The Evolution of PR – James McCann – Everhaze

James McCann, CEO of Everhaze, an all-in-one PR platform, shares insights into the challenges PR professionals face today, particularly in proving ROI and managing media relations in a digital world.

He discusses how Everhaze aims to transform PR into actionable business intelligence, helping brands and agencies demonstrate the true value of their efforts.

James and Mike discuss on the role of AI in PR, the importance of building relationships with journalists, and the future of the industry as it adapts to new technologies

About Everhaze

About James McCann

James is CEO of Everhaze, an AI enabled PR business intelligence platform that provides real-time reputation impact tracking through combined data sourcing across media database, media monitoring and narrative analysis capabilities.

He previously established ClearStory International, an international PR agency in 2017 building a team of 15 and sourcing international clients from North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. He currently serves on the AI in PR Advisory Council for the Public Relations Institute of Ireland and is also a board member on Oglaigh Naisiunta Na hEireann, Ireland’s veteran charity. He was a former PR Campaign Manager for Web Summit. He was recently included in Business Plus Magazines 40 under 40 for PR professionals in Ireland.

Time Stamps

00:00:18 – Guest Introduction: James McCann
00:02:09 – Overview of Everhaze
00:03:11 – Functionality of Everhaze
00:06:09 – The Pressure on PR Professionals
00:09:14 – Challenges of Media Monitoring
00:11:08 – AI’s Role in PR
00:17:08 – Marketing Tactics for Everhaze
00:19:09 – Future of PR in the Next 3-5 Years
00:23:31 – Best PR Advice Received
00:24:06 – Advice for New Marketing Professionals
00:25:30 – How to Learn More About Everhaze

Quotes

“We’re turning PR into actionable business intelligence for large-scale brands, for semi-states, for governments, for NGOs, and obviously for agencies and their clients.” James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.

“The major issue when it comes to media relations right now, which is that journalists are under enormous pressure.” James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.

“You need to continue to advocate for yourself and your value. Constantly demonstrate value.” James McCann, CEO of Everhaze.

 Follow James:

James McCann on LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/jamesmccann862

Everhaze’s website: https://everhaze.com/

Everhaze on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/everhaze/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with James McCann at Everhaze

Speakers: Mike Maynard, James McCann

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by James McCann, who’s the CEO and founder of Everhaze. Welcome to the podcast, James.

James: Thanks very much, Mike, and look forward to kicking off.

Mike: Well, it’s great to talk to you. I mean, let’s kick off by finding a little bit about yourself. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your career and also why you chose to create Everhaze.

James: Sure. So I suppose I started off, I suppose, in communications and public relations through politics initially. I was a local election candidate here in Ireland back in 2014 and segued into an Australian startup then as a campaign manager for them, which lasted for about six months. And then on to Europe’s largest technology conference, which was WebSummit. So I was one of their PR managers and then PR operations managers. And then I set up my own PR agency for a number of years. And as part of that whole process, as you’re kind of going through the day-to-day of PR operations, you’re constantly looking to find ways where you can, say, save time or, you know, we explored all different tools on the market and the fragmentation that was out there already and, you know, trying to constantly prove value to clients then as part of that. And then when you’re building a PR team, trying to keep track of you know, all of the inputs and outputs that are happening on a day-to-day basis. And a number of years ago, you know, we had an innovation voucher basically here in Ireland that we could take advantage of. We wanted to build an in-house tool for the agency. And then that just ballooned to becoming a whole different entity. And that’s how Everhaze came to be.

Mike: So before we dig into Everhaves, I’m really interested, you know, you’re based in Dublin, it’s certainly an area which has seen a lot of, you know, creativity and startup activities. Do you think that’s down to the support, the government support you mentioned, or what else do you think is driving, you know, so much success in Dublin?

