we communicate over the past 10 years, not just in like our proactive communications that we’re doing, but in the way that humans communicate just between each other.
Rachel
Well, and it really did change media relations and how as a PR professional, you conduct media relations forever, right? It’s just, it’s, it really has changed. I even feel like the idea of whether it comes to like influencers, like, okay, this is so 2016 coded too. When you would be on social media again, early influencers and every day you would see an ad from these like traditional blogger influencers, like the women listening will know the Sugar Bear hair gummies and the like all of these like, we now know that the supplement industry is like the wild, wild west. But back then it was like, this girl came off with extensions in her hair off of TV and Sugar Bear hair was like, sign her. We need her promoting our hair gummy every other Tuesday for the next six months. And she signed that and said, yes, ma’am. And like, That was how it like, it was these companies were like spray and pray, right? It was like, we’ll get anyone that’s anyone with a name, pay them to not take this supplement most likely, have no credibility behind it. Like people were taking brand deals in 2016 for things that they didn’t have, like they didn’t care. And because again, the consumer was just like, this is new, we don’t really know. And not like, we’ve instead built trust around creators and influencers and companies and it’s not that easy anymore. And we hold them to a higher standard. But that was kind of how we were doing media in 2016 too. Like, it was based on relationships, but it was. It was a huge landscape, right? You would send out a press release, kind of spray and pray, like put it on the wire, that looked different. And now it’s like, you’re not getting coverage on anything unless you like have a pretty established relationship and you put in the work if you don’t to build that relationship around this company, right? Like why you should trust my experts, why what I’m offering you is valuable, you know, just That to me is so different. Like the whole idea of spray and pray across influencers and media is just, we can’t do that anymore. It doesn’t work.
Dan
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think kind of to like put a bow on it, maybe like the way that the tools and like the new channels that we started to see back then, like really have changed a lot, but in a lot of ways, that was the groundwork for what we were doing. Like it was the groundwork of influencers. It was the groundwork of rapport. It was the groundwork of like these different social communications methods and overall just integrating all of those together to build it. We were talking like so much about so many different ways that we could try out these new digital communications methods, relatively new. And then like Again, it goes back to kind of consolidation. You find what works for you. find what is the actual like productive means of doing these things. And so much of what we do today is rooted in what was like a crazy universe of communications tools back then.
Rachel
So true. I.
Dan
Think it’s just, you know, the things that truly had value stuck around, the things that maybe were just like hot trends at the time and trying to engineer attention kind of fell through the cracks for probably for the better.
Rachel
Good reason.
Dan
Yeah. But I don’t know. It’s fun to kind of like think back and try to connect the dots between like where we were and where we are today.
Rachel
Yeah. It’s like I said, I sometimes still chase the nostalgia of 2016 for what it was because it was such a fun and pivotal year for me. But I’ll keep the rose.
Dan
Colored glasses on for a little longer. Like it was fun.
Rachel
Yeah, it’s fun like going back through pictures and looking at just the debauchery that was happening back then. I feel like for me, a much simpler world. And I was very naive to things. And you know what? I’ll look proudly on that time because of it.
Dan
Well, maybe in 10 years, we’ll do another one. Look back on 2026 and say the same thing.
Rachel
Run it back in 10 years and we can have a fully different discussion.
Dan
Yeah. All right. Well, Thanks. Thanks to everyone who took some time to listen to this rant and our look back on the last 10 years. And this is actually the last time talking about a new era. This is the last time we’re recording remotely for the time being. Next time you hear our voices, we’ll be recording from Franco’s new office downtown to Toronto. Yes. So yeah, talk about the next 10 years. Hopefully the start of a good and new era here.
Rachel
Yeah, so we will see you in the new space next time.
Dan
Yeah.
Rachel
Thanks.
Dan
Bye.
