In this episode, Rob Pyne sits down with Keith Barrett, Managing Director of Reverb Media, to explore the power of public relations in financial services. With a background in journalism and two decades in the media industry, Keith shares how strategic storytelling and well-executed PR can help financial planning firms stand out, build trust, and engage meaningfully with both clients and industry. From thought leadership to crisis management, Keith explains how long-term brand building can drive real business outcomes.

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SHOW NOTES

Topics Discussed

What Public Relations Really Means for Financial Services

How PR differs from marketing and why it’s not just about lead generation
The long-game nature of PR and its role in building brand reputation
The importance of contributing to the broader advice profession conversation

Building and Communicating Brand Strengths

Reverb Media’s “message house” and thematic pillar framework
Why starting with your core capabilities leads to more impactful content
Aligning messaging across media, social, newsletters, and internal communications

Standing Out in a Crowded Advice Industry

The challenge of differentiation post–Royal Commission
How boutique AFSLs can elevate their visibility and voice
Why it’s up to individual firms to drive awareness in the absence of national campaigns

Authentic Thought Leadership That Editors Trust

What makes a pitch valuable (and what gets rejected)
The power of fewer, higher-quality pieces over frequent but shallow content
Building strong, lasting media relationships by providing real value

Using Social Media to Support Strategic PR

How to leverage LinkedIn for B2B credibility and Instagram/Facebook for community connection
Why consistency and authenticity outperform volume
Building a shortlist presence over time by showing up locally and online

Navigating Crisis Communication with Confidence

A real-world example of reversing a 17% share price drop in 24 hours
The value of having a strong brand reputation before a crisis hits
Tactical steps to take when a reputational threat emerges

Quotes

“PR isn’t about sugar hits—it’s about positioning your brand for the long term.”
“Every time you interact with someone, you want them to walk away having learned something.”
“Awards can validate your brand, attract talent, and reinforce your values—when they align with your strategy.”

Resources

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to The Trusted Adviser podcast, where you get a deep dive into the world of financial planning with industry leaders who share their stories of winning and learning as they charted their path to success. This podcast is for the curious. Those of you that like to dig into the detail. If that sounds like you get ready to listen and learn.

Robert Pyne

Welcome to this episode of The Trusted Adviser today, I’m joined by someone who knows the media landscape inside out, Keith Barrett, Managing Director of reverb media. Keith spent over two decades in the media world carving out a reputation as a specialist in rebuilding and re launching magazines and mastheads. His work earned major accolades, including magazine of the year, newspaper of the year, and even front cover of the year. He was youngest editor in Ireland when appointed to the Galway independent after migrating to Australia in 2005 he worked on more than 20 magazines before founding reverb media. Keith brings a deep understanding of how powerful storytelling and strategic communications can drive real business impact, and I’m thrilled to share this conversation with you today. Welcome Keith Barrett to The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Keith Barrett

Thanks, Rob. It’s great to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Robert Pyne

It’s great to have a chat to you, Keith. We met a few weeks back. We were both at the slipstream connect conference on the Gold Coast and spent a couple of terrific days there with a whole bunch of maybe 300 400 people there that are all practice principals and Advisers and business coaches and people that around the industry yourself, included you and Jasmine, were there from reverb media, and we had a terrific conversation over lunch. And I thought, gee, public relations is interesting, and I’m really curious to know more about exactly how your business works and how the world of PR works. So can I begin by getting you to kind of give us a bit of background, share a bit about reverb media, your background in journalism, and how does journalism support PR services for financial planning firms who are listening in today.

Keith Barrett

So, I was a journalist for 20 years. I edited newspapers in Ireland and across Australia and a bunch of magazines, and then spent about 10 years working in financial services. So, I ran a number of financial press and while doing that, I witnessed what I consider to be generally mediocre outcomes for a lot of not just advice practices, but financial services generally. And there were a bunch of reasons for that, but I believed there was an opportunity in the market to take that editorial experience and that understanding of what is newsworthy and what is not and how to craft messaging to communicate something deeper than just the kind of top line headline. So, I use that editorial background to drill really deeply into my clients businesses and establish what are the key pillars that they should be talking about, what are their unique strengths, and then we take that, and we build strategies over 12 months and beyond that leverages the client’s key strengths but does it in a way that really contributes to the editorial conversation. So, for an advice client, it would be participating in the national conversation on the future of advice, on the trends in the industry, and it’s trying to help people see around corners. It’s trying to help them understand where the advice sector is going. And I use essentially the same editorial framework to do that as I would have done when I was running a magazine.

Robert Pyne

And what would a financial planning firm’s motivation be to talk to reverb? I mean, you talk about they can engage in media, talk about future advice, become a thought leader, or at least communicate their thoughts around advice and how it’s progressing. How would an advice firm work with yourself in that respect? And I guess back to that question I was posing there, what would be their motivation? Do you think to approach you guys and actually get your support to better communicate their message?

