Modern PR Unpacked with Nick Cowling

Justin Levinson (00:00)‍

Hey everybody. Welcome to the agency side podcast. I'm your host Justin Levinson. And today I'm joined by Nick Cowling. Nick is the CEO of Citizen, a leader who's helping redefine what public relations looks like in an era where brands reputation is everything. With three decades of experience guiding teams and businesses to global success. He brings a tomorrow first philosophy that blends public relations with performance, data, and intelligence. Giving clients the clarity, confidence, and courage they need to stay visible and competitive in a fast changing world.

Nick, it's so great to be with you today.

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Nick Cowling (00:32)

It's great to be here, Justin. Appreciate it.

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Justin Levinson (00:34)

And you are, you in Toronto? Is that where you're located?

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Nick Cowling (00:37)

I'm in Toronto today, yeah.

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Justin Levinson (00:39)

Awesome. have great, I love Toronto. I've been there a handful of times as a touring musician and I've been there for the North by Northeast music festival, which I really enjoyed being in your city. It's a lovely place.

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Nick Cowling (00:51)

Great. Yeah, it's really cold today. So maybe not best day to visit,

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Justin Levinson (00:55)

Well, it's wonderful having you today. Just to get into it, maybe you can just, for someone who might not be familiar with Citizen, just kind of describe to us what you guys are doing.

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Nick Cowling (01:03)

Sure. We're an international, I call us a midsize international PR agency. So based with offices across Canada, the US and the UK. We probably most of our business or most of our work that people might be familiar with is more obviously on the consumer marketing end of PR, but we do quite a bit of corporate reputation work as well. So we work across industries. So whether it's transportation, food and beverage, CPG, travel and tourism and the like.

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Justin Levinson (01:33)

Cool. And I'm interested in your personal journey. How did you kind of get started in this particular space?

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Nick Cowling (01:38)

It's interesting. When I first went to college, I had no idea really what I wanted to do. So I just took business admin. I liked, was drawn to the marketing part of the school, even though I'm, I'm pretty good at math. Accounting was my least favorite. And I remember I met someone who did public relations for the school that I was going to and I had a coffee with her and she was telling me what she was doing. I was like, that sounds a lot like what I really want to do.

I looked into it a little bit further, of course, at the same college, they happen to have a PR course. It was one of only two in the country at the time. So I switched programs the following year and then I landed at my first agency right out of school.

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Justin Levinson (02:19)

What was

your first role in a PR agency?

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Nick Cowling (02:21)

I was an account coordinator in the advanced technology group at Hill and Nolten, which I was, I was working on. God, was it Microsoft maps? And like, I mean, stuff from 30 years ago, tech was not very tech then, but yeah, it was, was new at the time.

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Justin Levinson (02:38)

Yeah, that's super cool. so from, from account manager, what was sort of like the next promotion, just kind of curious in your back.

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Nick Cowling (02:44)

Well, I stayed there for a couple of years and as people knew on the agency side, after a couple of years I switched. I actually went to a smaller agency to see if that was a better fit for me. I loved the experience, but I was a little bored to be honest. I just didn't have enough work. And, but you know, that actually allowed me to engage. Like I was spending a lot of face to face time with journalists, meeting different stakeholder groups, in what I'll call my free time, my non billable time.

And that led to actually Edelman, who's I think the still the largest in the world at the time had recently acquired an agency in Canada and was building up. They reached out to me because they were looking for someone who was good at media relations. And my name kept coming up when they asked media about it. So I went over there, which is a great experience. I was there for five and a half years. And then I got poached by one of my clients at the Home Depot.

So I went in-house and it was eye-opening, absolutely eye-opening in so many ways. And when I first got there, I loved it because it was just really, I don't want to call it wild west, but it's like everyone did what was best for the company. Like you never heard the words, that's not my job. But towards the end of my sort of five to six years, I went from, like became very bureaucratic. And I mean, I went from having to get approval on things like from two or three people to 13.

