Monthly Archives: November 2023

Over the River and through the Woods: Takeaways from November Travels

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November kicks off the busy holiday travel season and a month of travel it certainly was for the Kimball Hughes Public Relations team. Our colleagues visited Las Vegas, Chicago, Hollywood Beach, Fla., and more. We enjoyed spending time supporting our clients, speaking at events, attending insightful sessions, catching up with our colleagues in the media and making new connections.  

Below are a few takeaways from our November on the road.

Las Vegas

This month, Account Managers James McKinsey and Hari Rajagopalan had the opportunity to join our client at Insurtech Connect Vegas (ITC) 2023, a three-day conference dedicated to discussing the future of insurance and innovation.

One of the industry’s biggest of the year, artificial intelligence (AI) fueled much of the conference discussion. Insurtech and insurance leaders are still attempting to figure out the role of AI in the industry and whether it will truly serve as a disruptor. In fact, one of the most widespread opinions shared throughout the event was that everyone has their own definition of AI, but no one truly knows what it is. We expect AI to be a valuable supplemental tool to insurance businesses, but the industry still is not quite sure of how and where to best utilize this growing technology.

ITC Vegas 2023 also presented a great opportunity to connect with the industry trade press. Reporters from leading insurance organizations including Insurance Journal, National Underwriter, The Insurer, Risk Management, Rough Notes, Digital Insurance and The Institutes were on hand. In our conversations with the media and with various podcasters, we learned there is continued interest in hearing from sources on topics such as the future of work, innovation, AI, climate change and cyber.

Hollywood Beach, FL

Agency President Rod Hughes visited the Sunshine State to speak about crisis communications at the annual meeting of one of our franchise organization clients, as well as to lead two roundtable discussions on the power of public relations to promote new business openings.

As all entrepreneurs know, there are always war stories shared on crises large and small when gathering at these types of events that create teachable moments for others in the audience. A recurring area of concern was online reviews, their impact on the business and the various platform processes and guidelines that can work in a business owner’s favor – when used appropriately – to remove fake, slanderous or otherwise untrue reviews of a business.

Franchisees face myriad demands on their time and attention. Understanding how small things can quickly become big crises, what to look for and how to best manage an existing or potential crisis was information many of these attendees welcomed.

Chicago

This month, Eileen Coyne, agency vice president, had the opportunity to attend the Digital Insurance Women in Insurance Leadership Conference. After enjoying time with the Digital Insurance staff and meeting women leaders from across the industry, she provided two valuable takeaways from speakers related to the challenges that career and homelife present.

  • Break out of Your Comfort Zone. Joan Woodward, executive of public policy for Travelers and president of the Travelers Institute, captured the room with inspiring and amusing stories from her impressive career journey during the evening awards dinner. She encouraged the audience to embrace the unfamiliar, touching on milestones in her extraordinary career on Capitol Hill, at Goldman Sachs, Travelers and more. She urged the crowd to be bold and willing to try new things.
  • Expect and Embrace Flexibility. “I have one life and one calendar,” Kathy Krantz, vice president and chief financial officer at Pinnacol, told the women assembled for a panel on decoding leadership DNA. She said, she incorporates all of her work and parent to-dos on one calendar. She explained that many employers are more understanding now about work-life challenges. No longer should we feel a need to hide work-life challenges from the office as we struggle to navigate the multifaceted demands of life and work.

New York City

No itinerary would be complete without a stop in the Big Apple. Eileen Coyne and Hari Rajagopalan had the opportunity to join the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation at the IICF Northeast Annual Benefit Event in New York City where the nonprofit celebrated another year of giving and volunteerism – a year that saw more than $1 billion in giving industry-wide. IICF gathered leaders from across the insurance industry to celebrate the industry’s efforts, while raising funds for nonprofit grantees in the Northeast region.

It was a wonderful opportunity to cap off and toast an incredible year in charitable giving and volunteerism for the industry that fueled a fun evening of catching up with friends in the insurance media, within the industry, and introduced another chance to make new connections.