Keith Barrett

Yeah So, PR is a long game. It is around repositioning a brand in the market. So, it is not a quick sugar hit which marketing can provide. It’s also not generally a sales funnel mechanism. So, your marketing will do that. It will interact with people that may be potential customers in the future. But PR can have a much wider purpose. So, for an advice firm, it may be around developing a reputation around your key skills, which we’ve talked about. It could also be perceived as an acquisition target or urge your participant. So would be around positioning yourself in the market if growing if growth is a strategy. I think particularly in advice, there’s also which we’ll talk about a little later, I’m sure. But there’s also a need for the industry to promote itself. You know, there was a time not long ago where you had 10 or 12 sort of mega advice businesses, and they did national advertising campaigns. Communicate the purpose of advice to the community at large. And now that we’ve transitioned to kind of two and a half thousand. AFSL, there isn’t that national campaign that that is occurring to drive people to advice. So, it becomes incumbent on the advice industry itself to generate that awareness in the community. So, PR, for an advice business would really be a long-term play around positioning it in the marketplace, both as a contributor to the industry, to share its own experience or insights that could be with the use of technology or better ways to engage with clients, but it is a brand uplift, and that can have many functions.

Robert Pyne

Yeah for sure. What challenges do you think financial planning firms would face in public relations, and perhaps you can dovetail that with how would your approach support a financial planning firm to tailor content strategies or their positioning in the market? What challenges do they face, and how would you be able to support them to better position themselves in the marketplace.

Keith Barrett

I think advice is a very different industry now than it was even five or seven years ago. I worked with the then FPA as a crisis consultant through the Royal Commission and then to the exit of the banks. I mean, it was an industry in turmoil, and fairly quickly, we’ve arrived at a place where, through their intergenerational transfer of wealth and the efficiencies that are being delivered by technology and automation and the role of AI and all these things have really put advice into a great position. I don’t think anybody would disagree that there’s probably a decade of sunshine ahead for the advice industry, but the changes that have occurred over the past five years, and that sort of diversification into 1000s of AFSL and that lack of a national conversation occurring public awareness and differentiation within the advice space for an advice practice is now really important. I mean, if there are two and a half thousand AFSL’s and there is now a bunch of boutique advice practices in the kind of 50 ks around your business, etc, then differentiating yourself becomes really important. It’s what you specialise in, what’s unique about your business, what’s unique about the way that you approach the advice process. So, I think differentiating yourself from your peers becomes important, and also it’s incumbent on the industry to kind of play a role in public awareness more broadly, so, whether that’s through the way that they deploy social media, or whether that’s even like community events, it could be an advice practice, doing an event in the local Bowls Club, talking to pre retirees, etc. So, awareness of the benefits of advice is now incumbent on the two and a half thousand AFSL’s and differentiating yourself is probably the biggest challenge,

Robert Pyne

Yeah, and I can see that. And as you say, the industry has changed so much. We have become a profession, but in the process, there’s been a fair bit of carnage. And as you say, those big voices nationally exited the industry, and now it’s it is more fragmented, perhaps, and so you don’t have that significant spend coming through from those big players in the market. So, you might have seen, I was at a f triple A road show, literally, last week, and they’re just rolling out a campaign now to do exactly, I think, what that is designed to do, which is to communicate the value of getting advice and who to seek. So, I guess it’s kind of now our representative body, the FAAA, that are doing that work, but it still is a lone voice now, and perhaps just thinking that through. I mean, you see some of the big providers of financial products doing it to some extent. Vanguard’s quite active in the value of advice, and I know other businesses in that space dimensional as well, spend a lot of time positioning Advisers as front and centre. They don’t have a direct to market solution. They really are supporters of the advice profession. Could you describe your approach to developing content strategies for advice businesses or financial services businesses more broadly, and how could they be tailored to a financial planning business?

Keith Barrett

So, the first work we do with any client when we engage in PR is that work on defining their thematic pillars, which is often three pillars, we look for and then we find five proof points. So, once we’ve defined what it is that the business is going to lean on in terms of its capability, it’s pretty straightforward to take each of those pillars and then ideate content that will both serve a purpose of educating the reader. So anytime you’re creating content for any firm or any client, you really have to factor in who the person on the receiving end of that material is, if the content is sort of inauthentic and cobbled together on a Friday afternoon because you have to tick a box on your marketing to do list. It’s not really the same as sitting down and being really intentional about saying, okay, how can we talk to a potential client about this issue that we know will be affecting them, and at the same time, use that piece of content to lean into what we do really well? So, it all starts with that work at the outset, around defining the strengths of the business so that is used at the kind of macro level. Around what we choose to send to media or to speak to editors about right down to what’s inside a newsletter, what can be used on social media, what the content of a webinar might be. So, the work that’s done at the beginning and defining the strengths of a business that gets used right throughout the business, through the marketing function to the content development, but everything aligns back to the core strengths of the business, and it’s all done with an intent to give something to the reader that they haven’t had. You want to educate them. You want to show them some data that illustrates a point. And so, if you start from your strengths, and you consider the end user, and you build a piece of content that’ll have a lot more impact than communication by spreadsheet,

Robert Pyne

yeah, or by spray and pray. So, you really are saying, yeah, it’s very much a considered decision around, what are our strengths, what are the key pillars here that we can lean into, around, how do we message, what we do, and then who are we talking to? Who are we trying to actually reach? Is it a professional audience, even within the advice sector, because obviously you were previously editor of professional planner magazine, obviously the audience there is advice industry professionals. So, if there’s people appearing in those publications, they’re really trying to speak to that audience. They’re trying to speak to other advice professionals, advice practitioners. Whereas I’m sure you’re doing PR work consistently for publications that are more consumer facing, that aren’t industry professionals. So what role, given that there’s traditional media, there’s, you know, radio and newspaper and the like, what role does social media play in I mean, this is where people have kind of spent more and more of their time, increasingly, trying to position their brand, if they have done the work that you’ve described, which they possibly haven’t, but done the pillars around, what are our key strengths? How do we communicate it consistently? How does social media support a PR strategy? And how would you suggest planners should leverage that effectively?