So I couldn't get anything done. And I told, when I told my president, I was like, I'm going to start looking. And the only thing that was holding me there was her. was my best mentor ever. She understood. And she was actually, she mentioned it to a couple of people. And one of them, my boss today said, Hey, know, Annette said you might be looking, would you consider coming back to agency? And I hadn't thought about it, but you know, the rest is history. I've been here for 18 years now. That's when I landed at that citizen. Wow. ⁓

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Justin Levinson (04:36)

That's awesome.

Yeah, that's quite the journey. What sort of is your day to day now? What's a CEO? What does your job look like?

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Nick Cowling (04:44)

Well, you know what, it's got some things that I just absolutely love about it. And then I'd say there's some things I miss. So my day to day now is really about kind of providing a vision and direction for the agency. So I'm very much, I don't know if you're into Enneagrams, but I'm a seven. So I'm often thinking about what's next. And my personality, if you will, is to say like, hi, how can we push this further? How can we do things better? What else should we be considering?

And so I spend a lot of time about that. gets the, provides me with a lot of energy, but I do miss, I don't work with clients nearly as much. Like I might be brought in if there's a serious crisis or sort of a senior level client meeting that requires me. Maybe, maybe a pitch, but it's 10 % of my time these days. I definitely miss that. I miss that. And I miss working with the day-to-day teams. Cause I think one of my favorite things about agency is actually watching, you know, young talent develop and helping them figure out the next.

skill that they're going to acquire and, you know, how they'll continue to progress. But as I said, I can't do everything. So I'm very happy to kind of work through my, my team, my executive team to again, continue to engage and build on the agency and, then coach them to be doing what they should be with their teams.

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Justin Levinson (05:58)

Yeah. imagine that this industry has changed a lot since you first got into it as an account manager a while back. know, what does it look like now in comparison to how it looked before when you got into the industry?

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Nick Cowling (06:11)

I have, well, you know, my first day at Hill and Milton, I spent eight hours pretty much standing at a fax machine and then press releases to a newsroom and then calling them to make sure they got my fax. Even at the time, you know, usually like newsrooms had one computer in the middle that could receive email. even though as agency, we had email, it wasn't a reliable communication source because

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Justin Levinson (06:21)

What's a fax machine?

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Nick Cowling (06:41)

often those things who got missed. Fast forward to probably what 2007, 2008, that's sort of the birth, if you will, when social was starting to become mainstream. So shift then, and probably continual evolution. I think the, you know, the adoption curve of just technology as a whole, the fragmentation of media, you know, the unfortunate, I'll say, business model that

media, traditional media had sort of bringing on their quasi demise, have really shifted the form of public relations. Now, a lot of people, let's say outside of the discipline, would often say that public relations kind of equals media relations, but it's not quite true. PR is in some ways misunderstood as, you know, agencies like Citizen are telling our clients what to say.

PR is much more about helping companies act in the way that they should. So that they're getting to the right audience, that they're connecting on the right messages, that they're, even if it's about promoting products and services, it's doing it in a way that's going to actually engage with the right audience, right? A constituency that needs the product or service is going to engage them in the right way and allow them to create conversation about it rather than just hearing about it, you know, sort of that one way.

communication. now, mean, fast forward today, mean, AI having such an impact on so many different disciplines and marketing, believe it or not, it's probably the best thing that's happened to PR in a decade or more. Because AI, the LLMs are looking for the most trusted authoritative content available on the internet. And that's what we generate. You know, I think I saw some

rough numbers to suggest that I think like they will pull 10 % of their content from social, roughly 30 % from owned and the rest of it is coming from again, that, that authoritative, which tends to be institutions, academic and media, right? Trusted media. So it's having a massive impact in the sense of, what we're able to do. And at the same time, allowing us to measure some true value for our clients.

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Justin Levinson (09:00)

Yeah, that's interesting. And you guys have a very like unique offering too, because it's not, you guys aren't just a traditional PR agency. You're actually doing influencer marketing and, and experiential. You're, you're, you're almost like a creative agency and a PR agency. I'd be interested to learn more about, more about that. And if I'm actually describing that correctly. Thanks for tuning in folks. This episode is brought to you by Coming Up Creative, a relationship first boutique creative recruitment agency.

