by Jo Detavernier and Richard Chataway
Media training is traditionally part of a mix of measures taken by communication professionals to prepare their CEOs and other executives for media interviews.
Executives are offered through media interviews the opportunity to learn and practice the most important techniques they will need to communicate their messages efficiently during an interview.
The investment made into training people how to deliver corporate messages is an important one, because there is no use for any communication department to go through great pains in designing powerful messages if spokespeople stumble over delivery at the moment of truth. Efficient media communications is in other words a matter of both design and delivery.
Twice we have used the word “efficient”, but what exactly does it mean in the context of media interviews? We consider any efficient media communication to be communication that achieves its desired impact - and that impact will always concern something you want one or more target audiences to know, feel and / or do.
In media interviews, the delivery of messages needs to accommodate two requirements. First, delivery needs to account for the laws of the media production process. When you are delivering a media interview of which the sound will be taped for example, you will have to talk in very succinct soundbites if you want your messages to survive the cutting room. The medium is indeed very much the message in media relations.
Secondly, the messages need to be formulated in a manner that allows for optimal processing, storing and retrieval in view of the outcomes you desire to achieve with your key audiences.
Evidently, the journalist is part of that audience as well. He or she is a filter who will pass on the messages to the end-audience or at the very least moderate the conversation to which the audience is made a witness. While the targets you will want to achieve with the media as an audience proper will be limited to them knowing (understanding) what it is you want to convey, just achieving that end through clear communication is already no small feat.
When it comes to having an impact with audiences, the behavioural sciences have an important role to play in injecting what we know already about the science of how messages are best construed and communicated into the ways spokespeople are trained. We will come back later to how things will at times go awry in this domain.
Evidence-based training
What makes a media training (or any other corporate training) evidence-based?
Rob Briner (Briner, 2019) holds that an evidence-based management approach is one where there is conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the best available evidence.
Conscientious means that a major effort is made to collect and use the evidence. Explicit means that you describe in detail the evidence on which you end up basing your assertions. Judicious finally means that you critically appraise the quality of the evidence.
There are still, according to Briner, different sources of knowledge that need to be consulted if you want to talk about evidence-based management. It is by aggregating the insights of these different sources that a holistic view on reality is acquired. The more of the different sources you manage to consult, the more solid your findings will be.
Briner identifies the four sources that matter as: scientific literature, organisational information, the opinions of stakeholders and professional expertise.
In the context of media training this implies that you will want to know what the behavioural sciences have to say about the impact of your messages, what the editorial policies of the media consist of, what the opinions are of journalists and how these are communicated and what consultants have learned through experience about how media interviews are best prepared for and conducted.
Contrary to what some might believe, an evidence-based management approach does not exclude a trainer from relying on his or her experience. There are limits however to what that experience might bring to the table. Professional experience lacks the multitude of data points that are delivered through a scientific design, it comes with no immediate feedback on what has been undertaken (making it hard to discern causal relationships) and it provides for no information collection in ceteris paribus environments (Detavernier, 2020).
For all the reasons mentioned above, those aspects of a media training where a trainer will be able to make use of their own experience to gauge the impact of certain delivery techniques on target audiences are limited.
How could, just to give one example, a media trainer have any knowledge on whether negations used in statements (“we do not plan to…”) are well understood and processed by target audiences?
Without wanting to give less than due credit to the organisational knowledge and input of stakeholders, our opinion is that the integration of scientific insights into media training is where the most significant improvements can be made. Whoever sets themselves the challenge of this will have to navigate skillfully between the Scylla and Charibdis of quasi- and pseud-science.
Roads to nowhere
Different cases exist of claims that have been shared and sold as ‘scientific’ to trainees but have since proven to be less than accurate. Together with the Institute for Public Relations Detavernier (Detavernier, 2019) endeavoured to identify three ‘classics’ of the genre.
Verbal communication only accounts for 7 percent of the impact of communication
Body language would account for 55 percent of the impact of communication, the voice of a spokesperson for 38 percent and words said for no more than 7 percent. All of this is a misconception that is rooted in an erroneous reading of the research from Albert Mehrabian. The so-called “7/38/55”-rule is a simplification of findings that does not do justice to Mehrabian’s findings. That being said, we do not mean to imply that body language has no impact whatsoever.
You should always repeat a message three times
An executive should repeat a message three times during a conversation if he or she wants their audience to pick up on the message. Let us repeat this one more time: a message should be conveyed three times for it to be understood. This rule of thumb has no empirical foundation. How many times a message needs to be repeated depends completely on circumstances.
Audiences do not process negations
Actually, we should not have picked this subheader, if we were truly afraid you would not process the negation. Intuitively one might accept readily that negations can not be processed but this learning, which has probably found its way into media training through the influence of neuro-linguistic programming, is not correct.
Empirical research
Executives should not despair at the differences in what they’ve been taught. The good news is that in the last few decades scientists acquired a great many insights on the efficient design and delivery of messages in media interviews through solid empirical research. Aurélie De Waele, An-Sofie Claeys en Michaël Opgenhaffen (De Waele, Claeys en Opgenhaffen, 2020) have inventorized what we know now about what works and does not work. On their list we find that it is important for spokespeople to (among other things):
Make eye contact with the interviewer
Resist touching your face
Not smile when you apologize for a mistake
Not speak too slowly with a high pitch
Not speak with a monotonous voice
The authors scanned the recommendations of different media trainers as they could be found in media training manuals and found a lot of outdated advice. One example of such outdated learning is the claim that is a cardinal sin for any spokesperson to respond with a ‘no comment’, when crisis communication research paints a much more nuanced picture of the usefulness of such a reply.
Choice of evidence-based providers
There is no reason why executives should not have the same demand for high-quality media training as they do for other essential goods and services delivered by the communication department. The degree to which a training is evidence-based will decide the degree to which the techniques that are taught will truly help spokespeople accomplish the communication goals they have set for themselves.
In other words: the evidence-based character of media training merits being one of the criteria that is evaluated by buyers when different offerings are compared.
But how can you gauge the degree to which any media training is evidence-based? There are no ISO or other standards available for media training.
What professional communicators can do is ask up front to consult (at least part of) the course material. The best providers of media training already integrate quite a few scientific findings in their courses (and reference their sources transparently).
Where providers refuse to share in advance information on the evidence-based nature of their course material, through a preview or other ways, such denial can and should be interpreted as an indicator of potential quality flaws.
Bibliography
Briner, Rob, The Basics of Evidence-Based Practice. SHRM Executive Network, 2019, 7 pp.
De Waele, Aurelie, An-Sofie Claeys en Michael Opgenhaffen, Preparing to face the media in times of crisis: Training spokespersons’ verbal and nonverbal cues. Public Relations Review, Volume 46, Issue 2, June 2020.
Detavernier, Jo, Three things your media trainer should never have told you. IPR website, 2019 - link: https://instituteforpr.org/three-things-your-media-trainer-should-never-have-told-you
Detavernier, Jo, Rob Briner interview: Management consultants do not know how to read the scientific literature. Jo Detavernier website, 2020 - link: https://www.jodetavernier.com/2020/07/rob-briner-interview-management-consultants-do-not-know-how-to-read-the-scientific-literature/
This article is written by Jo Detavernier, principal of Detavernier Strategic Communication, and Richard Chataway, principal of the Communication Science Group - the authors launched their own evidence-based media training in 2020. A version of this article appeared earlier in Dutch in the print version of MT Magazine.
Twitter: @JoDetavernier
Twitter: @rich_chataway