Keith Barrett

I think it’s a really good question, because if we go back to that sort of lack of a national advertising campaign and public awareness, and if we say that, it then becomes incumbent on the industry to promote itself, then building a social media profile can be really valuable, and I think over the longer term, that will provide increasing returns, particularly as the younger people who are social media savvy, or it’s just been a part of their lives from birth, become potential advised clients, they will want to do business With the people that they have built a relationship over social media. So that could be following somebody with a million followers that’s a licensed Adviser, and they’re using that to get their financial awareness because they don’t have the means to enter into a full advice relationship. Or it could be a more localised, it could be somebody in a community. So, if you’re in a regional city and you’re a financial Adviser, and you’re appearing at community events, and you’re doing free workshops. Then when you think that PR is a long mission, then all of that accumulates over time, I think about PR as putting my clients on a short list when somebody is making a decision in the future. So, if you’re a fund manager that specialises in multi asset, then a goal for us would be, when a super fund is making an allocation change that our client is one of the three firms that are invited into pitch. So, if we think about we’re trying to influence people when they’re making a decision at some point in the future, then social media can be really important in a localised area. By putting the Adviser in the community, people align with that they like seeing that interaction. So, for a more regional Adviser, then it can be really important, particularly if their clients, they want them from that region. Maybe they specialise in rural clients or whatever it may be. On a national level, we break social media down into more the consumer facing, which is your Facebook and Instagram, and then we look at LinkedIn differently. So, LinkedIn is an opportunity to be a leader in this space. So, you would have the firm’s brand doing social media, and we would also work with the leadership team on how we take that media and then carve it up so that the CEO or the CTO or the CFO can then amplify that through their channels, but it’s more aligned with that commercial audience. It’s like a B-to-B space, as opposed to a consumer level space. But again, if you approach it all with that foundation of integrity, and your intent is to give something useful to the people you’re talking to, then that’s a successful strategy over a longer time horizon.

Robert Pyne

For sure, so just touching on that point you’ve made about it being a long game, that it’s not a sugar hit. It’s not about trying to just generate new leads. It’s about positioning yourself and building brand value. I guess. How do firms work with you? Then? Is that a retainer, an annual retainer, they work with you to sort of try and build a PR strategy and an ongoing campaign as to how to build those pillars, work out our core strengths, the things we can actually speak to in the public space and then syndicate content over and over. Off the back of those core strengths is that how you work with people? Is it an ongoing kind of program that you engage with?

Keith Barrett

Yeah, so what we do is, at the outset, we do a workshop with often the CEO and the ELT around the purpose of the PR. Engagement.

Robert Pyne

Just to clarify for our listeners, what’s an ELT? I know the CEO is executive leadership team.

Keith Barrett

So, if you have a C suite, if the firm is at a scale that it has a C suite. So, we do a workshop. It’s often a half day or a full day. We get everybody’s input, and then we build a message house, which is like a statement on the wall, which is where the business aspires to be in the future, what are the three things that would make that statement true? So, one of my clients wanted to be the most trusted technology partner in Australia. So, for that to be true, they had to have the best tech stack. They had to have the best people, and they had to create the best ecosystem with their partners. So, with any client, we sit down, we work out what the objectives are, and then we build a 12-month calendar ahead, so we know what awards we want to enter if that’s going to play a role in solidifying our reputation in a space. So, we’ll map out a 12-month calendar that will include all the key events we know we want to do. It might be activity around the end of financial year, or end of calendar year, or around the federal budget. We also overlay awards at key events that clients should be at. Do we look for speaking slots at those events? So, the first thing is the discovery session and building out the framework. We then build a forward planning calendar for 12 months. So, we operate both a proactive calendar, which is that forward planning, and we also have a reactive service. So, we monitor the news on behalf of clients. If we see a team emerging or a competitor taking a position, we will then go to our client and say, this has occurred today. Would you like to comment on it? We would suggest you do. And maybe here’s some LinkedIn copy you might consider using. So, there is the forward planning, and then the reactive so all clients are on a retainer. I’m really confident in holding on to my clients, so I don’t have fixed term agreements. Any client can leave with six weeks’ notice. Investing in PR, depending on the firm you’re dealing with, can be a grudge purchase, you know, like I’ve been engaged by asset managers, or the CIO just does not want PR. He doesn’t want to talk to the media. He wants to spend money elsewhere. So, it’s about building something that is easier for them to make a purchase, and I think letting them know that they can exit without paying out a 12-month contract just lessens the kind of resistance to that. But yes, we do work on a retainer. All of our work is calculated at the outset. When we build a 12-month strategy, we calculate the hours we will need to spend to achieve those results, and that gets rolled up. It’s all transparent pricing. You can see all the hourly rates and all the team and then, yeah, it kicks off on a retainer.

Robert Pyne

Contracts are always curious thing, aren’t they? I mean, certainly if you sign with an IT vendor, and they’ve got literally almost zero marginal cost to roll out their solution, because it’s really an out of the box solution, but they still want you locked in with a long-term contract to engage with them. And I’ve always taken a similar view at our business as well, as you just described, Keith, which is to say, if people are getting value, they’ll stay, and if they aren’t getting value, they won’t. And do you want someone to stick around that isn’t feeling value? That’s not good for them and not good for you either? So, giving people the option to get value or decide not to, as you say, takes that risk away from them, and they can really engage wholeheartedly in the process, knowing that they’ve got an easy option to decide they’ve changed direction if they need to. But, yeah, retaining clients, obviously is part of value propositions. As long as the value proposition is there, they’ll stick around.

