Navigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)

I often say to find your audience's cultural erogenous zones. So what it means is, people have things that they either care about or don't, and you're not gonna change that. So, it's a huge lift to try to change someone's worldview or their passions. It's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape it into, to fit into their worldview or their passions. There's not always a fit. There's gonna be people who are just not your natural audience, and you should know that and not waste your time. But if your natural audience cares about X and you're offering Y, then it's your job to create sort of the API, right? Or to create the bridge from X to Y. It's not, with messaging, it's not build it and they will come. It is so hard, and you'd have to be super humanly gifted to the extent that I can't recall seeing in my entire life, where you create a message and a story so powerful that someone who didn't care at all before suddenly makes that their passion. It's so much easier to take what they're passionate about and understand it, and then convince them that if they care about that, then they should care about your thing because of this connection.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Lulu Meservey. I met Lulu while she was head of comms at Substack, where she was infamous for taking big risks and bold stands, and as a result, creating a lot of attention for Substack and other companies she's represented. Lulu is definitely the most innovative and interesting comms person I've worked with. She's currently executive vice president of corporate affairs and chief communications officer at Activision Blizzard, and she writes what I'd say is the best newsletter on PR and comms strategy, a newsletter called Flak. In our conversation, we get tactical about how to make your ideas spread, cultural erogenous zones, the growing importance of going direct versus relying on traditional media, the importance of taking risks in your comms, and much more. Lulu is so insightful. I could have continued to explore the subject for hours. Enjoy this episode with Lulu Meservey after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by AssemblyAI. If you're looking to build AI-powered features in your audio and video products, then you need to know about AssemblyAI, which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale. What I love about AssemblyAI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from top-tier research labs. They recently launched Conformer-1, the largest trained speech recognition model on the market, which achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. All of AssemblyAI's models, which are accessed through their API, are production ready. So many PMs I know are considering or already building with AI, and AssemblyAI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases. Now is the time to check out AssemblyAI with their new Conformer-1 model available today, which makes it even easier to bring the highest accuracy transcription to your customers, just like Spotify, CallRail, and Rytr do for theirs. Visit assemblyai.com/lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by public.com, who want to tell you about their new treasury accounts, which earn a 4.8% yield on your cash. That is higher than a high yield savings account while still being backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. Treasury yields are at a 15-year high, but buying US Treasuries is super complicated. You have to go to a bank or navigate an ancient government website, or at least that was the case. Now you can move your cash into US Treasuries with the flexibility of a bank account. You can access your cash whenever you want, even before your treasury bills hit maturity. There are no hold periods, no settlement days, just a safe place to park your cash and earn a reliable yield. Public will automatically reinvest your treasury bills at maturity, so you don't have to do anything to continue growing your yield. And you can manage your treasuries alongside stocks, ETFs, crypto, and any alternative assets. Do all your investing in one place and earn 4.8%, a higher yield than a high yield savings account. Only with a treasury account at public.com/lenny. Lulu, welcome to the podcast.