With the year nearly wrapped, the team at Kimball Hughes PR would like to express an appreciation for the re-emerging opportunities we have all enjoyed this year enabling us to get together once again in person with colleagues and industry peers. We look forward to seeing many of you on the road again in 2024!

Getting Festive: Four Ways to Celebrate the Holidays with Remote Teams

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There was a time in business when office employees would get dressed up and gather with their coworkers for the office holiday party. As we know all too well, the pandemic changed everything – including those holiday parties.  

Office holiday parties used to be a significant aspect of a company’s culture where people would bond casually and build personal relationships. Not to mention, people looked forward to the celebrations with coworkers when business dialed down for the season.

Though traditional office parties may have fallen out of favor, we have a few ideas to help you mark a successful year and a happy holiday season with your teams near and far.

Tis’ the season for holiday fun

  1. Take a virtual city tour with the team. Consider marking the holidays with your remote team by taking a virtual city or region tour where they can explore tourist sites around the world with a guide local to those places. There are third-party companies that provide immersive tour experiences such Unexpected Virtual Tours and many of these companies will have a range of options to choose from like European virtual tours, South American holiday and more. To complement the tour, management may choose to send team members a special delicacy from that region to enjoy together while watching the virtual tour. Many of these tours have a strong educational component as well – but at minimum a tour could be a welcome virtual escape for team members geographically dispersed across the country.
  2. Encourage a gift exchange: A holiday gift exchange where team members send gifts to each other anonymously is a great way to engage employees with low pressure. Participants can create a wish list to help guide their coworkers buying for them in the right direction. Alternatively, the team could decide to make it humorous where team members compete to send the “most useless gift” or gift the “ugliest sweater.” If employees are interested in making the exchange more interactive, they can gather virtually to guess who sent which gift.
  3. Host a game or contest virtually: A little friendly competition offers employees a chance to work together and learn something new about each other, or good old fashioned bragging rights. Businesses could opt to use a third-party company for a game of trivia or a virtual escape room where employees work together to solve puzzles. To go a step further, leadership could organize a virtual baking or decorating competition where the team meets virtually to bake or decorate the best cookie, baked good, etc.
  4. Get together in January: Though virtual options have come a long way, nothing replaces in-person get togethers where employees gather outside of the business setting. If feasible, business leaders can consider postponing holiday celebrations to January when travel and accommodations can be more affordable and plan a get together in a convenient location. Holding a celebration in January also disconnects the celebration from a specific holiday, making it more inclusive to the entire team.

In planning any holiday fun, it’s always important to keep inclusivity in mind.Not everyone celebrates Christmas, and it is important that all team members feel comfortable and considered in holiday celebrations. Use terms like “happy holidays” and avoid the use of Santa Claus, or other holiday specific symbols in signage, cards and so on when planning for the season.

While the holiday office party may be a thing of the past for most businesses, employees are still interested in spreading some holiday cheer and deserve to celebrate their accomplishments from the year. While lavish holiday office parties may be a thing of the past, holiday celebrations with a valued team, shouldn’t be. Cheers to a festive and fun holiday season!

Paid Content: Is It Worth It?

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My discussions around paid content, for many years, typically went something like this:

Client: Hi. Amazing Media just emailed saying they want to feature our CEO as the best business influencer of [fill in month or year]. Is this legit? I’ve never heard of this outlet. Would you check it out for us?

Me: Sure. I suspect this is a pay-for-play opportunity, and it can come with a big price tag. Also, because you’re unfamiliar with this outlet, I suspect it won’t hit the target audience most important to your company. We’ll check it out and get back to you with a recommendation.

My colleagues and I would investigate and, with varying degrees of obfuscating from the outlets at issue, we would find it was a pay-for-play opportunity and often recommend to our clients to steer clear.