Keith Barrett

And it’s important as well at the outset, to set expectations. You know, a lot of my work is in sustainability and Net Zero, etc. I had a Impact Fund Manager contact me, and their brief was, they want to be in the AFR, and that is not, in my opinion, a good objective. You know, great, you get your 24 hours on a page of the AFR, but there is no lasting impact from that. So there has to also be a level of realism among the clients about what is achievable for their business. So, if we start in a contract and realise that that is not aligned with the work that we do, then that six weeks’ notice that it gives us a chance to also conclude that if we think their objectives are not really achievable or will create the impact that they want to create.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, for sure, setting expectations key to anything, isn’t it, when you’re working with people. So, tell me you’re working in financial services. Obviously, quite frequently. How do you navigate the regulated nature of financial services? Ensure compliance when you’re crafting PR campaigns in the financial services space?

Keith Barrett

Yeah, compliance, it really isn’t something we need to factor in, because the work that we do, there’s very little chance that it could be perceived as a form of advice at a consumer level. So, most of the work that we do is in the Nationals and in the trades. So, in those situations, when you’re talking about the future of the industry, or the efficiencies a tech solution will provide, or the challenges of navigating the compliance framework, or whatever it may be, there’s little risk there that it will be perceived as anything other than commentary on the sector. So, when that moves into the marketing function. So, if we work with a bank, for example, and we do work on defining what we want to be known for, and then that gets handed to the marketing team, and they need to create more consumer level messages, and they also can control who. Reading it, then compliance plays a much bigger role. Everything goes to the compliance and the legal teams. When I’ve worked with ASX listed entities, most of the work we will do, just for a sanity check, will go through the legal and the compliance departments. But there’s very little crossover between compliance issues and the work that PR does, because it isn’t that short term sugar hit messaging where you’re trying to convert someone into a sales funnel. It’s a broader brush, yeah?

Robert Pyne

So, you don’t have to paste everything with a general advice disclaimer, because you are really taking a much higher-level view and positioning the brand, as opposed to actually trying to sell something or engage people into a marketing channel or a sales funnel for that matter.

Keith Barrett

Yeah, and if I think there’s a compliance risk, anything will be checked. It is a part of what we do when it’s required. But for the most part, in the PR work that we do, there isn’t really a complexity around compliance.

Robert Pyne

Can you speak a bit about this idea that of thought leadership and how that plays into PR strategies? How do you help clients establish that thought leadership. And perhaps it goes back to your earlier point about working out what their key strengths are, and so on. But I’m really keen to hear you speak to this. How do people think about thought leadership, and how do you help them establish that in the market?

Keith Barrett

Yeah, it’s interesting, because when you think about a piece of media activity on behalf of a client, there are sort of tiers, I would say. So, if we issue a press release because a tech provider has added an integration, you’ll get a certain amount of media mentions across the trade press, etc. That is less valuable than, say, a 1200-word article in print with your clients headshot on it and byline. They may be the only opinion piece in a print publication in that edition. So that would be a far more valuable execution than a media mention elsewhere. But it comes back to where I started from and my experience in journalism, so I can’t help but know what is newsworthy and what is not newsworthy. So, if we think that we want to position a client and we want them to be known for their thematic pillars, then it’s my job to come up with editorial ideas that I think an editor will approve. So anytime an editor is going to commission or to allow somebody to have a page of their publication, there’s a risk to the editor that when the copy arrives and it’s like two days before deadline and there’s no time to replace it, and it’s essentially the individual standing on a soap box talking about how great their firm is. That’s an appalling place to be for an editor and for the PR person who’s put that in front of the editor. So, I have a really successful rate of getting good editorial executions on behalf of clients, because I just would simply not propose it in the first place if I didn’t think it was going to meet the needs of the editor. So thought leadership is like a catch all term that’s used for a whole range of things. It’s like, use your LinkedIn for thought leadership. But really, to me, thought leadership is ensuring that your client is brave enough to talk about the challenges that they and the industry at large faces and to propose solutions that benefits the entire industry, rather than just their clients or their partners. So, it requires a level of bravery on behalf of my clients, because I tell them, we need something that’s going to get clicks and is going to be read and it’s going to be shared online, so we need to give something valuable to the people we want to influence. So, I would rather do less thought leadership, but super high impact, valuable, shareable, community participation, than more thought leadership, but it’s just stuff pumped onto LinkedIn and on blogs that we’re sharing. So, to me, thought leadership, you know, it’s a big catch all term, but there’s very few things that I would consider is a thought leadership win, and it might be a Keynote or at an event where you get to talk about the industry as a leader. It might be a one-on-one interview with the AFR or one of the other nationals, the Australian or capital brief. It might be a print execution in a magazine, etc. But they’re really valuable. They’re really important, and it’s very difficult to get them. So, I’m very fortunate in that I have a library of print op eds that my clients have done. But that is all really that’s only achievable is because I don’t burn my relationships with the media. Many of them are my friends. I’ve known them for years. They trust me and I trust them. And if they say no to an idea, I trust it’s because I got it wrong. But for the most part, the idea will have merit. And I’ll give one example. I hosted a round table in November on the future of advice, and I had seven leaders from the advice industry around the table. In the entire time I worked in financial services media, I never saw competing mastheads in the same room. Other than that, like a national event, like a national conference, but you just would never see it. You would have somebody from money management or IFA or professional planner, they would be in the room. But when I did the round table in November, there was three trades in the room. I’d never seen it, and the reason that happened is because I told them, I said, you’re going to get some absolutely brilliant stuff from this round table. So, the editor is sent their journalists. So that’s just kind of reflective of. Off the commitment I make to the media, and the promise I make to my clients is that all our interactions are going to be super high integrity. They’re going to be high impact, and the editors are going to want to come back to us. They’re going to want to speak to us again. They’re going to want to get our thoughts on trends in the industry. And it’s all on the back of respecting that relationship between the PR firm and the media. Given my background, it’s also something I find quite interesting, because most PR firms will tell you that they have great relationships with the media, but I know from sitting on the other side of the desk that it’s just not true. Like meeting junior people from PR firms who have a book of 25 clients they want to pitch to you is not a good use of an editor’s time. So, by respecting those editorial relationships and understanding the challenges that the media have, you know they’re under resourced. They’re short staffed. They’ve got competing priorities with their own deadlines, but also the commercial realities of their business. So, they’ll have events that their company is running, etc. They’re time poor. They’re drowning in information. So, if you can cut through that and say when an email arrives from Keith and it’s got an editorial idea, it’s normally well received because they can tick off something off their to do list

