Why Your Marketing and PR Measurement Isn't Telling Leadership What Worked

Your executive team wants "the numbers" by Friday, and you know what's coming: six logins, a Thursday-night spreadsheet, and a CEO asking, "So what actually worked?" The problem isn't you—it's a process that asks for activities, judges you on outcomes, and scatters the data across teams and agencies that all measure differently. In this week’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich breaks down why measurement keeps breaking and how to fix it: start from organizational goals, measure each PESO Model® media type for its job, and report what the numbers mean instead of just what they are. Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/marketing-pr-measurement-broken/  PESO Model Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/  Build your measurement spine: https://spinsucks.com/contact/

Novartis made the most likable pharma ad of the Super Bowl—Gronk, hammocks, "relax your tight end"—and won the Pharma Lions Grand Prix at Cannes for it. But when paid media is the only channel that legal can fully control, the ad quietly becomes your whole operating system, and everything it can't say gets handed to someone else.  In this month's PESO Model® Diagnostic, Gini Dietrich runs the full Novartis campaign through the PESO lens, names the regulated-industry trap, and lays out the fixes that survive a compliance review—at every size of organization. Take the PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/peso-model-diagnostic-novartis/

Give 1,000 people the identical AI-assisted résumé and change only the first name, and James is "resourceful" while Emily "can't even write a CV herself." Three studies this year show women are judged more harshly than men for the same AI use—and in a profession that's two-thirds women, that's not an HR footnote; it's how the job loss Alex Karp predicted actually happens.  On this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich walks through the research, why the adoption gap doesn't close with access or training, and four things to do about it, whether you lead the team or you're the one using the tools (or both). Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-resourceful-cheating  My conversation with Tara McDonagh: https://communicationsbusinessadvisor.libsyn.com/episode-49-yes-and-what-gini-dietrich-and-i-learned-from-each-other Free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

A new report says earned media is disrupting the PESO Model® for AI discoverability—and a second survey, published the same month, says paid media matters most. They can't both be right, and Gini Dietrich argues neither question is. In this week’s Spin Sucks episode, she walks through what both surveys found, why "which media type matters most" measures who you asked instead of what works, and the finding everyone should be talking about: a 28-point confidence gap between agencies and brands that comes down to one word—measurement. Read the post: http://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-peso-model-proof  PESO Model Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/  Spin Sucks Community: https://spinsucks.com/community  D S Simon report: https://www.dssimon.com/earned-media-in-the-ai-era-report/  Sword and the Script survey: https://www.swordandthescript.com/2026/08/ai-visibility-survey/

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich explains why the AI persona you built last year just got promoted to referee, the only two signals it checks before it vouches for you, and the four moves to make before someone in your building tries to solve "the AI problem" with a bigger ad budget. Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-agents-gatekeepers/  Take the free PESO Model Diagnostic®: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model Certification®: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/  AI Visibility Is a PESO Model Problem: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-peso-model/  Meet Your New Buyer Persona: https://spinsucks.com/communication/meet-your-new-buyer-persona/

Everyone is writing the same article about AI visibility: it's a new discipline, and—what luck!—they sell the thing that fixes it. Nope. AI systems reward probability, not popularity, and probability gets built through the integrated program communicators have been running for more than a decade: the PESO Model®.  In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich breaks down the specific job each media type does in the evidence base LLMs actually score—and the claims-versus-corroboration audit to run with your team this week. Links:  Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication//ai-visbility-peso-model  Marketing Dive article: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/why-unpaid-media-is-now-essential-to-ai-visibility/822485/ Free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

Everyone wants the AI visibility tool with the free trial and the dashboard. We don't have one to sell you, and neither does anyone else—because if AI isn't recommending your brand, that's usually a trust problem wearing a tooling costume.  In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich makes the case that trust is a supply chain with stations you cannot skip, and she walks through the three shortcuts that failed in public last year. You'll also learn why getting cited by an AI engine isn't the finish line, and how to tell an awareness problem from a belief problem. Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-trust/  Links: Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/  The full eight-week arc, from the CMO operating system post through the Duolingo diagnostic, is at spinsucks.com

Duolingo built the internet's favorite brand on rented land—the best shared media engine on the planet, run through one green owl on platforms it doesn't control. In this month's PESO Model® Diagnostic, Gini Dietrich looks at what the legend leaves out: an owned media record too thin to defend the brand when the 2025 "AI-first" backlash hit. You'll learn why Duo's chaos is actually disciplined character work, why AI engines ignore your funniest channel and cite your machine-readable record instead, and the three fixes that apply to any brand being told to "just go viral." Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/duolingo-peso-model-diagnostic/ Links: Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/  The series so far: Budweiser, Liquid Death, Peppa Pig, and HubSpot at spinsucks.com

Your best work goes into review sounding like your brand, only to come out sounding like a terms-of-service update—and legal isn't actually to blame. Nearly 80% of CMOs tell Lippincott that bureaucracy regularly interferes with decision-making, and that's not a culture problem—it's a brand-erosion mechanism. In this episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich breaks down the difference between compliance bureaucracy and the self-inflicted kind, and shares the quarterly content pod system regulated teams use to ship fast without skipping review. Links: Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/org-chart-brand-sabotage/   Lippincott CMO Outlook 2026: https://www.lippincott.com/cmo-outlook-2026/  Free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/  PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

AI tools are already answering questions about your brand—to your buyers, your board, and the journalists who cover you—and they're confidently wrong often enough that one Minnesota company is suing Google for as much as $210 million over a lawsuit its AI invented. To make matters worse, Muck Rack research shows that in 29% of organizations, nobody owns this at all. In this episode, Gini Dietrich shares the four-move discipline for governing what AI says about your brand—baseline the narrative, fix your source of truth, correct the record with infrastructure, and give the work an owner—and make the case that this is reputation management, which means it belongs to communicators. Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-reputation-management/  Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/Explore the PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/