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Nick Cowling (09:54)

No, you're absolutely right. we have, so citizens part of a, I'll call it a network. I wouldn't quite call it a holding company, but a network of other agencies. So all the disciplines, know, media buying, advertising, promotion and such are a part of the network. And I mentioned I'm a seven. So when I take a look around at some of these other disciplines, I'm like, you know, I think the strategic planning is really critical when I look at a creative agency.

as well as the creative teams. But I wonder, like, how can we apply that to our discipline? Right? So I'm not looking to be a creative agency, but I do want to provide really great insights to drive our work. And from a creative standpoint, I want to create what we would call sort of more earn-first creative, which I feel is what a lot of creative agencies are now trying to build themselves to create. Because, you know, our job is to put something into the world again, that's going to...

I'll say broadly be newsworthy, generate that conversation, right? We want the right audiences to be talking about our clients rather than just hearing from our clients. And so, you know, we brought in strap planning probably in 2015, 2016. And then we were at that time, we were kind of renting creative teams from our sister.

just to try and figure out like what's the right type of creative agents or creative team and that's going to fit with our business. How do we brief them properly to kind of get the stuff that we're looking for? You know, it was funny. I remember hearing it from a team probably three or four years after we started and they said, you know what? love doing some stuff with Citizen. I was like, no, why? Like, cause you do like all of the back of the deck stuff. And I was like, back of the deck? What do you mean? Like we, you we present to our, our advertising clients and we have to go through all the

you know, here's everything and then the radio and outdoor and what it'll look like in print and on TV and blah, blah, blah. And then we have these cool wicked ideas in the back of the deck and we never get to them. But you guys only present back in the deck. So I was like, oh, I like that. I like that a lot. And then we brought on XM. It was a natural evolution. I we were, we were doing a number of, I'll call them events, right. As opposed to experiences at the time.

And so that was a quick add on. But as we got better at it, we realized like, you know what? There's a lot of opportunity and experience. Of course that creates a lot of news value of, know, even at the time, I mean, social was still in its infancy, but there was still the idea that obviously people were sharing content and the way they were doing that most was when they had something they felt was unique, they wanted to share with their circle. So we started to build on that. And then we got into, I'll call it more about

uh, more of a technology and intelligence probably in 2020, end of 2020 when, you know, data was really starting to be something of value to PR. It's always, it's long been a very tough thing. Well, I want to say it's tough. It's long chosen. It's long, long been a discipline that's been, um, cost prohibitive to measure because couldn't take credit for what some other marketing disciplines were already take credit for.

Um, and so we are kind of stuck in these vanity metrics, impressions, engagement, that sort of stuff. But that changed in the, again, in 2019, 2020 is data became more readily available. And so we started to build an intelligence team that today, I mean, some of the stuff like now we're talking about connecting to commercial metrics, advocacy, brand health evaluation. Like it's changed again, if you ask me.

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Justin Levinson (13:32)

And that stuff you can all, you can present to your clients and they can have full transparency and see how, how things are.

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Nick Cowling (13:38)

Exactly. Exactly. So now having full broad spectrum of those capabilities, we bring them to bear, not again to be a digital agency or a research company or a creative agency, but to be quite frankly, just a better badass PR agency.

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Justin Levinson (13:53)

Yeah. so you mentioned kind of like the strategy department. I'd be curious to just kind of know what other kind of roles and positions are within the whole agency itself.

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Nick Cowling (14:02)

Well,

as I said, outside of, mean, we have the PR, which tends to in our business tends to largely be the client service group as well. So that's kind of one, one area I think PR and creative agencies differ is like, those are very separate. Like you don't have experts and client service as the same person, but we do. We would have again, the creative teams, as you would know at a strategic planning group.

You know, our, our digital team is everything from creative technologists through to, we call them decision engineers, but they are the guys who do stuff. They can post on social, they can, you know, create some low code or no code websites or that sort of thing. And then intelligence group, largely they are data analysts. We used to have more research analysts, but that's actually flipped over particularly over the last couple of years. And then our experiential group who are.

probably well suited in maximizing sponsorships or they may create experiences, bespoke experiences for clients.