Robert Pyne

Well, it makes their job easier, which is what you’re doing, you’re actually crafting what you know to be newsworthy content, and they trust it, because they know you, and they know you wouldn’t put something in front of them that isn’t actually newsworthy. So, you’re helping them achieve their goal, which is to get good content. And that because you’ve been on both sides of the fence, because you know as an editor what you’ll be looking for, and you therefore have that experience to better appreciate what another editor would be wanting to see, and to keep their audience ahead the mark. So that’s a great description of thought leadership, and actually just understanding that the better-quality content, fewer pieces, but much deeper and more thoughtful about how it would impact people in the broader profession. That makes a lot of sense. That’s probably the best description. I’ve heard of it before. So yeah, and if

Keith Barrett

you think about it, if we were to take you, Rob, and we were to do PR with you, and we were to focus on your geographical area and your position in the industry, etc. People will want to work for you. Young advisers will see you and say, what Rob talks about? Really? Talks to me about what I want to achieve out of my career. So again, that’s another purpose of PR for a tech company, it’s about helping them attract the best staff in the market. Like the war for talent, particularly through COVID, etc, was bloody and messy. So being perceived as an employer of choice was a really important thing for a developer, for example. But this creates that sense of people will want to work for you if they feel that you’re doing the work that they want to do. So that is also one of the longer tails that is a benefit of advice and working on your brand is that finding and securing and retaining the best staff becomes a part of it.

Robert Pyne

Indeed, finding and retaining talented people is equally as important as finding and retaining key clients, obviously, as well. But those two things go hand in hand, don’t they? If you do find great people, you end up being a fine and retain great clients. So yeah, and I love that. So, can you think of a specific example you can share that you’re able to share without breaching confidentiality about a successful media relations campaign you’ve executed on behalf of a financial planning business client?

Keith Barrett

Yeah there are a couple of examples I could give around sort of the impact of what successful PR looks like. I have worked with a very large licensees, listed entities, etc. So, a lot of the work we would do at that level is, there is the sort of investor relations, there’s the ASX communications and announcements. So, there’s a level of formality around managing a listed client versus a private company. For those large firms, acquisitions are a big part of it. So, we would use PR broadly. Again, back to those three pillars. We would be communicating the values and the integrity of the advice business on an ongoing basis. It makes it easier for them to have acquisition conversations down the line. So, one of the proof points would be a successful growth across the PR campaign. So, if we’re doing acquisition announcements every three months or six months, then we know that the firm is successful in meeting its objective, which would be a growth strategy. There’s also another example, which isn’t an advice business, but it is in financial services. Was a listed tech firm they had launched, had taken 30% market share and then been functionally inert for seven years. Their market share didn’t grow. They brought in a new CEO. He hired a bunch of new leadership team members, and they needed PR, so they spoke to some PR firms, but they were told you, actually, it’s not off the shelf PR. It’s not the mechanical part of PR, the sending a press release, tracking media mentions. They actually wanted someone who could help them use the editorial to really carve out the reputation in a deeper way than the transactional part of which a lot of PR can be. So, they implemented a three-year transformation strategy. We worked really hard on communicating the pillars, and they were acquired 18 months into that for nearly twice their market cap. So, I don’t think anybody in the business would argue that it was the PR that led to that acquisition. So that’s kind of an example of when PR works really well, that we had pumped the tires of the business, and it was known as the platinum standard among its peers and was acquired 18 months into its three-year turnaround strategy. So that’s PR at a listed level, and what success looks like. I’ve also done work with smaller AFSL on helping them sort of define what they want to be known for. They often have a national strategy part of it. So, we’ll take them, and we’ll enter the leaders into the national awards, like the financial standard power 50, or try get them into the Barons top advisers, or whatever it may be so working with the firm. Can be working with the CEO on the thought leadership part of it. It can be working with some of the advisers who might be specialists. So, they might be specialised in dealing with sports people, or they might be specialists in dealing with pre-retirement or whatever, and then working with them on creating PR that talks to those parts of the business. So, for an advice practice, it often can be work with the CEO, and then at the next level down, it’s working with the advice practitioners on helping them sort of validate their position in the market.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, sure. I mean, you mentioned the FS power 50 and the Barons top adviser list. And do you have a particular preference as to how people should work towards being identified or profiled in those sorts of publications. I mean, because the publication itself, I’m just going to speak to my thoughts around that for a moment here, that the publication itself is looking to actually attract readers. And so, what do they do? They run a list. They run a top list. And that does clearly create some cut through for people where they read that, and they’ll actually assume that person has got credentials. And you know, rightfully so, they’ve gone through a process of being assessed and determined how they and why they should be appearing on the list. The power 51 is an interesting one for me, because I’ve seen people send out a message to vote for me because as one of the most influential people, and I thinking, what a wonderful strategy for financial standard, because essentially, they’re getting the person who’s wanting to be profiled to go and spread the word to every one of their connections to vote for them to be listed as a top influencer in the profession. So, I think that’s a wonderful strategy for financial standard, because it’s people looking and reading. Do you see that sort of activity as being useful, or just another arrow in the quiver to assist someone to build profile, as those sort of things really important part of PR strategy.

