From Data to Decisions: The Four Questions Every Comms and Marketing Leader Must Answer

Here’s the paradox at the heart of our profession. Leadership has never valued communications more: seven in ten professionals say their organisation sees PR as a strategic contributor¹. Yet barely half can point to clear measures of success that connect their work to business outcomes¹. The belief is there. The proof isn’t. And every quarter, that gap gets harder to defend.

Meanwhile, the world you’re measuring has quietly changed. Your audiences no longer just read your coverage. They ask AI about you. Nearly half of adults now use AI chatbots, and six in ten read AI-generated summaries before they ever click a link². Somewhere in those answers, your brand is being described, compared, recommended, or left out entirely. Most measurement programmes can’t see any of it.

The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s that data alone doesn’t answer the questions your leadership is actually asking. This session is about those questions, the four every comms and marketing leader must be able to answer:

• Is what we’re doing working? Proving the value of your campaigns and activity, in language the business understands.
• What should we do more of, and less of? Turning measurement into strategy: what resonates, what doesn’t, and where the white space is.
• How do we compare? Benchmarking your reputation against competitors across earned, social, and now AI answers.
• Can we trust our data, everywhere, every time? Building a consistent, best-practice framework across markets, brands and teams.

You’ll leave with a simple way to assess your own reporting against these four questions, real examples of insight-led measurement in action, and a clear first step to close the gap between the data you have and the answers you need.

Who is this for? Senior PR, communications and marketing leaders (CCOs, comms directors, brand leads and agency account directors) who want their measurement to answer strategic questions, not just describe activity.