James: Yeah, I think, you know, obviously Dublin and Ireland in the main, certainly, you know, down Cork and over in the West and go and Mayo, there’s actually been massive investment in technology infrastructure, but also, you know, ecosystem development, right? Enterprise Ireland has obviously played a big role in that through the state, but there’s been a whole positive ecosystem that’s developed over the last 20 years where successful founders have reinvested through angel investments. And obviously you’ve got the big multinationals that have come in that have developed and brought a lot of tech talent here to Dublin that then wanted to spin out and do entrepreneurial activity. So Dublin is fast becoming not just a large-scale technology hub with the presence of Facebook, et cetera, but just a startup hub. I think we had our first Unicorn Tynes announced there a couple of weeks ago, and the future certainly looks bright for Ireland where I’m sitting on the tech side.

Mike: That sounds really cool, really exciting times for Ireland. Let’s go and dig into the product you built now. So can you explain very briefly what EverHaze does?

James: Sure. So EverHaze is an AI PR platform that first of all consolidates your media database and media monitoring CRM functions. And effectively, we’re turning PR into actionable business intelligence for large-scale brands, for semi-states, for governments, for NGOs, and obviously for agencies and their clients. And that’s a big claim, right? So I think we’ve all struggled over the last number of decades, certainly since things have gone digital as opposed to print, in trying to prove ROI to our clients and trying to put some tangibles on the very intangibles that we do in our industry. And ultimately, yeah, that’s what we’re looking to do, is help brands and PR professionals put proper attributable value on what they do.

Mike: So you covered an awful lot there. And maybe we can break this down a little bit. I mean, the first thing is editorial databases, media databases. I mean, there are a lot of them around, they’ve been around for a long time. Did you see that as being core to the product? Or is that really an enabler for what the product does differently?

James: It’s an enabler, you know, media database functions from a tech perspective, and this will become more the case. It has a very low barrier to entry, right? So it’s data capture and then, you know, distribution function, and then your media database provider. Now, obviously, we’ve seen what’s in the market at the moment, where there’s AI functionality coming into us to help pure professionals hone in on particular germs, helping them with media lists and the research function. you know, that is absolutely needed because we’ve all been there where we’re, you know, working with account executives or, you know, team members and we’re trying to put together an accurate list, right? But it is only one piece of a wider puzzle that needs to be solved, right? Because we all know that the major issue when it comes to media relations right now, which is that journalists are under enormous pressure, newsrooms are under enormous pressure, and as a result, it’s harder to prove a return for your clients, right? And I often see this debate around the spray and spray approach and kind of targeting kind of specific journalists for specific content is the way to go forward. I think there’s a reverse to that, which is also true, which is that because journalists have such limited bandwidth, they have such limited ability to respond in a lot of cases. You’re constantly vying for the retention, whether you have that relationship personally or not. And journalists are rightfully setting boundaries now around digital communications, WhatsApps and text messages and whatever else, because they are just so overwhelmed. So irregardless of the intelligence that you have, you need to be pitching good, relevant content and sometimes you need to be doing that at scale or certainly with accurate intelligence to help you capture that journalist’s attention. So, as I say, I think media databases are one part of the puzzle, but you need a wider input, you know, for where the industry is going in order to deliver the value that you need.

Mike: And I mean, you mentioned the pressure on journalists. I think equally, there’s a lot of pressure on PR pros as well. And this is really around the impact of what their coverage is generating. So it’s not just, you know, today, it’s not acceptable just to count the number of clips or column inches or fairly trivial measures. So I think this is one area wherever Hayes really tries to differentiate itself is by really analyzing what you get from the coverage. So can you talk a little bit about that?