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Justin Levinson (15:01)

I was kind of doing some reading that you guys have, you're awarded like agency of the year, best places to work as an award. I'm guessing that's a lot, a part of your job too is, is making, you know, at a great place to be the curious kind of like your thoughts on that and, kind of your, secret sauce and keeping everybody happy.

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Nick Cowling (15:19)

Well, you know what, I don't know if I can keep everybody happy all the time. And I think it's, it's interesting over, was much more, I'll say predictable, let's say prior to the pandemic. And I found more recently, and I think this is like ubiquitous, depending on regardless of market that in the pandemic, I mean, there was no playbook for how to deal with employees or clients or what, whatever else was going on.

And so it really just felt, I'll sort of describe it. I don't mean to put, um, to make light of it, but it's like everyone needed a hug every day. Yeah. And you know, when you do that long enough, it creates a bit of a habit, right? And then of course we went into 2021, the great resignation. And so we were, you know, bending over backwards in order to get people to avoid taking the next $5,000 and multiple roles that were being thrown their way. Um,

You know, that kind of curved off in 20, end of 23 and in 2024, I would say that's sort of when the economy cooled. That was probably, it may have even started late 23 at that point, but 24 was that most definitely like we saw no attrition. was no roles. In fact, people were starting to lay off and so forth. And now this year, which has got mega mergers and cuts all over the place, concerns about AI replacing humans and so forth.

We have particularly this last 12 months tried to be quite intentional about shifting away from what I would call could be created as this like culture of nice, right? Where we got so used to just being really nice to everyone and to each other every day that we stopped being kind in the sense that we weren't being direct and caring.

almost having this well-called radical candor. think that's Kim Scott, think is, wanted to coin that and she has her own consultancy now. The best thing you can do is actually let someone know whether it's again, constructive criticism or praise, right? Being specific, saying why it's important. And that has been a bit of a journey, right? It's not, you don't change a habit overnight, especially one that you created over a course of years. And that's one piece of it.

Because that's where I think we're finally back to a stage where people are now looking at their career and it's not about like, how are you going to get me through the pandemic? know, who's going to pay me another five or 10 K to do the same job. or, know, Hey, are you going to be doing layoffs? And do I need to just find security to now getting back to this place where, and again, regardless of generation, people are saying like, you know what, actually I want to like build on my skillset. want to get to the next level. I'm going to continue to earn.

and progress through this career. And I think it took a little while, two couple of years coming out of the pandemic to say, okay, back to business. Yes, the economy is a little ridiculous. Everything costs a lot more than it did just five years ago. Salaries, let's admit, did not move at the same pace. Certainly it did not sit at the same percentages. And so, hey, if I'm going to make more, I'm going to be successful and, you know, sort of see

a place for me in the future, then I'm going to take that, my own destiny into my own hands. And so that's another place we've been pushing is on a call, proudly development, right? Making sure people have really great goals. So the role competencies are clear. So people know what they have to achieve, what skills you need to acquire in order to get to the next level, to make it to the next pay band, to make more money, which is ultimately what.

everyone wants as part of their success. Those two things are certainly contributing to engagement. And then I'd say the third is recognition because this may be controversial, I guess, in the agency world. There's lots of talk about the days in the office. We currently do two days a week in the office. I see that hybrid as being a bit of a, like it has some pros and cons.

Few of the cons are less exposure between all levels. So senior people to juniors and vice versa. The ability to acknowledge and recognize people for a job well done on the spot and some building some of that, what I would call, you know, that sort of in-person traction that you can't get on a video, right? You don't pass someone at the coffee machine or stop them in the hall or randomly walk and grab, pick up lunch when you're on videos, right? You get on video.

Do your 30 minutes, get through your agenda and onto the next one. Some of that additional exposure is part of the learning process and not having that often enough, think it could be detrimental as well. So trying to find and replace a particularly that recognition piece is something that we've also been working on so that it's doesn't feel fluffy. It's not just, you know, a catchall email like that sort of stuff. Doesn't it's not the same as someone.

up a superior or a colleague coming up and saying, like, you did a really great job at this and here's what it delivered to the client. And I just wanted to like call it out, right? It's, not quite the same thing. So those three elements, it's a fluid living thing. And so it's always a battle.

