What will the world look like ten years from now? Public relations executive Marian Salzman spoke Monday evening on her role as a “trend spotter” and the changes to the news industry during a Must See Mondays event at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School.
Salzman, who serves as CEO of Havas PR North America, graduated from Brown with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and started in a doctoral program at Harvard before dropping out to start her own company.
“I realized I was great at being a student, but ‘studenting’ wasn’t who I was,” Salzman said. “I was way better at being Harriet the Spy than being Karl Marx. I was great at determining what was in your shopping basket but not at great theory and great thoughts.”
Fran Matera, public relations lab director and associate professor at the Cronkite School, introduced Salzman at the event and called Salzman a “marketing and communications visionary.”
“She does not gaze into a crystal ball,” Matera said. “She does not read tea leaves. However, she is a voracious observer and gatherer of data and information. She prefers to be known as a strategist.”
Salzman said she recognized early on that people could create news and put products at the center of news.
“News was much purer 25 years ago than it is today,” she said. “I’m going to argue that you can create news if you have a decent-sized budget. Twenty-five years ago you had to cultivate relationships with journalists.”
That shift in news production is visible in the use of buzzwords, she said. Salzman said she knows exactly what words can generate thousands of views while a more serious story may attract few eyeballs.
And part of uncovering buzzwords and provoking a conversation is finding trends and using data to back them up, she said. The rise of the term “metrosexual” is an example of that, Salzman said.
She said, although she didn’t invent the term, she was able to pair it with a data set about how men felt about their social roles. From there, the term went viral and was named “word of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 2003.
“How did I know metrosexual was a success?” she said. “I saw ads on craigslist with women asking for a metrosexual boyfriend.”
Salzman said even by the early 2000s, most of what television stations show is a video news release provided by a public relations company, and this has only expanded with the growth of the 24-hour news cycle.
“There is endless demand for content,” she said. “Newsrooms are very poorly funded.”
Salzman closed with some predictions for the trends of 2015 before opening the room to questions. She said that she sees the year being very focused on questions of religion, ethnicity and celebrity. Building and maintaining a “personal brand” will be paramount, she said.
“It’s going to be very hip to be ethnic,” she said. “People are going to go into their backgrounds and say, ‘Okay, my grandfather came from Ireland, I’m Irish. . . .’ If you’re just plain, bland, old, white-bread American, you are totally a loser right now. There’s no place for you in the mix as a style-setter.”
Journalism sophomore Olivia Turner-Tolley said Salzman’s level of success and her own desire to enter the PR industry drew her to the event. Turner-Tolley said she thought the lecture was informative and felt that Salzman’s predictions were “pretty on point.”
“The whole ethnicity thing, I have actually noticed it among the social media that I’m a part of and I do agree that it’s going to be a huge trend to be ethnic,” Turner-Tolley said.
Interested readers can view prior “Must See Mondays” lectures in the Cronkite School’s video archive. Next week’s event will feature panel discussion on reporting in Mexico and Nicaragua by Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor Rick Rodriguez. and ASU students in the Cronkite School’s Depth Reporting class.
Contact the reporter at travis.arbon@asu.edu.
