What replaces the old comms playbook
Kim Oguilve on writing without ego, the shifting media landscape, and why leaders should trust their comms teams before it's too late
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Getting press coverage used to be one of the more straightforward parts of working in communications. As a journalist writing about startups, I saw it from the other side—companies pitched, we wrote, and everyone was happy. Now, newsrooms have tight budgets and and tight agendas. Brands are choosing to tell their stories themselves—with a little help from AI. The old playbook is dead.
So what comes next? This week’s guest, Kim Oguilve—a marketer and comms professional with a decade of experience in retail, beauty, tech, and energy—has some ideas. She is currently head of marketing and communications at Synergi, a Finnish energy startup.
Kim believes earned media is much bigger than press coverage. She thinks if you’re an early-stage company, your messaging should change often. If it doesn't, you're not learning fast enough. And she makes a case for humanness over speed and staying calm when change accelerates.
Key takeaways
Good comms writing is egoless. The output is never just yours—it's the result of input from many people.
AI can make you a better writer. Don't feel shame about it. If it helps you communicate more clearly for your audience, use it.
Earned media is bigger than press coverage. It’s everything other people say about you. Now, audiences are migrating to smaller, trusted communities.
Your comms team has a sixth sense. Let them use it. They are tuned in to every stakeholder in the company, and can see a crisis before you do.
How did you get into comms and marketing?
My dad was a marketing, economics and business professor in Costa Rica, so I grew up with a lot of marketing talk, but from the academic, theoretical perspective.
When I moved to Finland, I was exposed to applied marketing and comms for the first time through internships as part of my studies and then when I started working at startups.
It’s also connected to my passions as a teenager. I loved writing—writing lyrics, specifically, because I was very into music. I loved coming up with sentences that worked nicely together and had a nice sound to them.
Do you think you have to be a good writer to be a comms person?
When you study marketing or comms, nobody actually teaches you to write. That skill comes through practice, through making mistakes, through learning from more senior people in the workplace. You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize winner, but you have to be decent. You also need strong judgment about what makes good writing in a business context, how you interpret information for different audiences and how you make it easy to understand for them.
Another important aspect: humbleness. Even the best writers get edited.
It’s especially true in communications where the output isn’t just your output; it’s the result of input from so many different people.
Exactly. You have to take your ego out of it. My work is not about having my own personality or my own way of doing things. It’s about integrating input from different functions and people on the team and making sense of it all. That’s very different from, say, fiction writing, where it’s more about your personal vision.
“You have to take your ego out of it. My work is not about having my own personality or my own way of doing things. It’s about integrating input from different functions and people on the team and making sense of it all.”
I love getting feedback on my work, because I feel like it’s not for me—it’s for everyone else.
Let’s talk about the difference between marketing and comms, because they’re often treated as one function.
Traditionally, marketing is more about product and selling, and comms is more about positioning your company and building its reputation. If marketing is about the “what,” then comms is about the “feeling.” Of course, you can still add “feeling” to the “what” to show differentiation.
The reason we see these two functions coming together is simply about consistency. Why have teams sitting in silos when you can orchestrate a campaign that leverages all the different marketing and communication channels at your disposal and delivers one consistent message?
You’ve always worked in multicultural environments—Finnish companies, international companies. You speak three languages. How does that impact how you think about comms?
I always want to dig a little deeper. When you have to craft messages for different audiences, it’s important to recognize that there might be biases in how you’re approaching something. That international experience has taught me to question whether what I’m crafting has the right values behind it.
Working internationally also teaches you to change contexts and learn different practices. Take media relations, for example. Building relationships with the press in Finland versus Mexico, the US, or Japan—they’re all different. Press releases are different across all these markets.
How does AI help you specifically with writing and crafting communications?
Quite a lot. It helps me make texts flow better. I used to feel a bit of shame about that, because we work in comms, we’re supposed to be good at writing. But I heard a journalist say recently: you should use AI, because if it’s going to help you communicate things better, why not? Why would you restrain yourself from using something that helps you do something better for your audience? It’s the same way an author gets their book edited by an editor.
Let’s talk about the startup side of things. What do startups or fast-growing companies get wrong about messaging and positioning?
Startup messaging and positioning is supposed to change frequently and should always be questioned and validated. If it doesn’t, it means you’re not learning enough about your audience and how your product is finding its fit in the market.
At Synergi, we’ve changed our messaging many times. It usually changes based on what we learn at events from our ideal customer profile. When people come to our stand, I’ll ask them: “What brought you here? Is there something in the booth that caught your attention?” Then they’ll mention a specific word, which confirms what we thought would resonate is resonate. Or sometimes it isn’t, and we adjust.
“Startup messaging and positioning is supposed to change frequently...If it doesn’t, it means you’re not learning enough about your audience.”
Have you seen this play out in your own career?
I joined Synergi as the first in-house marketing person, and I’ve learned that I can use journalist responses to improve future pitches, fine-tune the process, and analyze which successful pitches turned into coverage. At Synergi, PR has been our number one user acquisition channel in Finland. Nothing else has come close. But we’ve also learned the shortcomings of relying on it.