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Justin Levinson (20:25)

Were you fully remote or were you hybrid before the pandemic or was the hybrid thing a change after?

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Nick Cowling (20:31)

had

a work from anywhere policy where you could do that one day a week. I kid you not Justin, like, I don't know what anyone did it. Yeah. Prior to, but the good thing about it when we went into the pandemic, we were set up for it. So we had all the, you know, the we're on a Google enterprise. we had, you know, Google meets and all the, all the protocols and things set up. So it was a relatively easy transition from a tech standpoint. but yeah, now the, of course, mean,

employment culture has shifted so much in such a short timeframe. Now the expectation of coming into the office is, I got to commute and I got to pay for my commute and I need dress clothes and all the things. Right.

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Justin Levinson (21:12)

You make an interesting point because I've talked to many leaders about the transition from hybrid and in office and the differences between those. But I've actually never heard anybody say that one of the tricky parts about the hybrid work model is that you can't offer recognition. I actually have never heard that before as being a pain point that you're actually, it's actually something that employers think they want to offer their employees more recognition, encouragement.

They're not, you don't necessarily get that when you're doing these, like you said, these quick zoom videos where you're just kind of getting to the point and you're moving on to the next thing. So I find that really fascinating. I appreciate you sharing that with us.

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Nick Cowling (21:48)

No problem. mean, so many things I'm sure we'll know years from now, there'll be some science around it, but on the impact of, you know, just the employer, employee social contract has just changed so dramatically. And, know, some things are good about it and there's some things that aren't right. There's always a trade-off.

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Justin Levinson (22:07)

Yeah. far as technology, is there anything that helps your team kind of like stay connected? Do you guys kind of use like Slack or like what sort of like, uh, if you are going to have to connect this way, what's the best way to do it?

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Nick Cowling (22:18)

Well, I mentioned we're on Google enterprise. So we use like G chats and spaces often. So yeah, so large larger groups, account groups, whatever, they'll be on spaces all the time. As I we still try it. So even our days in the office, we try and ask everyone to focus those on collaboration so that like, don't come in here and sit in a corner and be on video calls with stuff or just be writing like do that on your days when you're home. When you're here, spend time with whether it's status meetings or brainstorms or

whatever else you need in order to collaborate with your colleagues, spend that face-to-face time, get the exposure that you might be missing on the other days.

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Justin Levinson (22:54)

I'm curious just on a personal note, what kind of things do you like to enjoy and do outside of your work day?

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Nick Cowling (23:00)

Well, I have two adult children. So I'm often looking for scheming for ways to spend time with them, which they're pretty good about, but I'm sure they see through. But I'm also, I'm a self-proclaimed gym rat. So I go, I go there every morning and I got my kids into it. And so that's how I kind of conned them into spending time with me either, you know, going for a hike or we try mountain climbing or parasailing or whatever it is for, you know, based on what we're doing.

I also coax them into winter vacations because, you know, being in Canada gets cold, as I mentioned earlier. you know, going to the Caribbean before or after Christmas is, you know, an easy, an easy seven days with them.

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Justin Levinson (23:38)

I can understand the cold weather. I'm located in Vermont. I'm not too far from you. We're roughly an hour and a half to Montreal. So I'm pretty close to that neck of the woods.

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Nick Cowling (23:48)

Yeah

So you'd be at least same latitude, maybe even little further north than where I am.

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Justin Levinson (23:57)

Yeah, it's pretty chilly. We have some snow out here right now and I'm not waiting. We have some nice, nice mountains around here. It's pretty, pretty peaceful, nice place to live. But yeah, it's a yearn for the, especially in February, I yearn for the tropical climates and yeah.

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Nick Cowling (24:00)

Way better skiing, way better skiing.

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Justin Levinson (24:14)

cool, man. Well, guess that. Curious. you know, maybe on a final note to, kind of just understand a little bit, if you're seeing any, any, any trends or anything that you're seeing and expecting in the, in the coming year or two in the industry or, know, and how you're planning to adapt to it.

