What the Flack? Jackie Cooper
Time to get meta as we interview the communicators of the communications industry. The PR and marketing leaders who work hard to raise the profile of creative campaigns, talent and businesses very rarely get asked about themselves and their own work. Which is exactly what we’re hoping to remedy. After all, PR is at the heart of so many of the big ideas that are shaping the industry.
In our second interview of the series, LBB speaks with Jackie Cooper, the global chief brand officer at Edelman, the full-service communications and marketing firm. Edelman works with businesses around the world to communicate their messaging in sectors including - but not limited to - marketing, retail, energy, health, CPG and financial services. Its list of clients include internationally-recognised household names such as Unilever, Starbucks, Microsoft, Samsung, PepsiCo, Adobe and more.
Jackie has over 35 years entrepreneurial experience in global brand, creative, business and personality strategy. She co-founded JCPR in 1985, where she helped to create lauded campaigns including the launch of O2, PlayStation, Mary Kate & Ashley, Wembley Stadium and the final flight for Concorde - and won many industry awards in the process. JCPR was acquired by Edelman in 2004, at which point she became creative director and vice chair of Edelman UK, working on campaigns such as Dove's 'Campaign for Real Beauty' and the 'Halo' launch for Xbox, as well as creating Edelman's brand content and production resource. She then moved to global chair of creative strategy and worked internationally to establish Edelman’s formal creative offering - building a global community of 650 creatives, planners and production talent. During this time, she hosted events at Cannes with Jamie Oliver, Will Smith and Ellen Pompeo, and oversaw the firm’s first foray into the awards, garnering 65 Lions within the first three years.
Now as global chief brand officer for Edelman, Jackie works in a multi faceted role across client strategy and internally. Passionate about the creative possibilities at the intersection of culture, brand and entertainment, she is also a NED for Jamie Oliver Holdings and a Trustee for GROW, a life skills education programme for kids. She was the first woman inducted into the PR Week UK Hall of Fame in 2018, and continues to proudly mentor people in the PR and brand business. Embarking on the second phase of her career with new ambitions, she is currently spearheading Edelman’s 'Gen Z Lab' and beginning her journey as a podcast host, revisiting some of the amazing people she’s met throughout her career.
Here, Jackie chats to LBB about her career journey so far, why only bad news is created in the absence of information, and how complacency is the enemy of both job satisfaction and great client work.
LBB> Tell us about your current role - what do you do?
Jackie> I am Edelman’s chief brand officer, overseeing our global brand teams to drive action, build trust, shift behaviour and deliver commercial success for over 1,000 brands. There is a constant need to balance when to promote and when to protect brands, and my role is to ensure we have the right people, the right resources and the right solutions to give our leading brand clients the trailblazing work they deserve. I also help drive innovation for our brand business and always keep two feet in broader consumer culture, which led to two major launches this past year: Edelman's ‘Gen Z Lab’, and a new podcast series called ‘Touch of Truth’.
LBB> And how did you get to where you are today?
Jackie> I started as a publicist - which honed my story-pitching skills for sure – in the days when journalists could hang up on you if you didn’t nail it in the first 30 seconds! Working for a really toxic PR agency led me to work for Greenpeace where I learnt that I loved the skill of creating motivating stories. I continued to freelance and built enough clients to set up my own agency in London. Specialising in entertainment, culture, and brand, my partner and I built up a leading firm, creating award-winning campaigns, that we then sold to Edelman. Suddenly being part of a huge agency headquartered in the US was a steep learning curve, but I have had several roles here encompassing creative and brand leadership.
Key to my success has been that I have been blessed with amazing mentors, both within Edelman and outside. My dad told me to always meet everyone once and I have learned so much, won business and grown a network from doing that. He also taught me that kindness costs nothing and this has held me in such good stead, especially in challenging situations. Working in an independent agency, like Edelman, with such a strong entrepreneurial pulse means that I am constantly learning. I have always asked myself, what difference will this make, to ensure I never settle? Complacency is the enemy of both job satisfaction and great client work, so this slight paranoia has ensured I have kept progressing!
LBB> What does your average day look like?
Jackie> My job description doesn’t come with an ‘average day’ - which I love. Being global means it can be Asia in the morning or US late in the day, so the hours flex, as the people I get to be in meetings with are all over the world. I can be on a new business pitch, managing a client crisis, creating strategic solutions for a new client launch, appearing on panels, or recording episodes for ‘Touch of Truth’. Podcast hosting is a new initiative for me and it’s been brilliant to share the stories of some amazing people around the world and to hear back from so many in our audience.
One consistent factor in my day is running our ‘Gen Z Lab’, which I founded to deliver on all things gen z for our clients globally. So many CMOs and brand leaders have expressed hesitancy when it comes to engaging this generation, and it’s gratifying to see Edelman’s own super smart gen z-ers contribute so much to our offer and inform our clients.
LBB> For your organisation, what is the key function of PR and comms? Is it about company culture? Attracting clients? Empowering talent? Something else?
Jackie> PR and comms have been our heartbeat for 70 years, since Dan Edelman founded the firm. Engaging hearts and minds, knowing when to promote and when to protect, and helping companies galvanize their ability to make a positive impact in the world are all integral to PR. If you do this right, then talent, culture, output and profile all benefit. If you don’t respect the power of this or harness the potential, loyalty, productivity, image and commercial success are all negatively affected. We also believe that PR and comms have a massively important role to play in building trust around the world between institutions and people. Edelman has been studying the drivers of trust for over 20 years, and has an immense repository of data that we leverage to inform client decision-making and innovation every day. This year, we even built an AI platform from our trust data to optimise marketing decision-making even further so that every brand action taken is backed by trust.
