Jeremy Weisz 12:21
There’s a lot to unpack there. So what I got is the sub-process, whether it’s sex trafficking, whether it’s Pringles, it’s a very similar process, from the research and education to identifying the stakeholders to speaking to the stakeholders, you’re getting it firsthand, engaging, influencers and the media, which may, again, be a number of things. I mean, it could be like you said that experiential marketing, it could be paid ads, it could be a newsreel. It could be so many things under that. And then you think of it as like an emotional and intellectual because people make decisions based on emotions, right. But we want to back it up with the intellectual things and the facts. And you mentioned, we talked before we hit record about, sometimes these things are combating fake news, things that are totally not true. And people have opinions, and there’s a lot of gray between people having opinions and fake news. And how do you think about, and you’ve been a journalist, I know you’re a producer at CBC Radio. I mean, you were communications at McGill, your experience goes way, way back in journalism. How do you balance this thought of free speech? And just misinformation that people are sharing?
Judy Lewis 13:51
They’re two completely different things. And we are very committed to free speech. We are Canada, we are a diverse country, and there many different voices. And that’s very important that everybody does have a voice, as long as it is based on fact. So, people are allowed opinions and opinions are different than facts. And I think that if people state opinions as opinions, everybody has a right to an opinion, if people state information as fact and we certainly saw this through the COVID pandemic, of people claiming fact, which was not backed, and it became very important and I think it was a prime example of when academics became so very important when the medical community needed to speak up and correct misinformation. So I do want to say that developing brand campaigns is not formulaic. In other words, there are tactics in which we look at. But each one has to really, I think, become that much better through the use of creativity. And it is our creativity combined with the understanding of what the public is really interested in knowing about and combining those two things in making good information. Now, we talk all about being storytellers. And we are storytellers and the idea of storytelling is to take information, honest, ethical information and make it understandable to many. And I think that that’s what we as communicators have this great power to do is, as you say, unpack a lot of complex information and make it understandable.
Jeremy Weisz 16:07
I want to talk about brand identity, right? Because a lot of companies will come, what are they asking you for? I don’t know if they show up at your door and say, I want a new brand identity, what are they? What’s the issue that they’re experiencing that they’re coming to you for? And then I want to talk a little about maple leaf in this realm. But what like a company like Maple Leaf or whoever, what are they actually the issue they’re experiencing, but they’re actually asking, like, we need to work on our brand identity.
Judy Lewis 16:37
Many of our brands that we work with are well-established companies. So they do have brand identity already. But it is brand identity that is not necessarily well understood, or that it doesn’t have what we say legs, it doesn’t have different pillars on which it sits to have a personality the same way a person has a personality. So when we do think about a brand, we do say, what do you stand for? What do you do? And they say, well, we’re a healthy brand. Okay, well tell me more about that. And that’s where we are very much able to help a brand, figure out its story and tell its story in a meaningful way. And I think that that would be a very easy segue into Maple Leaf foods, which is one of Canada’s most highly respected food company itself. It has many brands under it, we know it most from Maple Leaf, but there are other brands that are underneath the mega-brand, if you will, and they are very well known for the product and their deli meats etc. But people did not understand the incredible work that they had done to become a carbon-neutral company, carbon zero, that is a huge feat for a company not really aware of the great work that they’re doing in regenerative agriculture, animal welfare, clean ingredients that are going into the feed that is feeding the animals and the care that it takes in all aspects of it production. Now in Canada, there isn’t really a debate that there is global warming, we accept as a nation that there is global warming, and we have seen it through the wildfires and the huge swings in temperature and so on so forth, this is affecting agriculture, that is the first area that is affected by it. And therefore it becomes very important. So we created a day that was called Little Changes Day. And this campaign has won many awards and we are coming up to Little Changes Day in November again, and it is a time where we are able to celebrate the company having gone carbon neutral, but also helping consumers understand what they can do and the little changes they can make within their own life to become more sustainable. We did something that was quite interesting, and we created something on their website. called the Green Glossary. And when we originally proposed it, the client said, Well, why would we do that? And we said, well, we know through all our research, the number one thing is, not all Canadians really understand what sustainability is, they don’t necessarily understand what carbon neutral is. So we created this information, which is now used by many different audiences, including consumers, schools, and so on, so forth. But it is honest, real information that consumers can engage in. And people can understand a little bit more about what Maple Leaf is doing. We have been welcomed on to many TV stations, many influencers have supported us, so that we are able to tell the story, and this campaign has been named, you know, best of the best for getting the information out, but also continues to really have impact for the brand. And research is showing that the brand, that movement is happening, so it’s very impactful.