Like the fact that getting media coverage is so much harder now than when we started in tech! And audiences are overwhelmed with content. How are you navigating that?
Synergi has existed for three years. At the beginning, it was easy because we were doing something novel. We had credibility because we were showing the numbers. But within the past year, it’s gotten a lot harder. Newsrooms have stricter topic agendas. They’re becoming pickier about featuring the same companies over and over. If you’re a small company, journalists may not want to give you as much space compared to companies that bring in more readers.
So now, instead of pitching Synergi specifically, I have to think on a larger scale—show big changes in the world, bring data points from other companies to show there’s real traction and change in the industry.
On the audience side, people are moving toward small creators. As mistrust in mainstream media grows, there’s a natural shift towards safe spaces where you know the person, you’ve been following them for a while, and you trust them. Brands who thrive amid these changes will embrace authenticity and getting into smaller, more curated communities.
What does that mean for credibility? Traditional media coverage was a mark of credibility. Do those smaller communities provide that?
I don’t think media outlets will disappear or lose credibility entirely. It’s more about diversifying your comms and marketing strategy and not relying on third-party coverage as the main thing.
Earned media is not just getting featured in the press. It’s about everything other people are saying about you—earning the right to be discussed publicly.
“Earned media is not just getting featured in the press. It’s about everything other people are saying about you—earning the right to be discussed publicly.”
What else has changed about your job as a comms and marketing person over the course of your career?
The speed of change. Sometimes a little unbearable! How do you adapt and handle everything? There’s also more risk. There is more to lose for brands and there’s more to learn.
But I’ve worked in companies where I’ve had to build from zero with a tight budget and figure things out amid constant uncertainty and volatility. I think people with startup experience are in a really good place to tackle work life in the future, because of the skills that will be required: resilience, flexibility, and the ability to contextualize for many different situations.
What skill do you think is underrated in comms?
One skill I think is quite underrated in the comms world is creativity. And I don’t mean creativity in the sense of making a flashy campaign. I mean using creativity to navigate complexity. How do you problem-solve when you have XYZ restrictions?
Also, creativity in the sense of doing something you haven’t been doing before, because that’s how brands can continue to get noticed— by trying to do the unexpected. That’s going to be a challenge for corporates that have a lot to lose. But at some point, you need to take risks.
How have you been creative about problem-solving at Synergi?
In our case, creativity means asking: how can we take small bets and test doing things differently? For example, right now we’re selling electricity contracts for other companies under the Synergi brand and trying to validate whether this is an interesting growth model. We need to figure out the best way to position the brand in this situation—If we’re more present, does that help us sell more?
Are there any other skills comms people need?
I think the most important qualities are learning ability, proactivity, and curiosity—the drive to explore new technologies and take on future challenges. Ultimately, thriving in the future will be about your ability to humanize a brand, to keep it relevant and authentic for your audiences, while navigating global complexity in a calm, thoughtful and reflective way. These are all critical strengths for future comms teams because they translate into the qualities that will set brands apart and drive their success.
There is so much AI-generated content that you need to differentiate at all levels so future comms people will need to bring human voices forward. At the same time, they will need a calm mindset.
“Thriving in the future will be about your ability to humanize a brand, to keep it relevant and authentic for your audiences, while navigating global complexity in a calm, thoughtful and reflective way.”
I like the word “reflective.” When everything seems to be falling down, comms people need to be the ones who force everyone to take a step back and think for a minute.
Not everyone necessarily learns crisis preparedness in school. But since things are changing so rapidly and the world is getting more complex, comms people need to prepare for when things go wrong. Because they will. You can’t avoid a crisis, especially at bigger companies that operate in many different markets and are making decisions tied to what’s happening politically. Everything is so connected. Comms people have to be more aware of everything happening in the world and how it affects their companies.
It goes back to being the voice of reason in that moment.
Exactly. And I wish that leaders would trust their comms people more. We’re really tuned into everything that’s happening in the world. I see so many crises happening and think: I’m sure their comms team could see this coming from miles away. So why did it happen?
We have to work with pretty much every single stakeholder in the company, including external ones. We have this sixth sense about what is going to happen next. So, listen to your comms team before it’s too late!
👩🏻💻Read more: Kim’s research on media relations
Kim’s master’s thesis, published last year, tackles a gap she noticed in her own career: the PR industry sells media relations as a tool for brand awareness and credibility, but that’s not how early-stage startup founders think.
“What founders want to hear in the early stages is how something impacts the growth of the company,” she says.
Her thesis repositions media relations as a validation tool. Instead of coverage being the end goal, the process itself becomes valuable: how journalists respond to your pitch, which parts of your story they choose to feature, how many customers coverage actually drives.
“Through that exercise of validation, you learn how to leverage media relations as a tool for growth in the future.”
Early-stage startups should treat media relations as an experiment that helps them build better with each iteration.
Thank you for reading! How has the playbook changed in your career or specialism? How have you responded? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.