The New CCO

Last week, Harold Burson passed away at age 98. Harold was a larger-than-life icon of public relations - he’s the Founding Chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a predecessor firm to Burson Cohn & Wolfe, he covered the Nuremberg Trials as a cub reporter after serving during WWII and he’s the author of one of the PR industry’s most seminal works, The Business of Persuasion. 

To commemorate him, we are republishing a past podcast featuring Harold’s conversation with Becky Edwards, now CCO of Schneider Electric, at the 2018 Page Spring Seminar. Harold explains why he was bullish on the future of the communications, his roundabout path into the profession, and how the digital era has and will continue to reshape it. 

We've also published a handful of retrospectives on Harold to the PageTurner blog. Former colleagues and friends such as Roger Bolton (Page), Bill Nielsen (Johnson & Johnson), Carol Cone (On Purpose), Bob Feldman (ICF Next), Bill Wohl (United Rentals) and Herbert Heitmann (Karaktero) have contributed. 

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Special thanks go to Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible.

As The New CCO wraps up 2019, we sit down with Mike Wing, the lead writer of Page’s most seminal research reports, to discuss the common threads of the CCO role from our first publication in 2007 to the present. 

Mike’s been helping define Page’s perspective on the transformation of the CCO for over a decade. Most recently, he penned The CCO as Pacesetter, our report on the state of the CCO role and its way forward. Having surveyed a broad swath of Page membership and their teams, along with his years working alongside Jon Iwata at the head of IBM’s communications organization, Mike has a distinct, hyper-aware perspective on the state of the function and how it must evolve. 

Special thanks to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for their support throughout this past year.

Deepfakes are media that take a person in an existing image, video or audio and replace them with someone else's likeness using artificial neural networks. The nefarious application of this technology is wide-ranging, and worse, it’s spreading. More than ever, we must equip our enterprises with safeguards against malicious actors who seek to damage corporate reputation and tarnish trust among stakeholders. 

Professor Danielle Citron from the Boston University School of Law spoke at the Page Annual Conference to educate us about deepfakes, and we’re bringing you her lecture on this episode of The New CCO. Professor Citron is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and an expert in online privacy. She discusses deepfakes’ rise to prominence, their proliferation, the ongoing battle to regulate them through legislation and the best ways for us to steel our organizations against attacks. 

Special thanks to our podcast partners Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for their support.

Purpose and values are often derided as corporate buzzwords or feel-good messaging. But for Franz Paasche, SVP of Corporate Affairs at PayPal, these foundational elements of corporate character are the lifeblood of the enterprise. They are what differentiates this financial disruptor from its peers. 

On this episode of The New CCO, Paasche discusses PayPal’s purpose to democratize financial services. From remittances for small businesses to cash advances for furloughed government workers during the shutdown earlier this year, PayPal lives by its purpose and makes it real through action. 

The company’s mission and values similarly inform its policy positions, some of which have played out on the national stage: as in the case of PayPal’s responses to North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill” and the Charlottesville episode. As Paasche notes, “If you have a clear sense of your mission and you have a clear sense of your values, then these are not political decisions, these are values-driven decisions.”

Special thanks to our podcast partners Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for their support.

How do you build an entirely new global customer base for a business that has remained domestic throughout its entire existence? That’s the challenge that faced Mitsubishi Heavy Industries CCO Dan Lochmann when he was tasked with burnishing the company’s brand globally by CEO Seiji Izumisawa.

MHI is a $40 billion B2B business that builds all kinds of large-scale heavy machinery from wind turbines to jets to rockets. In order to identify prospects and target them as core brand stakeholders, Lochmann and his team use CommTech, the emerging field within communications that takes inspiration from MarTech. Leveraging an array of paid social, targeted placements, earned media, and thought leadership, all unified via data dashboards, Lochmann’s team opened the doors for MHI to build a global brand, generate leads and earn its longstanding domestic reputation as an engineering innovator abroad.

On this edition of The New CCO, we feature Lochmann as he presents the MHI case on CommTech at the 2019 Page Annual Conference in Boston.

Special thanks to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible!

KPN is looking to the future of mobile networks and the digital infrastructure on which they will run. Recent CEO Maximo Ibarra discusses how the company is preparing for what he calls a new world of “immersive connectivity.” 

Ibarra discusses the future of interpersonal communication, starting with the next era of screens and the new features they will provide. He also dives into the emerging field of neurotechnology and brain-machine interfaces, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Ultimately, Ibarra describes how the company itself is transforming to meet the needs of a rapidly changing and perpetually disrupted industry. 

This podcast is adapted from a session led by Becky Edwards, CCO at Schneider Electric, at the Page International Exchange held this summer. 

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Special thanks go to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible.

On this episode, we take you inside our new research report, The CCO as Pacesetter, with the research leaders: Roger Bolton, Aedhmar Hynes and Jon Iwata. 

Together they visited nearly 30 countries, speaking to over 200 senior communications leaders. Those conversations shaped a new perspective on how and why the role of the CCO is at a pivotal moment. Above all, the CCO is a crucial leader in enterprise transformation, which is in many cases an existential proposition for their companies. 

Through our research, we introduce a new wrinkle to traditional stakeholder engagement models through CommTech. We also focus on three key dimensions of Corporate Character the CCO can use as a lever within the C-Suite: corporate brand stewardship, corporate culture and societal value creation. 

We also explain how we will translate the new research into digestible, easy-to-learn formats, starting with Progression Paths. 

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Special thanks go to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible.

On this edition of The New CCO, we invite Bill Heyman, Founder & CEO of Heyman Associates, and Jennifer Doidge, Executive Search & Assessment Consultant with Russell Reynolds, to discuss hiring for the CCO role and how it is evolving. 

The two leaders of premier executive search firms give us a window into the search process: what CEOs are looking for in a CCO and how the relationship differs from other C-suite functions. 

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Special thanks go to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible.

Last week, Harold Burson announced he will return to his childhood home of Memphis, TN, after seven decades of living in New York while leading one of the world’s largest and most successful PR agencies. At 98 years young, Harold is a larger-than-life icon of public relations - he’s the Founding Chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a predecessor firm to Burson Cohn & Wolfe - and, to this day, imparts visionary wisdom regarding the industry and its future.

On this edition of The New CCO, we revisit a conversation from the 2018 Page Spring Seminar between Harold and Becky Edwards, now the CCO at Schneider Electric, who was then with the International Olympic Committee. Harold explains why he’s bullish on the future of the communications, his roundabout path into the profession, and how the digital era has and will continue to reshape it.

Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Special thanks go to Morning Consult and Rivet Smart Audio for making this season of The New CCO possible.

On this edition of The New CCO, we bring you our conversation with General Motors CCO Tony Cervone from the 2019 Page Spring Seminar. Interviewed by former IBM Chief Brand Officer and SVP Jon Iwata, Tony discusses the brand transformation effort he’s leading at GM alongside CEO Mary Barra.

Facing disruption from new players such as Lyft, Uber, and Tesla, GM has had to rethink everything from its business model to its role in society. Tony has led the redefinition of the enterprise, starting with its brand and culture. He, along with GM’s senior leadership team, developed a new aspirational goal for the company - Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions, and Zero Congestion - which now serves as its north star.

Tony details how he leverages his responsibility for the corporate brand to influence other parts of the business in ways that bring that brand to life. He also explains the emerging field of CommTech and how he’s used data and new technology systems to reach the stakeholders that matter most.