Keith Barrett

So, awards can be, I think there are different types of awards. So, the power 50 is a very personal thing that’s about an individual, so that serves a purpose, often for the individual, rather than necessarily their firm, etc. It’s about them and their perception among their peers. I think awards more broadly can play a role. So, there are certain awards, again, it’s like a media mention has a different way, depending on what it is. So different awards, some awards are good to just validate a firm’s position in the market, but there are other awards that really talk to a particular part of a business. So, the AFR boss most innovative companies awards, for example, that’s based on your business. That’s not just the individual. And one of my clients won the AFR boss award in October a brilliant tech firm called Path zero. So, awards can play a role. If one of your thematic pillars is we want to have the best people in culture, then winning awards like Best Places to Work or great places to work and doing things like tracking your NPS score among your staff over a period of time to validate your submission, that can be really useful in helping you back to that attracting and retaining the right talent. So, there are awards that are really useful within a business. So, the Innovation Awards are really great for talking about the progressive nature of a firm, the great places to work. It shows that you you’ve got a culture that people want to align with. Then there are tech specific awards, FinTech awards, etc. But the awards do have a different level of gravitas depending on what they are. So, for our clients, we will look at the awards that we think have integrity or like a national footprint, rather than necessarily being in the Fund Manager of the Year Awards, which is run by a kind of a masthead in the space. So, awards can play a role, as long as they’re aligned with that long term strategy of where you want to bring your business over time?

Robert Pyne

Sure. So, we’ve been working on the assumption things are all going well, and you’re looking to promote what you do with a long game strategy in mind. What about when things don’t go so well? What about when a business has got something that has gone south and that might get out and their online reputation is damaged or potentially damaged by a crisis that’s occurring, that maybe it’s a cyber breach, and that their name gets published because they’ve actually been called out by the regulator that they’ve had a breach. How do you as a PR firm engage with businesses that are in that space and actually assist in helping to respond to crises they have? Of maybe their name is being published and not too favourable way.

Keith Barrett

So, if we’re a certain length of time down the road with a client, we will have done a lot of work by that point on the values of the business, etc. So, for example, if it was a cyber breach, we will have communicated to the market our digital capability over the years. So, then we lean on that and say we have invested in digital defences, etc, so we have a defendable position based on the work that we’ve done to get us to this point. And the other thing is that these aren’t unique instances. You know, if there is a cyber breach, for example, my client isn’t the only firm it’s ever happened to. They won’t be the last firm it’ll happen to. So, it’s also important to kind of take stock and not allow emotion to get on top of things. It’s like, Listen, this is what has occurred. We have a checklist of things we need to do. We need to communicate to clients. We need to own the issue. We need to communicate what we’ve done to solve it and what the ongoing plan is. We need to tell our clients how we’re going to communicate with them on an ongoing basis, etc. So, you will have a set of steps you will go through in a crisis. There are also crisis that that listed tech firm that I worked with their competitor, issued a press release one morning that was inaccurate, and it got really murky. There was legal letters the competitor was ringing consultants, and a share price dropped by 17% in a day. So, the impact of that miscommunication at 6am on call it a Monday was really dramatic for my client. By close of business on that Monday, the share price was down 15% so what we had to do to negate that is we had to go back to the source of the information, the data that was released by a data aggregator. We had to analyse the data. We had to be sure that the competitor was incorrect. We then had to go to the provider of the data, validate it, and get their endorsement that our view was correct. We then had to get a press release drafted and distributed, and we had to do all that in one afternoon, but it worked. By the following day, the share price was back up to where it was, etc. So, the nature of the crisis, if it’s a reputational crisis, if it is a data breach, or somebody in the leadership team has done something wrong or has been called out, etc. Then that is its own type of crisis. Then there is the more material crisis that affects the business and the brand as a whole and has immediate impacts on it. So, depending on the type of crisis, we’ll have a checklist we’ll go through to make sure we’re doing everything appropriately. And then we can also do really rapid, tactical work to get some analysis and to create clarity around what that miscommunication was in the first place.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, in one afternoon, if you don’t mind. So, yeah, a quick response, please. So broadly speaking, what trends are you observing in PR? You know, you’ve been in it a long time. You’ve been in the media a long time. Keith, so what are you seeing, and how with those trends that you might be able to see and share with us. How are you adapting your business to changes, and especially as it regards to financial services?