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Nick Cowling (24:32)

Yeah, I think there is, I mean, it's already emerging now, but I think it's going to become more so next year and maybe for a couple of years, but there's like a dual crisis kind of facing the basically facing the industry, right? On one hand, you have this crisis of visibility. So AI is as we know, is cause, you know, paid search to have a huge paradigm shift. know, people are turning to chatbots instead of Google.

And even when you go to Google, it's serving up an AI summary. So the sponsored links are not paying off and when they do, they're costing a whole lot more than they used to. Alternatively, as I mentioned before, like there's no way, I mean, yes, there's some monetization happening in the LLMs, but it's not a paid model where you can just insert your brand and it may or may not ever be because the whole purpose of going to an LLM is to actually get an aggregation, if you will, of sort of factual information. And.

I think if anyone were to say like, Hey, we're going to put an ad in there. think you'd have people drop off like in droves and no one's going to do that in this, you know, hyper competitive market. On the other side, we have this crisis of trust, which AI is also creating where there's so much, I'll call it AI slop on social. is impacting influencers. It's impacting a number of the platforms where even the ads that are coming on there, people are like, is this a real ad?

Or is this a fake company? I can't tell. And so I may see these really super cool shoes, but it's from some company I've never heard of. And I clicked through and it's not really jiving. I immediately back out and saying, you know what, I'm going to go to a Nike or a Ditas because I know what I'm getting. Right. And so now we're, at this point where it's like, I can't trust necessarily that it's going to be fed to me. So, you know, we're already starting to see some of that consumption on social people are still participating. Don't get me wrong, but I think they're consuming less. And they.

When they go the AI, you may or may not be the answer. And that's a problem, right? Because a lot of the content that's out there owned or otherwise is maybe not optimized for the AIs to pick up anyway. And that's going to cause, as I said, what I would formally call reputation become maybe a company's most strategic asset. And it's not just reputation in an unmeasurable or esoteric form. is, as I said, what your employee base.

thinks what level of advocacy you have with them. What does your brand health look like? How are they talking about you and subreddits? know, how are you perpetuated in again, sort of whether it's with analysts or other financial institutions or, know, the even I'll call them the legacy media, but the noted authorities in media, as well as how is that correlating with your product life cycle, the sales visits to your website and so forth.

All of those factors really correlate together. And I think that's what CEOs and CFOs are soon going to realize that, this all revolves around my reputation. If I continue to improve that in the right places, then those sales are going to head up or my website visits or analysts are going to, you know, catalog my stock in a better way. If it goes down, if you're in a, you know, you have a crisis, a product recall, some other kind of issue that will actually, you know, cause you to have the other way.

I think it's going to be critical going forward. Not just, as I said, in a sense where, know, just kind of throwing out hope, but there's actually ways to measure all of those elements of your reputation and being able to do that. And then again, leverage the opportunities you have within that is going to be super important. I think the other piece on particularly on influencer, like I think we're in for a bit of a shift of people will debate between whether they're an influencer or content creator.

And both there is certainly two roles there, but there's such a proliferation with the number of people that are coming online to be various sizes of influencer or creator. there's, you know, as I mentioned with that sort of AI slot, there's a lot of folks that are kind of shrinking their circle on social when they can. And I think that's going to make it tougher and tougher, particularly for that. I will call it the mid group. Like I think micro influencers are going to continue to have trust. They've got a.

a really close circle, right? That people are looking for them because they cover a niche or that they're sort of trusted in that community. And then there's the big names people I know or the like, I think it's the ones in the middle. It's like, I'm not sure if you're selling me this because someone paid you to, or is you creating any of this content that's sort of AI generated? Like, you know, if you're just in this for the money, I don't know that I'm in it for you. So I think there's a bit of a juxtaposition coming in that space too.

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Justin Levinson (29:20)

Yeah. Riches will be in the niches and reputation. That sounds like a really, thing to keep in mind going forward. I appreciate that. Cool, Nick. Well, thank you so much for being on here today and having a conversation and offering value to, to all of our listeners. Yeah. I forward to staying in touch with you in the future and, yeah, really appreciate your time.

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Nick Cowling (29:37)

it sounds great. And thanks again. Thanks again for having us.

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Justin Levinson (29:41)

Take care.

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Nick Cowling (29:42)

All right, bye bye. Bye.