James: Sure. I mean, obviously, there’s different sizes and scales of campaigns, as we’re aware of. On the upper end, you could have a client that’s generating hundreds of mentions a day. You could have a one particular campaign, for example, that just goes gangbusters and generates, you know, 100 clips in a week, right? And to your point, you know, you can go off and you can get the number of articles and the estimated reach and the estimated views, all of which are relatively intangible. and go back to that client and say, look, this was the great work that we did. But from the client’s perspective, and we often see this with CMOs in particular, their job is to go and to sell their success to their executive team. And if you do not equip them with the right insights, it becomes very hard to do. And oftentimes, us as PR pros, we will adopt whatever metric is there that we feel we can stand over, even though we’re kind of squinching a little bit and we’re saying, I wish I had something more tangible to show these guys. Because the whole technology landscape has changed, you know, even in the last two years with AI, but even before that, the amount of SaaS products that are now available on the commercial side of enterprises, everything from zero to your financial metrics, obviously there’s Google Analytics, there’s a whole host of social media tracking tools and all the rest of it, that it’s quite possible now to link your business intelligence with your pure inputs and outputs. And that’s really what we’re looking to do. You know, every large brand is unique in how it measures success. It’s not one size fits all. So you need to be able to provide a broad plethora of options so that you can sit opposite a client and we have one at the moment that we’re going through a process with. whereby you’re helping them understand as CMOs what their C-level team need to see, and then you’re working with their business intelligence team to link up the required sources so that we can show on the PR end what the impact of a campaign is, positively or negatively, linking obviously key messages. And so up until quite recently, messaging was NLP related, right? So if there was a particular keyword that you were tracking, that would be reported as a tangible kind of win. But the wider context is missing from that. And the significance of that mention is also missed from us. So from a metrics perspective, or just from a reporting perspective, it’s very hard to attribute value to that, other than the fact that that keyword got a mention. So we’re going kind of a step beyond that then again, and we’re tying all of what we’re reporting back in to our enterprise clients BI.

Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, one of the things that strikes me quite difficult is obviously you’ve got to monitor the media and there’s a lot of media out there. So, I mean, does getting that media monitoring element of the tool, is that a complex thing to do or was that relatively straightforward to include?

James: Look, it’s complex, right? And it’s complex for a couple of reasons. You obviously have a multitude of different platforms. So you’ve got digital, you’ve got print, you have TV, you have radio. Radio is expensive to monitor, right? It’s not that it’s difficult to do technical, it’s expensive. The digital side is very much, if you’re building out your own technology like we are, it’s just hard to get it refined. So technically, it requires a lot of time and effort. Print, as we well know, is very well licensed and its providers are rightfully protective of that. Print is also very expensive to secure that. And then TV just as much. And in a lot of cases, we’ve had to go kind of direct to TV providers for rights. between the licensing, the technology, and what we found with a lot of our competitors is that they’ve kind of skipped a lot of that, and they’ve gone directly to third parties for their technology infrastructure, which is all well and good, but it’s quite restrictive then in terms of the capabilities you can roll out to your clients. So we’ve decided that we spent a long time before we launched in effectively January of this year, on the media monitoring side, we spent a long time investing in the technology and the infrastructure so that we can roll this out at scale. That’s kind of what we’ve been focused on these past few years is making sure that when a client comes to us and say, okay, can you integrate with our systems X, Y, and Z so that you can show the comparatives or tie in with this metric or demonstrate how this particular narrative arc is going to impact on visitor numbers, for example, or whatever it might be. And we can tangibly work with them on that. without having to go back to a third party and say, oh, you know, would you be able to do X, Y and Z for us? So that’s kind of what we’ve been positioning for.

Mike: That sounds great. I’m really interested because at the moment, one of the things that a lot of people are hyping, particularly with the CRM type products that are able to build relationships with journalists, is AI and building AI pitches for journalists. You seem much more restrained with your mentioning of AI. So what’s your view about the importance of AI for PR pros?