Jeremy Weisz 21:22
Judy, again, if someone’s watching the video, if they’re not watching the video, here it is, we’re actually looking at the strategicobjectives.com page. And this is some of the work that you did with Maple Leaf foods showing the join little challenges Home Challenge, which it looks like it’s on November 7. And then the Green Glossary, where you were talking about and some of the other things and you mentioned a piece of this, it’s hard, you’re kind of distilling all this information into what’s digestible. And you’re thinking, okay, what’s emotional, what’s intellectual, and there’s a definitely art and a science to that. But part of it is also reaching out and having it spread. And you’ve been very successful doing that. What are some mistakes you’ve seen people make when reaching out to the influencers or media? And then what are some things that just are tried and true that people should be thinking about when they want to get their message out there?
Judy Lewis 22:18
Well, I think the most important thing is that brands need to be honest in supporting issues, it’s not just a marketing campaign, it has to be a commitment from the company. So I would say that the errors that we have seen that we always guard against is what people call greenwashing or pinkwashing, which is using an issue strictly for marketing purposes. And that is not what we do. And we advise the game set. And I would say that the companies we are involved with are the companies that choose us, because we feel the same way. So we are working with progressive companies who want more people to understand the great work that they are doing, or if they haven’t identified it, and this comes back to our brand’s identity. Clients do come to us and say, we need to advance our profile within communities. And we want your help to do that. And that would be a prime example of what we do with KIA. And we created a beautiful program together with KIA called Communities in Motion. And that supports a variety of small community organizations that will advance their ability to become more environmental in one way or another. And that could be in food sustainability. It could be in bicycle repairs, and repairing kiosks that are setting up in communities where the kids don’t have money to have their bicycles repairs, it could be quite a broad number of different initiatives. And then we back it up by supporting the organizations but then also profiling them to inspire other communities as well.
Jeremy Weisz 24:37
I’m sure when you were a producer, you probably got tons in still today we get tons of incoming messages, incoming pitches, there’s a lot of incoming information you before now you probably have great relationships with lots of influencers and media, but before you did, how did you get their attention, right? Because they’re getting in when you were that you were getting flooded with, okay, these 15 companies all sound and look good. And maybe there’s another 30 that’s like, okay, these are terrible. But how did you break through the noise when you were reaching out to the media?
Judy Lewis 25:16
Since the beginning, we very much positioned ourselves as a switchboard of information. So we were sitting between clients on one side, and the media on the other, understanding both and understanding their objectives, and being able to put them together in a way that made sense. And I think that there are a lot of public relations, people who have not been trained in identifying what journalists really want. And that is why journalists will say, sometimes people waste their time, we are very specific in, first of all, choosing outstanding people to join our team, but then putting the time into training them, and sharing the background, and creating situations where journalists can actually help our people. And we help journalists discover great stories together. And we are facilitators, we are not pushers, we are not spin masters, we are people that are really interested in getting good information out to consumers. And I think that that does differentiate them. And I think that when journalists speak to our team and members of our team, because I’m not the only one speaking to people, that they understand that we are coming about it with information that is relevant to them, and relevant to their consumers. And that may be on a cookie, or it may be on an issue. But there is a story that brings relevance to it.
Jeremy Weisz 27:08
What made you decide to start your company? You could have gone on this path with being the producer of these companies, but you chose to start your own company, why?
Judy Lewis 27:25
I am an entrepreneur. And I guess because I wanted to define my own destiny. And I think that for many years having worked in media, you’re not controlling your own destiny because media has, and we’ve seen that has collapsed all around us. And now there’s why there’s so many podcasts and why there are so many independent people now. So when we looked at it, having been journalists, the one thing that we identified was the public relations, people did not know how to pitch stories with relevant. And we too experienced PR people calling us and say, hey, I want you to interview my author, I want you to interview my CEO. And we kind of say well, why and that’s when the stories stopped. So we really, first of all, like every entrepreneur, which started because we had a customer, we had this person that called us and said, we understand you’re great communicators, and we’d love to have you just start work with us. And it just really built and built and built from there.
Jeremy Weisz 28:56
What was one of the early milestones you mentioned, I know who is that customer another because you’ve seen quite a landscape in it started back in 1983. Right. So what was the first major milestone for Strategic Objective?
Judy Lewis 29:11
Our first client ever was a man by the name of Frank Stronach, who runs Magnet International, and that was to help him launch an incredible United Way campaign. So from the very beginning, it was in the idea of helping communities so I think that that was a milestone. It was also a milestone to understand that someone so high up within the corporate world, actually cared as much as he did. How did he find us? Through our media producers, really, he went out and he found journalists who were able to work In communications, so that’s what how he found us. And then our early clients was one of our first clients and our largest clients was Marks and Spencer, and Marks and Spencer was coming over from the UK to Canada, and had launched one store not very successfully. And they ultimately built that chain up to over 120 stores, which we supported. So we were literally immediately into the retail business, we were into the food business, we were into the fashion business, we were in to the retail business, we were in a publicly listed, we were supporting a publicly listed company. So we were all of a sudden, very involved in many aspects of business. And then from there, our clients very quickly grew, whether it might have been the Body Shop, or it was Pfizer, and the launch of Viagra and taking Viagra out of the category of being a joke to identifying this was a very valid drug. The ED was an issue that many men faced couples faced, and it became a very important health matter that we addressed. So it really kind of started in quite different broad categories. And then we brought in financial services. And we were operating in all sectors. And I believe that it is our journalistic background, and I’m not from the fashion industry or the beauty business, but serious journalism, to take that information-gathering approach, and that curiosity and to decide that I could make that into together with my business partner, my sister to take that curiosity and build it into a business.