Sometimes these were paid broadcast interviews with fading celebrity hosts. Often these interviews would air at 3 a.m. on Sundays on some wildly obscure television station or streaming platform no one I have ever met would admit to watching. At other times, they involved free publications (meaning no one asked for them) so broad in nature that the concept of a specific target audience was practically a joke. In some limited circumstances, these paid opportunities were with good outlets, however, they were often still slightly off-target and, therefore, not worth the investment. In my 20 years in public relations, I have seen these types of unsolicited opportunities range from $2,500 to more than $80,000 for a one-shot deal.

So, of course, for many years I scoffed at these outlets and felt a duty to protect my clients from being taken advantage of.

However, the landscape of journalism is changing and, increasingly, we see paid-content opportunities with legitimate media outlets of value to some of our clients. With shrinking newsrooms and ongoing media consolidation requiring more revenue growth, some of these opportunities are – with a limited few industry trades – becoming de rigueur.

The question, of course, is, are they worth the investment? My evolved answer is, it depends. If the audience aligns with your target audience specifically, not generally, then maybe. The costs should also not exceed 2 to 5% of your total marcom budget for the year. If it’s more, it likely isn’t worth it for a single opportunity. Finally, you want to maintain control over the content for which you are paying. Don’t accept the default writer assigned to you from the outlet. I have seen this go very badly and at great, nonrefundable cost to the clients involved. Insist on your own, vetted and knowledgeable writer and maintain final veto authority on the content and the art that might accompany it.

Paid content, in this dynamic information age, is no longer something to be immediately scoffed at or ignored. Increasingly, this type of content should be built into your marcomm strategy, but carefully.

The Stories We Tell About Insurance Must Change

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For years our agency founder, Gary Kimball, talked about how the insurance industry has an image problem. I continue to share that sentiment.

It’s akin to a plane crash. This time of year, millions of us climb into aluminum/composite tubes to be flung hundreds of miles per hour at 30,000 feet or more to visit family and friends. We do this, mostly, with confidence and not much concern about the airline industry until we learn of an incident of some kind. Suddenly, some are afraid to fly … because of one incident.

Whether it is capacity issues, carriers leaving certain states or regions, rising premiums, the talent crisis or denial of claims, these seemingly jolting situations are a mere fraction of the total contribution of one of the few industries that, without exaggeration, not only helps us in a time of need, but underpins every foundation of our society.

So, what is the solution?

Insurance leaders need to lean into what the industry, and individual companies, enable in the world. The messaging going forward needs to focus less on balance sheets, premium, products and capacity. Instead, a long-term image campaign is required. To do this successfully, a full-throated and relentless discourse is needed on the successes and enablement insurance provides across our society, in things large and small.

  • Businesses can expand – and create jobs – because they have insurance to protect them in the event of an “incident,” whatever that might mean to the business.
  • Technologies can be explored, developed and deployed because insurance exists to protect organizations and entrepreneurs from misapplications or hardware failures.
  • Each of us can invite friends and family to our homes, regardless of season, weather and other conditions, with the reassurance that if a guest trips or gets hurt, there is insurance to protect them and us from financial devastation.
  • Holiday gifts, as well as mission-critical medical equipment, can be shipped around the world without fear of loss or damage because these items are insured.
  • Life-saving treatments can be developed because the scientists and doctors doing the work are covered in case something goes wrong, ensuring the entire enterprise isn’t lost to the detriment of those who depend on these treatments.
  • Volunteers can support charitable events and serve on the boards of nonprofits doing social good because insurance shields them from junk lawsuits or legitimate, but not malicious, errors in action or judgement.
  • You can buy your $1,000 smartphone and rest assured two days later when you drop it that you have insurance to cover the repair or replacement without breaking the bank.
  • And those aluminum/composite tubes can help us get home to our families for the holidays because insurance protects them from complete disaster in even the most minor of errors, delays or missteps.

These and other messages are what consumers, potential industry recruits, business executives, homeowners, nonprofit leaders and others need to hear. In this moment, as we brace for a new year and all the challenges that come with it, we need to change the industry’s approach to its perpetual image problem.

I have spent a career reporting on, adjacent to and supporting the insurance industry. I am a convert. Despite the occasional bad press, there is so much the industry does that makes the world go round. We simply need to tell those stories, often, and starting now.