Keith Barrett

Yeah, there’s, I mean, it would be crazy not to just start with AI and what it is doing at all levels of business. So, what’s changing with our clients is that we work with a lot of data heavy businesses. They are collecting vast amount of data on trillions of dollars of investments. So, our clients are building their own AI agents that can operate internally in their business. So, what that enables us to do is to get much more rapid analysis of data requests. So, I will go to a client and say, here’s a trend I’m seeing in the market. Can we get some data that can help us participate in this conversation, and that will come to us more rapidly now than it would have in the past, because there’s tech being deployed internally to speed that process up. That also presents risks, because when you go back to that relationship with the media, for example, it’s very easy. If you’re an editor or have been or a journalist for a long time, you can see AI copy, and it’s not just the length of sentences. It’s not just the type of hyphens that are used. It’s not just that every word is capitalised in a sub head. You can’t help but kind of get it like a Spidey sense when you’re reading something that is AI generated. So, there’s a lot more of that now sloshing around the industry. There are press releases written by AI. There are opinion pieces that are being submitted to editors that are written by AI. And of course, the editor has to sift through all this material, which just goes back to my point earlier, that if you have a really good relationship with an editor, they just know you would never do it. I would never send anything AI generated to an editor with my client’s name on it. So, the technology is shifting it, but PR being a long game, I don’t see necessarily big trends in PR itself, like moving from one type of PR to another. PR is still a multi-pronged strategy. It talks to different tiers within the business. It talks to different tiers within the media. It has different sets of objectives, etc. So that kind of complex strategy, at least at reverb, is still rolling out as it always has. It is just being there to advise clients on when they want to use tech internally, what’s the best way, what do we do and not do, and setting some guide rails around what’s appropriate. But there is little doubt that there is more material that has come. From clients, because technology is enabling it. So again, because we only work with a small pool of clients, I’m really hands on. I work with all of my clients directly. I often work with the CEOs directly. So, our work kind of continues as it always has. It’s just maybe pivots a bit into more of a consulting role at an internal level with a client around how they can either uplift or take advantage of the benefits that technology can provide, but doing it within that framework of integrity and being intentional and maintaining the relationships with the people we’ve already worked hard already to build a PR relationship with not alienating them, because there’s a drop off in standards, etc, so PR in a bucket, at least to me, continues in the same way. It’s really more about how we consult with clients on how they can get the most impact out of what they want to do internally, and then run it through the reverb machine to make it public facing.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, you spoke a little earlier about that connection between you, your client, and the media outlets that have come to trust you and the content you’ll put to them and their editors for publication. How do you approach that sort of long-term relationship building between your clients and key media outlets to kind of maintain a strong public presence for a business? Is that something that editors that you work closely with look to say you’ve got a key client here, we like what they’re doing, and is there an ongoing connection often, between you, your client, and a key media outlet that likes the stuff that they’re actually doing and wants to kind of promote that? I think, way back to the beginnings of the internet, there’s a friend of mine at school that ended up being a part of the startup of ionet, and he said, we’re in the right place, the right time. We were doing this stuff for ourselves. And then media outlets all over us all the time asking questions because they wanted to publish content on it. They needed someone who was an expert that could speak to it. So how does that relationship carry on? From just maybe one piece, but actually maybe an ongoing relationship between key clients that you look after and media outlets.

Keith Barrett

Yeah, it comes back to that everything we do has integrity. So, you know, if you’re an editor in the financial press, you have a busy job. There’s a lot of brands coming across your desk every day. There’s a lot of communication. There’s a flood of it daily, like particularly when you think about advice. When I edited the Chartered Accountants magazine. There was 250,000 accountants in Australia ballpark, and there was only two mastheads talking to them, and they were the two magazines from the industry bodies in the black, from CPA and Charter, which became acuity for the Institute of Chartered Accountants. So, there was a quarter of a million potential readers and two magazines. And then you pivot, and you look at advice and back pre–Royal Commission, there was 25,000 advisers, or whatever it may have been, and there was like seven mast heads talking to them. So, every fund manager wants to be in front of the advice audience, so they’re throwing money at it, and they’re trying to do everything they can to kind of influence the adviser pool. And now there’s fewer advisers, but there’s still the same number of mastheads, so it’s an incredibly busy space for the finance press. So, if you go back to what I was saying earlier about if every point of contact you have with an editor is really impactful, it starts with trying to educate that editors readers on a topic, trying to show them what the future might look like, then they will know that my client is a brilliant voice for that. So, they will It will create inbound opportunities where they will ring, they might be having a webinar, and they want some specialists on it, and they’ll give us a ring and say, would such and such be available? But also, editors, in my experience, don’t necessarily want kind of one-on-one relationships with all of my clients. They want to know that if they ring me, one of my clients will be able to fill the gap that they have, and they’ll know that if I tell them I have a client that can do it, that it will meet their needs. To the point where an editor will ring me and say, I need somebody for a cover shoot, and I will give them advice on who they should interview, and they most likely won’t be my client, but I’ll know that the editor needs my help. They know that I know the space, so I will tell them x and y at this firm is really progressive. They’re thinking is amazing. So, by being available to editors to give that advice. You know, I often get editors contact me and ask to meet my clients, not to write about my clients, but to be backgrounded on something really niche or really specific. So it might be a new tech that’s emerging, so I encourage my clients to be available, like we’re going to go and we’re going to meet an editor, he’s going to ask you a lot of questions, or she’s going to ask you a lot of questions for an hour, and we’re not necessarily going to get a news item out of it, but every time that this topic comes up, in perpetuity, they’ll remember that it was our client that gave them the foundation understanding. So, it trades long term opportunity, but we do have one on ones. We do facilitate one on ones between clients and the media, but for the most part, both for the client and for the editor, it’s useful for reverb to be that relationship, rather than the clients and the editors talking directly. You know, if they need something, we’ll book a slot put the calendars into everybody’s diaries. And the phone call happens, rather than the editor trying to talk to a CEO when he’s on a plane, and then he can make the meeting, and then it changes. So, we manage that complexity, but reverb often will own that relationship.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, you’re really like a talent manager or an agent, aren’t you, in sense that the person looking for the talent, looking for the content, effectively, is coming to you, and the fact that you would sometimes introduce them to people that are not your current clients. No wonder you build a reputation with them. That’s positive, because they know you’re a trusted source of good content from clients, but also direction if you can’t necessarily bring one of your clients to the table, but someone else that is doing something. So, I can see why editors would love you like that would be amazing for them to think that they don’t have to go and look for these thought leaders and people that can comment on things they come via a trusted source like yourself to get access to the content they’re looking for in their publication. So, it’s a very good description, and I really understand it better than I did even when we sat down at lunch together a few weeks back, Keith, I was thinking, where does power finish and marketing start? And trying to understand the difference between the two. But I think what you’ve described today really described today really helps me understand the distinction between the two, and how very much PR is a relationship that builds a long-term profile for a business in one way, or whatever strengths they have that you can really promote and help them to build that strong brand and brand awareness in the market. So just being conscious of your time, can I ask you one final question, absolutely, what advice would you give to financial planning firms that looking to enhance their public relations and communication strategies in the market?

