In this episode of Signal in the Noise, we sit down with Robert Melstein, Lead Director of Corporate Communications at CVS Health, to explore how strategic communications can drive business results. Robert shares insights on crafting messages that resonate, understanding the user journey, and the critical link between communications and corporate reputation. He also dives into the tools and qualitative data that prove comms impact.
Below is just a snippet of the conversation. For more episodes, check out the Spotify channel to listen or the YouTube channel. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
"My theory has always been when you spend in the company's money [...] if you can show how Comms is going to drive the business directly, [that's] not a bad place to be." - Evan Escobedo, measuredPR.
Robert Melstein: [....] [This is] my opinion only - when you're a comms function, you don't have a P&L. Usually, you're a cost center, and you don't have a quota to hit sales targets. Okay. Good and bad at that. My theory has always been when you spend the company's money, you're going to go into the CFO, and after budgeting to me, if you can show how comms is going to drive the business directly, [that's] not a bad place to be.
So I tell the story that I put everything that we did at Charter, from our owned content to social content and digital platform, on my whiteboard. I wrote one message: "To do today, sell more cable." Why did I put that on there? Well, our CEO used to say, "Well, there's nothing that can't be solved by selling a little bit more cable."
Dan Gaynor: It's the famous phrase in startup land. There's no problem that more revenue won't solve.
RM: Exactly. And so you could debate, sure, Comms should work towards reputation. We can get into that. But if you can align comms, and we're able to do it, like, no knock against tier ones in my media relations friends, if you get a New York Times placement, a Journal placement, great.
I started in the days when people were cutting out headlines from clipbooks, putting them together, and putting them to the CEO's desk, 'Look what we did today.' But the Times, Journal, all the tier ones, tier twos, they may link back to your own platforms if you ask a reporter nicely. But nine times out of ten, they may not. And they're not going to give you the data on like, okay, well, what did this placement do?
So getting to your question, by the way, about AI, I do think AI can really help. Again, opinion only, sort of say, 'Okay, what does all this effort, tactical stuff? What does it actually mean?'
You could get impressions and other vanity metrics. Sure, they're nice, but is it moving the business? So the point is that owned platforms you can track, you can track social clicks to a website, click back to here, over there, and then yeah, if they go online and buy cable or shampoo, you can now put it on the marketing, right?
I'm using my marketing terms. We can get that mid and lower funnel [...] you could go in there and show that comms is working it and helping to move the business. I can't imagine any C suite just like you reiterated, you know, when you're a startup, can't solve most problems without, you know, but without getting more revenue, it solves a lot of problems.
Then that's not a bad thing. So I'll pause there for a second so you can get in any other questions, but that's sort of my theory. If you're going to work in comms, especially today, you really have to show how it's driving the business. It could, it could be a reputation, but I've always set up ways to track in previous roles and current roles how our own platforms are directly impacting, whether it's a transaction or a call to a call center. But it takes a lot of discipline and effort around the enterprise to do that.
"If you're going to work in Comms, especially today, you really have to show how it's driving the business." - Robert Melstein, CVS Health.
DG: Well, that's the big reason that we even initially connected because I think you're like a real innovator in this space [...] for the longest time comms has been unmeasurable. Or, it hasn't had folks like you to connect comms to real business outcomes. So let's talk a little bit about how you're doing that right now and then extrapolate out to core principles. Tell me about what it means to be lead director for corporate comms and digital comms.
RM: Thank you, and by the way, you're giving me way too much credit. I mean, this to me [...] it's innovative in the way of trying to get comms to think like this.
[....] This is the enterprise side that tells that story. So what did we do? On day one, I said, "Well, let's do some SEO research." It doesn't have to be a ton, but we need to see how users are coming to the site. And so, if I had—and I'm not a good artist—but if I had a little whiteboard, I would say, "Here's what a company wants to say."
Here's how users are searching for you, whether it's chatbots and AI search engines, and the best places to be right in that middle, because if you say what you want to say, and no one's searching for you that way, get the tree falls in the forest, right? No one's going to find your stuff. So you want to intersect that.
So that's what we do. For the most part, when we do any piece of content on the site, we do an SEO brief. Again, marketing was not Rob Melstein's idea. I worked on it when I worked with the marketing teams on that side. I was like, everything was briefed out. Everything was researched.
[...] So that's one concrete thing to do. We search engine optimize [SEO] everything we can to see what the intersection is between what we're saying and what users search. And so we do that, and then we create the content. We do editorial. We match with the SEO inputs, and we post, and we track. It could be a series of articles, a podcast, or videos.
The search engine crawls all those things. So the key is to get those, and it's not just keywords. There's backlink strategy again—all the things we borrowed from our marketing friends who do it day in and day out. So that's how we approach content on the side. We SEO it. We blend the editorial with the technical inputs. We measure. And wash, rinse and repeat.
[...] We blend the S editorial with the SEO. We put tracking on things to measure. Is it driving to other parts of the lower mid-funnel? The sites, the company, and we also try to think about ways that we can tie this all into reputation. I think if we can do all that, you have tangible things to go up to your CCO and C suite it and show how comms is helping them.
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Signal in the Noise is a podcast dedicated to helping today's business leaders navigate the complexities of decision-making by leveraging data and groundbreaking technology—first and foremost, artificial intelligence (AI). You can also watch the interview on our Signal AI YouTube channel here.