James: Sure. Look, I seen a good quote there yesterday. I can’t remember who said it, but basically every software technology company is going to be an AI company and that’s just the truth of it, right? So it’ll power background processes, it’ll power insights, it’ll power an awful lot of the day-to-day maybe automations that we want to kind of roll out. But I just think with respect to content, one of the most common faux pas obviously we’re still seeing now around AI literacy is like American English being put out in press releases, right? And websites and content and blog content and so on. It’s just very apparent, right? I also feel on the publisher side, there is going to be just a level of temptation to adopt AI to screen the noise, right? So pitches and relevant stories and so on. I think that’s coming. But on the PR side, the drafting of the content, as we all know, is instinctual in a lot of times. It’s ensuring not just that the content messaging is in there, but the paragraph structure, that your size and scale factors, your pedigree factors in there, whatever the kind of story that needs to be written. AI can’t understand your intentions, right? And you can explain it, you can prompt as much as you want. But we just don’t think Gen AI is going to be in the content writing space sufficiently enough that doesn’t require the rework in order to distribute them to journalists. So we’re making a bet instead that actually what PR people want is more like reducing admin around media coverage, logging, reports, writing and construction, media intelligence and research, and all of the kind of background hassle that comes with all of that. So like our CRM system, for example, on the agency side, you can track all of your client campaigns at an account director level or account manager level concurrently. And that just enables you at a snapshot to see where everything is at. And then you can make strategic high-level decisions on what has to happen next for each one of those clients or campaigns and work more proactively under less pressure with your account executive teams to deliver what you need. So, That’s, I suppose, why we haven’t leaned so much on the AI content piece yet. We just don’t think it’s there yet. And also, it’s going to be interesting to see how the industry responds to the strategic element of kind of what AI brings. And I suppose what I mean by that you’re not going to need account executives to do as much list building, right? That’s a given. You’ll be able to track your agency or your organization’s personal relationships, in most cases, with journalists or outlets. You’ll be able to see who’s kind of positive, negative, you know, all of this intelligence. What you do need is still good instincts around content and editorial and, you know, relationships. And That is just not something that AI can do. And if you want to do it at scale, even at that, it’s just harder to do without that human factor of context.

Mike: I love that. And I’ll tell you why I love that. It’s great because what you’re doing is you’re solving all the problems and challenges around the work that people hate in agencies. And you’re doing the difficult grunt work rather than try and do the exciting work, which is building relationships with journalists. And I totally agree. I think certainly today, AI is not great at building those relationships, but people are. So I love that approach.

James: And look, you know, in my experience before this on the agency side, you’d come across CMOs that were just torn to pieces, right? Because, you know, the role of CMOs has just grown to an unbelievable extent and it’s still going now, right? That PR oftentimes isn’t their greatest strength and they might have a PR executive as part of the team or whatever it might be. And it’s overwhelming. And it’s not necessarily possible to roll out the kind of campaigns required now to capture attention, especially if you’re like an emerging brand trying to crack into a new market. Just that attention seeking piece, you know, you haven’t got the relationships, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It requires an awful lot of time, effort, creativity and just labour. 80% of your role could be just centred on the admin. That’s just wild. So we’re trying to solve that problem so that, again, and the way I look at this from a journalistic perspective, you know, journalists have just the same problem as PR people do, but in reverse, in that they need good stories to sell to their editors. And in order to ensure that they get that, sometimes they go with just their trusted sources. And what you start to see in the news landscape then is just almost like a monopolization of large brands in the news cycle the whole time. And we’re trying to get to the point whereby if we can help pure people be more creative to pitch higher quality stories, even if that’s at scale and journalists can kind of trust what they’re getting from clients based on this editorial led approach, you’re solving a problem for the journalists as well as just the agencies and the pure pros themselves.

Mike: Well, that’s a really positive view on how you can help people. I’m intrigued to know, how’s it going now? You mentioned you really launched at the start of this year. Who’ve you got as customers so far?

James: Yeah, so, I mean, I can’t disclose too many. We have UPMC, which is a US multinational. That’s probably all I can say publicly at this stage. One of our enterprise clients now, as I said, is quite a large organization. Their biggest challenge so far has been tracking the significance of their narrative publicly. So they’re in a significant argument with government right around a particular issue, and they want to know who’s winning the overall narrative publicly. It’s around from their perspective, it’s kind of the rate of fire, right? The amount of mentions of kind of positive and negative. And then they want to be able to go into their CEO and say, look, this is how we’re winning public discourse in detail. This is what it looks like in terms of visitor numbers. This is what it looks like in terms of spend. This is what it looks like, you know, in various other different metrics. So that’s at a very enterprise level. And we have quite a number now of kind of mid-sized companies as well. And I think what we’re finding is We went to market earlier with the media database. It wasn’t that great of a sell because there’s so many of them. But now that you have this combination of both and the higher-level analytics, people save money on it, and that’s been a big plus.