LBB> PR has always been about finding the story/finding the angle. What is your process for staying ahead of the content curve and serving up something fresh and engaging?
Jackie> This is the part I love the most! Sir Ken Robinson said, 'Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value'. Magnetism and substance are both needed. Being aware of what is going on in the world, what content is out there and what is of interest is key. Know your audience, know your channels. I always like to push further… How can this be braver? More impactful? More empathetic? More joyful? More shocking? How can we ensure it’s an actual story that’s shareable? We need to engage emotionally before we can retain information.
LBB> Historically, advertising folk have a very different relationship with the media, especially the press, than PR folk. Advertising is about buying ad space and being able to dictate how and where something is presented - that’s a degree of control you can barely dream of in PR. Does that tension still exist, and if so how do you navigate that tension?
Jackie> Years ago, I felt that, as PR, we were always the poor relations at the table. The ad agency owned the strategy and the creativity, while we were there to amplify its work. This has totally changed. The most trusted information is not paid for – it’s earned. Implicit and explicit endorsement from the author or how it’s shared brings more credibility than just creating your ad and paying to be seen. When I built our initial formal creative offering, so many ad creatives wanted to join us because they saw the power in creating stories rather than 30-second slots. Today, paid and earned is a constructive dance. Editorial-style content benefits from paid support but I don’t see tension. I just see opportunity. We partner with ad agencies all the time.
LBB> And what other common misconceptions do advertising/production people have about comms and PR?
Jackie> To my point above, I think they are pretty savvy about both. Measurement is an area that does cause conversations at times, so can comms and PR be measured in the same way? The answer is that the impact can be quantified for sure, but not by the same tools as an ad.
LBB> To what extent do you feel 'the work speaks for itself'? To what stage of growth can a business rely on this mantra to gain more clients?
Jackie> When I ran my own agency, I always felt that the work would speak for itself. It was our marketing and our recruitment tool. However, when I set up Edelman’s formal global creative offering, I learned from the ad agencies how brilliantly they marketed their work. Taking Edelman to Cannes and entering our work in the Lions made us elevate our game in showing our campaign and the results in a more impactful and strategic way. Clients want the context of great work, and they want to know the impact too. Rigour around this is important to optimise new business.
LBB> When it comes to getting coverage/PR for a creative campaign in the consumer press, how should creative teams go about working with their agency’s comms and PR experts?
Jackie> The key is to understand the story from the audience’s POV (not the creative's!) and it’s so crucial to have the people who are going to promote the story involved with the creative from the beginning. That way, all angles can be exploited as the creative evolves. The insight that inspired the creative, the journey/behind the scenes of the campaign - even the mistakes and mishaps - all give texture and interest to how the campaign came to be.
LBB> When a business is faced with very bad news, what’s the key to getting through it?
Jackie> Face it full on. Avoidance breeds negativity and in the absence of information, only bad news is created. Communicate even if you have to say you do not have the information right now, but you will revert. Bad news travels much faster than positive news, unfortunately, so the other key aspect is speed. Crisis comms is so interesting because in times of trouble, people have to be decisive in order to be effective.
LBB> Generally speaking, how do you approach the hack/flack relationship?
Jackie> Back when I was in regular contact with reporters, I approached the relationship the same as I did any other – meet everyone once and kindness costs nothing. At one point, I was working on a story for a client, and the reporter in question was being particularly nasty. Despite the client’s urging not to, I asked the reporter out to lunch, and turns out they were going through a really hard time. Given the opportunity to open up, people will surprise you. Our relationship transformed because of one simple invitation.
LBB> How does doing comms/PR for the advertising world differ from any other industry you’ve worked in?
Jackie> Agency comms is its own animal. At Edelman, we have a very talented global marketing function that does for us what we do for clients. If I had to generalise, the key difference is that the target audience for agencies (CCOs, CMOs, creative talent, trade reporters etc.) is far more discerning than your average consumer audience. While I think gen z is changing a lot of consumer habits, particularly when it comes to fact-checking and vetting claims, the B2B agency audience is commonly as knowledgeable as you are on any given topic, so the comms requires that much more rigour and precision and storytelling.
LBB> What are the most useful tools in the arsenal of a PR / comms professional working in advertising right now?
Jackie> Know how to create a magnetic story, have contacts who you can ask advice from, not just pitch stories to, be aware of the area that you working in beyond your own project/client and read - read/watch/engage with everything that you might ever want to appear in or at.
LBB> In your opinion, how has the role of a PR / comms professional evolved during your career span? Have things changed greatly or do core tasks / principles remain the same?
Jackie> The ability to create a story remains the same, but the universe that we reach now is so much wider, so much more complex, and multi-faceted. Influencers and social platforms have materially affected the entire function, the audience is also the creator and publisher now, so interaction, engagement and that dance of content created, shared and commented on means PR/Comms is an always-on remit.
LBB> What frustrates you about the way the media and PR have changed over the years?
Jackie> As a lover of news and media, it’s been hard to see the business model transform so rapidly and at certain costs to integrity. Edelman’s data has trust in media at an all-time low. And it's no wonder - so many areas of media are challenged to deliver audiences/participation and are incentivised by clickbait, which can be testing. It’s more difficult to discern between what’s clickbait and what’s the truth. Clients are more apprehensive as a result, and incredibly talented journalists are under more stress to deliver.
LBB> And what excites you?
Jackie> The opportunities are still infinite! Nothing beats the satisfaction of being part of a campaign that travels, becomes a cultural movement, a purpose-driven call to action, or a story that everyone you know is aware of. Additionally, being part of a crisis for a client and being able to protect its business and its reputation, or helping it be better for the future is so rewarding. Finally, our ‘Gen Z Lab’ inspires me every day and I am learning so much working with this cohort, as are our clients.