Keith Barrett

The first thing would be to really drill into the intent and the purpose behind it, because, as you said, there is a sort of blurriness between the role of marketing versus the role of PR. So, if, fundamentally, if what the firm is trying to do is to grow its book and bring clients in, then a PR strategy is not the most effective way to do it, because we’re talking about brand positioning over a longer time horizon. So, the first thing is to be really clear about what the purpose of the PR is. And so, if it is reputational enhancement and developing the brand to be known around what its strengths are, and it’s going to be localised into at a community level or a national level, or is it going to play in a subsection of advice? Is it going to be in the SMSF space? Is it going to be around tax optimisation, etc? So, the first thing is to really be truthful about what the point of spending money on PR is, because if it’s client acquisition, you’re better off just doing a marketing spend and just hammering ads and pumping your socials and building your funnel and then having a nurture campaign to bring those people down and convert them to a client. PR is not that the tagline to my business is reverb media that resonates. And the point of that is, is that every time you have an opportunity to interact with somebody, you want to move them in some way. You want them to leave that interaction either reading a social post or a LinkedIn piece or an article, feeling that they’ve learned something, that the person who wrote that was generous in their knowledge and they shared it. So that’s what PR is. It is a longer term positioning your brand so that it aligns with the people you want to do business, the people you want to bring in as staff, the firms you want to integrate with or merge with, etc. So, it is a long game, but it can be really useful. I mean, PR is equally as it’s a long game, it also has a long tail. So, if you’ve done good work on your PR and there’s a crisis, it’s easier to emerge from that, because your reputation is strong to begin with. If you have a crisis and you have mediocre PR, that’s just sales collateral dressed up as content, it’s more difficult to legitimately say, we’re good people, we do good work. So, to answer your question, what for an advice practice looking at PR, it’s to be really honest about what the purpose of it is, and if the purpose is that long term brand enhancement, then it’s to find a PR provider that you think aligns with those values. So, there are a number of bigger PR firms in financial services. You know, they have big books of clients. They work with the whole spectrum, from small AFSL, right up to the biggest super funds. So, their vehicle for PR is one flavour, and then you have, like, reverb is a smaller business. We’re a super high impact. We changed brands for our clients. We can do it on a rapid timeline. We do it with integrity, etc. So, it’s finding a PR provider that that aligns with what your mission is. So, for a larger firm, and particularly if you want PR, if you’re a larger advice business, you know, with a couple of 100 advisers, etc, then a larger firm may be more appropriate because they have more admin hours available to work with the different tiers within your business. If you’re a smaller business, kind of five or 10 people, and as a leader in the business, you’re prepared to get on the Tools, then a different sort of PR is more appropriate for you, where you get that one-on-one consultation with the CEO of that PR practice, etc. So, know what you want to achieve and be honest about it. And once you know that it’s then finding the right provider that can help you. Build the framework, build a forward strategy, and then execute it brilliantly.

Robert Pyne

Yeah, no, it’s really from what you’ve described. It helped me understand the difference between PR and marketing. But it sounds very much like it’s about playing the long game. It’s about brand building, about reputation building that you can lean into for the promotion of your business and its ideas and its values, and playing the long game is crucial there. So, I really appreciate you taking the time Keith today and help us understand the world of public relations. So, Keith Barrett, thank you for joining me today on The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Keith Barrett

It’s been a pleasure, Rob. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to The Trusted Adviser. Hope today’s conversation brought you new insights and inspiration for growing your business. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favourite podcast platform, leave a review and share it with others in the industry, and don’t forget to connect with us on LinkedIn for updates on future episodes until next time, keep building trust embracing innovation and driving success in your practice.