Mike: That sounds great. It sounds like you’re really building momentum. So I’m interested to know, you’ve now got this problem that you’ve actually got to promote your own product. What are your marketing tactics? How are you building your customer base?

James: There’s two approaches we’re taking. I mean, one is iterative marketing, right? So, like, we’re a bootstrapped company. We haven’t raised any investment yet. So what we’ve been doing is taking small bits of advertising, 100 quid here, 100 quid there, looking at our core messaging, what’s working, what’s getting a better response rate. Typically, we’re looking for kind of views around our tick-through rate. and then 0.5% and we’re standing kind of scaling that up. And that’s just purely market awareness because it’s a very small population overall. We’re like maybe targeting 25,000 people. So it’s a highly targeted audience. And from that building up awareness and then I suppose the latter part of this year is just going to be focused purely on market education. So ensuring that the market knows that there is something in addition to just the monitoring and database side, that we do have this plethora of other core metrics that they can go off and maybe sell to their own kind of bosses. That’s our approach. What I have always tried to do with any business that I’ve set up is prove that there’s a product market fit and to do so with whatever shillings I have in my pocket. Like we haven’t started to spend massively yet, but so far so good.

Mike: I think it’s exciting and I love companies that are bootstrapped, you know, rather than taking as much money as possible and basically relying on having unlimited resources. So I think it’s really laudable that you’re building your momentum based upon the quality of the product rather than huge advertising budgets.

James: Yeah, look, we’ve seen us on the agency side, we used to work with a lot of early stage technology companies and kind of post COVID boom, right, so between 2020 and 2022, where venture capital was just flowing very freely. You make mistakes quickly, but they’re really, really expensive mistakes. And if there’s no follow on investment, everybody’s kind of diddy goosed. So we’re looking at a more pragmatic approach to building in the market, building trust, building awareness, all of the first principle stuff, really, you know. That sounds great.

Mike: Moving forward, I’m interested to know, you know, you see a lot about what’s happening with PR. You’re obviously working with quite a number of your customers who are looking at the changes in the world of PR. Other than obviously EverHey saving us all from a lot of admin work, what do you see as the biggest changes for PR process going to happen over maybe the next three to five years?

James: I suppose this is kind of the holy grail for where we’re going. Ultimately, I think in my head is AI, PR, account executives. And I know that sounds kind of, you know, if you’re collecting all of this data, all of your distribution, your relationships, the content conversions, your messaging conversions, you’re doing so historically, you’re doing so across, you know, 30, 40, 50 clients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of that is interrogatable and all of that can be used to learn in a particular way for each individual customer and client. And It’s not there yet. It’s going to take another three to five years, exactly your timeline there. But I can see a world where you can jump on a platform, hopefully ours, and you’d be able to ask your AI account executive to build your lists to advise you on who engages with your content the most at a particular time, ask them to send a prompt to a particular journalist to remind them about a certain thing, ask them to produce you a report around the most positive articles that have been produced for a particular client. All of those things can just be asked with a prompt and converted quite quickly. I think that’s the game changer. having just an instant assistant to execute these tasks. I remember years ago, I worked for an insurance company before I moved into PR and we were kind of shifting from print to digital, right? And obviously the PR industry went through this transition and the massive changes in workflow and also massive resistance to it in a lot of cases as well, right? And the learning curve that came with this was significant. But if you don’t upskill to a higher level, you risk redundancy. And I genuinely think the next three to five years, we’re in that period, right? It’s not just a buzz. It is a very tangible thing that is going to change how we work and all of that over the next couple of years. And the last thing I’d say on it is, It’s not that the value of what, like we’re just eliminating a lot of the bottom tier admin work so that people can go on to spend more time thinking, strategizing, creating. And it will give rise to other segments of the market that we haven’t even thought of yet. So that’s kind of what I’m excited by is We have an opportunity now within the industry to think a little bit differently, and it’s going to challenge us to push ourselves. We have to follow the publishers as well, right? It could be the case now that publishing is going to become video. Like, I mean, we’re looking at it already where the Daily Mail pushes out a lot of its content over TikTok and Sky News, etc. Newspapers will probably go that route to a degree as well. Is every publisher going to become a multi-channel publisher, having to produce all of its content? Because it’ll be scalable in about three to five years time. What does that mean for PR professionals and how we then generate content? We’re just talking about media relations here right now, but there’s a whole other industry that’s going to emerge from this over the next kind of three to five years, again, that we haven’t thought of, and it’s just trying to get ready for that.

