Comms Confidential: The Podcast

What actually counts as good coverage once an AI answer is the first thing your buyer reads? Brett Farmiloe has the answer.From financial auditor to a sixteen-thousand-mile road trip interviewing strangers about their careers, Brett Farmiloe is now Founder and CEO of Featured.com, where he bought and revived two of the most recognizable brands in public relations, HARO and Connectively.In the season finale episode, we discuss why PR has split into more than twenty-six separate jobs, what AI detection on every HARO pitch revealed about how the industry really works, why a third of journalists now refuse AI-written pitches outright, how a small blog can outrank a major outlet inside an AI answer, where a PR professional's working day now begins, what still has to pass through a human before anything gets sent, and much more.Learn more about Featured at www.featured.comConnect with Brett at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettfarmiloe/

When is the right time to build your professional network? Daniel Méndez Aróstica has the answer, and most communicators miss it.From landing in the US from Chile in December 2015 with no local network and a newborn, to starting CommsJobs, one of the largest open job-sharing communities for communicators on LinkedIn, Daniel rebuilt his professional life from nothing and then built the thing he wished had existed.In this episode, we discuss why networking works best when you need nothing from it, how a single hashtag grew into country and regional groups around the world, why Daniel refuses to own or monetize any of it, and much more.Connect with Daniel at https://www.linkedin.com/in/commsjobs/Join CommsJobs at https://www.thecommsjobs.com/subscribe or https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12960212/

After fifteen years inside big agencies, what finally makes a PR pro walk away from the steady paycheck and bet on himself? Adam Belmont has the answer.Adam Belmont is the founder of A-to-B Strategies, a fractional strategic communications practice based in Dallas. From his first internship at Edelman to more than a decade across Ogilvy and ICR, where he rose to managing director, Adam spent his career putting other people in the spotlight before deciding it was time to turn it on himself.In this episode, we discuss leaving agency life, the rise of the fractional PR model, building a referral pipeline before there's an opportunity on the table, running LinkedIn as a storefront instead of a website, pitching podcasts the way you'd pitch a journalist, the question that finally pushed him to start his own firm, and much more.Connect with Adam at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambelmont/.

Eighty percent of PR professionals know they need to network. Fewer than half actually do it. Monique Kelley has the answer.From a decade on the agency side at Weber Shandwick, to leading internal and external communications at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, to a full-time professorship at Boston University’s College of Communication, Monique Kelley has now built a consulting practice with no website and no marketing spend, almost entirely through relationships.In this episode, we discuss the AI blind spot that nearly tanked a client’s gym launch, the three-step framework behind her book Redefining Networking, why introverts often out-network extroverts, internal networking and executive sponsorship, what her Boston University students get right that older generations didn’t have the chance to learn, and much more.Connect with Monique on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moniquekelleygigliotti/Check out Redefining Networking at https://www.redefiningnetworkingbook.com/

What does it actually take to move a communications team from prompting to building?Enter Dan Lewis, a trained lawyer who became the first social media lead at Sesame Workshop, wrote Cookie Monster’s Reddit AMA, and built a daily trivia email newsletter to more than 100,000 subscribers over 15 years without a dollar of paid acquisition. Now he writes the Comms Stack to help comms pros figure out AI the same way he figures out everything: by building in public.In this episode, we discuss the difference between prompting and building, how to structure a comms AI tiger team, why not hiring junior practitioners is the real AI mistake, the Beehiiv vs. Substack decision, what 15 years of daily writing teaches you about creative endurance, and much more.

How does a comms team actually build the case for hiring someone dedicated to AI? Erin Miller has the answer.Erin Miller is VP of Global Corporate Communications at Yahoo, where she's spent the last two years helping reposition a 30-year-old brand for a new era. Her path runs from Porter Novelli and Condé Nast through Meta and Handshake to Yahoo, nearly two decades built on the same instinct: relationships outlast any one job.In this episode, recorded live at Cannes Lions, we discuss how Yahoo built the business case for a dedicated AI operations hire inside its comms team, what actually works (and doesn't) for first-time and repeat Cannes attendees, how Yahoo measures impact beyond the festival, and much more.Connect with Erin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinfrostmiller/

AI is shaping every aspect of the communications field. From content development to agents that can help with crisis plans, there's no avoiding it anymore.In this episode of Comms Confidential, Adam Pratt, the Director of Issues and Government Communications at IBM, and Tiffany Guarnaccia, the CEO and Founder of Kite Hill PR, discuss the difference between using AI and building systems, information hygiene before any implementation, measuring productivity shifts from admin to strategy, the agency-client AI relationship, human oversight as AGI approaches, AI skills stratification in the communications industry, and much more.

Susan Oguche spent 20 years climbing the comms ladder, from P&G to Nike to CCO of the Cleveland Cavaliers and now the founder of Brilliance Communications.In this episode she breaks down:•  The three-stage journey from doer to strategist to trusted advisor and why you can’t skip the rungs.•  Why adaptability is the one superpower that scales across every company culture.•  How her lean Cavs team became early AI adopters when the tools were barely ready.•  What she’s building now for mid-market clients navigating GEO and content infrastructure.•  The AI ethics question she can’t stop thinking about and why trust erosion is the biggest risk for all of us.Closing principle: “Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all.”Find Susan at linkedin.com/in/susanoguche and brilliancecomms.comCommunications, rebuilt from the middle out.

What does it actually take to prove the value of internal communications? Regine Nelson and Keith Berman have the answer—and they don’t agree on everything.Regine Nelson went from travel PR in 2003 to PayPal and a string of in-house tech roles, taking a six-year break to raise three children before returning as sharp as she left. Keith Berman started as an FM rock radio DJ, became a journalist for a decade, and transferred every skill he had into corporate communications—a career arc he'd tell you at a party whether you asked or not.In this episode, we discuss how to measure IC impact without hard metrics, the push/pull distribution framework that drove a 625% increase in open rates, why every M&A playbook fails on execution, using AI for listening and workflow automation, the career path from external to internal, and much more.Find Keith Berman at https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithberman1/ Find Regine Nelson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/reginenelson/ and https://www.reginenelson.com/

Brooke Kruger founded KC Partners in 2009 out of the financial crisis, built the business by treating candidate relationships the same way she ran media relations on the agency side, and has spent 16 years placing senior communications professionals at high-growth tech companies, VC firms, agencies, and corporations. This episode is a practitioner briefing on the current state of comms hiring: what AI fluency actually means in an interview room, why references now need to be ready within an hour, how companies are ghosting candidates and what that costs their brand, and what a clean hiring process actually looks like from both sides of the table.Connect with Brooke at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookechilenkruger/ and KC Partners at https://kc-partners.com/