Jeremy Weisz 32:00
Talk about your sister for a second. What’s it like starting a company and working with your sister? Well, I have two siblings. And I think I mean, at times we fought like dogs. And sometimes is a love hate thing. But I think more love than hate.
Judy Lewis 32:15
That’s good to hear, that’s to hear. I believe it’s more love, and equally, if not even more important trust. And trust has been something that Deborah and I have always known that is absolutely fundamental to the two of us. And also something that we believed was fundamental to our success, because our clients trusted us as trusted advisors, and that we would be honest with our recommendations. And I think that in working together with the business partner, you have to be incredibly honest, and as sisters, we could be very honest, while being very trusting. And I think in our early days, we would actually work on the same account. And we would, as you say, fight, I don’t know if it was fight, I would say debate creative ideas. But the client won because they got the best of the thinking of the two of us. And I think that that has been something that has grown within our company, we really do believe two heads are better than one we believe in collaboration, and we believe is very important. Particularly in the ideation process of coming up with the best ideas, figuring out what research needs to be done, is that when you are working as a team, whether that be two or many, you really can get the best out of that.
Jeremy Weisz 33:47
To start any company, it’s usually one or two people, in this case you and your sister, what was the first key hire and isn’t the person but just position that you’re like, we can’t do this ourselves? What were some of the first key hire and maybe some key hires that helped you grow your company?
Judy Lewis 34:18
I would say that when we founded our company, in the very, from day one, we said we really wanted to focus on what we did best, which was communications. And therefore our first hires were in the area of finance and administration so that we had trusted people who knew what they were doing, to be able to do that financial management of our small little company to advise us now I consider myself quite epically able to do that work. And I can look at balance sheets and very quickly kind of know exactly what needs to be done. But that wasn’t in the early days. So we supported ourselves in the area of hiring people that would complement our expertise. And then as we grew, we brought in other communicators, usually quite junior and train them to do things the way that we believe that things should be done, and I now serve on one of the communications colleges advisory board in the area of curriculum, because that has always been an issue, what are the students learning in school that will be relevant to contemporary communications, and very often the schools are behind. So right now I play a role in helping the school develop proper programming of what influencer relations should look like? What are the ethics of influencer marketing? How do you bring diversity and inclusion into that area? What are the issues of social media and brand building that you need to loop together?
Jeremy Weisz 36:30
I have one last question. Judy, before I ask, I just want to thank you for sharing your journey. Thanks for sharing your expertise. And I want to encourage people to check out strategicobjectives.com to learn more. And I’m curious, my last question is any recommended resources, it could be books, it could be maybe just people that you know that you follow that were colleagues and mentors that people should check out? But what are some resources that if someone’s listening, from a business communication standpoint, what should they be checking out?
Judy Lewis 37:07
Well, I think that both in Canada and the US, there are associations and public relations that really do put a lot of information up for free. And whether that is PRSA, which is the Public Relations Society of America, or Canadian Public Relations Society, both of those have exceptional amount of information. There are also numerous podcasts, which really, if you just Google Public Relations, that’s great. There’s also a guy up here in Canada called Tony Chapman who runs a podcast and he has something that talks about Chatter That Matters and he interviews a variety of different entrepreneurs and people who have overcome difficulties. So that’s kind of interesting. And then I would say, whether it be our LinkedIn, our blogs, our website, whether it’s our company, or several other of the large communications companies do put up information where you can learn more. So I welcome, if people want to get in touch if they want to check out our website and they find something interest in, we are always looking to help brands and have brands be highly successful both in Canada and the United States. And I would say the one thing with influencer marketing and influencer relations, it is completely digital. And therefore we are now doing significant amount of work that is not just Canada, but it is Canada, the US, because our clients span the borders and influenced to spend borders and have influence on both sides at the border. So that’s been a real growth area, within public relations and particularly for our business. Whether that particularly for brands, whether it be automotive, food, beauty, anyone that needs to connect with consumers needs to be in social media connecting in an honest ethical way and in a strategic way.
Jeremy Weisz 39:39
Judy, I want be the first one to thank you everyone, check out strategicobjectives.com and more episodes of the podcast and I want to be the first one. Thank you and thanks, everyone.
Judy Lewis 39:48
Thank you. Take care.