Mike: That sounds very positive because it sounds like you have a view of there still being a lot of demand for PR professionals, even with the assistance that AI can bring.

James: And look, this is just an old story that I like to say, old story is an ancient story. But in Dublin, the mansion house, the mayor’s residence here had a cable to the Freeman’s Journal in O’Connolly Street. and that was the first wireless to be put in to communicate news from the mayor’s office directly to the Freeman’s Journal. My great-granddad was the runner in the 1890s for that route and obviously he got made redundant and, you know, and he went into the print room then and obviously kind of things changed but This has always happened. Technology has always driven change and skill changes and disruption in the labour market. I think we just need to keep an eye on what the potential is, as opposed to protecting our patches right now, because it’s not going to be defensible in the long run.

Mike: I love it. I think that’s a great way to summarize where PR is going. You’ve been really generous with your time, James, but we’d like to ask a couple of quick questions of everybody just to really dig down and get some advice. So from your point of view, what’s the best ever PR or marketing advice you’ve ever been given?

James: Best PR or marketing advice? Do you know, it’s funny, I was thinking about this. I don’t know if you’ve seen We Crashed, the documentary about Adam Neumann and WeWork and his kind of adage of, it’s not who you see, it’s who sees you. Like right now in the world that we’re in, being front of mind and competing for everybody’s attention is literally the name of the game. So yeah.

Mike: That’s great advice. And then my next question is, and I think this is going to be perhaps challenging for people in the near future with AI potentially taking away entry-level jobs. What would your advice be to someone who’s about to start a career in marketing? What should they do?

James: You know, I think for anybody starting off, a lot of the theory that you’re probably going to come across in college, start immersing yourself in, I suppose, the tradecraft of the industry now. Obviously, you have to learn the basics and understand the significance of, you know, accuracy and editorial and writing. I think those are critical skills. Critical thinking is going to be huge, I think, for the next generation of PR professionals and marketing professionals. One thing that I would say is for those in marketing, those in PR, continue to advocate for what you do. I think it’s becoming harder and harder to demonstrate the value of what we do. It’s taken for granted a lot of times. It’s not seen as a need to have. It’s seen as a nice to have. And I think we have to advocate on behalf of ourselves and the industry as much as possible. again for the next five years to demonstrate value. We’re looking at kind of what’s known as a go-to-market engineer, GTM engineer, which is basically an automated CMO that will run all of the various campaigns from one centralised location, which, fair enough, there’s a potential for that. It’s not going to be tangible for everyone. And I just know from a CEO perspective, it’s going to be a temptation to say, look, we can consolidate your positions, we can consolidate your roles, we can consolidate this and that. And burnout is obviously massive in the industry already. You need to continue to advocate for yourself and your value. Constantly demonstrate value.

Mike: That’s great advice. Great way to end it. People who’ve listened to you, if they’re interested in Everhazen and want to find out more about the products and maybe try it, what’s the best way to do that?

James: Sure, anyone can book a demo at www.everhaze.com, or if they want to send me a direct email, they can get me at james.everhaze.com.

Mike: That’s awesome. James, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.

James: My pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.