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While the finance team has EBITDA and marketing boasts customer acquisition, what can the Communications Director show in the boardroom? Traditional indicators have structural weaknesses: barometers that are too slow and non-actionable, incomprehensible KPIs, and disputed ad-value equivalents. It’s no wonder your projects get deprioritized and your role is dismissed as “just the colored-pencil department.”

It’s time to move from justification to demonstration. Unlike other departments, you don’t simply carry out a plan—you’re a partner to all strategic plans. Proving your decisive impact means establishing a clear, direct, and demonstrable link between communication and the executive leadership’s top priorities. Let’s explore three themes that resonate at the executive level: stock price (for public companies), market share, and business model. These are three areas where you can shift perceptions:

From Awareness to Brand Value

Rather than talking about awareness or image, focus on your impact on investor perception—and, by extension, valuation multiples. Nvidia, once a graphics card manufacturer, became an AI leader in just a few years, thanks to a strategic shift in brand perception that had a tangible effect on its market capitalization. Imagine identifying the “tech” signals in your market that boost that perception. By leveraging these markers in your communication, you demonstrate your ability to tangibly influence company value.

From Thought Leadership to Market Leadership

Show how your communications strategy helps win market share. A well-orchestrated message can make a company appear larger than it is—triggering a Pygmalion effect that speeds up market entry. In its early days, Doctolib was just one of many startups offering online medical appointments. But its bold, leader-style communication and ability to dominate informational pathways made it seem like the market leader. The result? Public hospitals, health authorities, and doctors adopted it as the go-to platform—well before it actually led the market.

From Reputation Management to Recommendation Engineering

Defending your image reactively is no longer enough—communications must now act as the social engineer of a recommendation machine. The most powerful brands today aren’t just known—they’re endorsed. Take Decathlon. Once a standard sports retailer, it became a relationship-driven brand by activating user feedback, ambassadors, and product use stories. It no longer says, “Here’s what we sell,” but gets customers to say, “Here’s how I use it.” This shift from product to purpose is something communication can help lead and prove its strategic value in doing so.

Generative AI: Your New Metrics Power Tool

But how do you actually measure “tech perception,” market leadership, or recommendation strength? That’s where generative AI comes into play.

It allows the creation of custom KPIs that draw on multiple data sources—media, social media, search behavior, web analytics—and go beyond raw numbers to include qualitative insights. These are tailored, strategic metrics that finally allow Communications Directors to quantify their impact.

This AI-driven metrics revolution is exciting forward-thinking Communications Directors. They see AI not just as a tool for optimization, but as a strategic command center. Where many feared AI might replace roles, it might actually prove their legitimacy.

Caroline Faillet, General Manager of the JIN Group.

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Today, however, power seems to be caught up in a culture of immediacy. The performative deluge of rhetoric in the first 100 hours of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich, reveal a preference for urgency. According to this new American leadership, there is an imperative to assert dominance, to impose its agenda, whether political, economic, technological, or geopolitical, at breakneck speed.

The politics of speed

Disrupting the intellectual comfort of the “End of History”, transactional leadership has found its way into the gaps of liberal democracy, which had long remained complacent in an almost aristocratic vision of liberalism. The new modulus operandi is to act swiftly and decisively on unfolding events without restraint, care, or elegance.

Breaking with the virtue of moderation (which Albert Camus saw as an essential ethic for European pluralism), Trump cuts the Gordian knot of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world–one that seems impossible to control. For him, anything is possible if one catches the world off guard and reduces political action to a business transaction.

The strategy is to become the director of a never-ending spectacle. This involves blending different communication techniques: Tony Blair’s agenda-setting tactics, linguistic triangulation to blur ideological lines, and the normalization of performative rhetoric to shape reality itself. 

Trumpist rhetoric primarily seeks narrative victories because everything depends on one core strategy: the rapid internalization of a new American imperialism. This is a form of narrative “blitsscaling”–a concept borrowed from the tech world, where speed is prioritized to dominate vast markets.

A possible backlash?

Mario Draghis’ February 19 speech in Brussels, the recent Macron-Trump meeting over Ukraine peace talks, and Friedrich Merz’s push for European defense autonomy all indicate that Europe has taken note of the Trumpist playbook.

But in the face of the dangers and violence of political speed, can Europe still hold on to its “quiet strength” when everything seems to be on the verge of collapse? On one side, we see a global show of American moral and military rearmament; on the other, Europe as the guardian of balance. However, resisting also means not rushing. It means knowing when to act, when to stay silent, when to prepare. Choosing the right timing across short-term, structural, and long-term scales.

Faced with an endless flood of information thrown around to control every agenda, the philosophy of Zeno, with its emphasis on moral fortitude, resilience, and constancy, might prove useful.

Already, words like “shutdown” and “recession” are surfacing in the American debate. Let’s not forget: Trump’s political theater is also playing out internally. Just one month after his inauguration, an Ipsos-Reuters poll already showed mixed American public opinion, particularly regarding the economy. Disruptions, uncertainties; this narrative of speed and dominance creates vulnerabilities that could ultimately turn against the United States.

Camille Fumard, Strategy Consultant & Special Advisor to President Edouard Fillias, JIN agency.

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The time has come to prove, with figures to back it up, the real impact of communication.’ Caroline Faillet, GM of JIN.

The Barcelona Principles: the foundations of communication evaluation

The International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication has established the Barcelona Principles, an internationally recognised reference framework to guide communication professionals in their evaluation processes. The Barcelona Principles 3.0, updated in 2020, focus on :

• Setting clear objectives: Planning, analysis and evaluation must be based on clear and measurable objectives.
• Distinguishing between different levels of results: It is crucial to differentiate between outputs (what is created and disseminated), outcomes (how messages are received), results (the changes brought about in stakeholders) and impact (the consequences of these changes for the organisation).
• The importance of considering all stakeholders: The evaluation must take into account the impact on stakeholders, society and the organisation.
• The combination of qualitative and quantitative measures: It is necessary to use a combination of quantitative data (figures) and qualitative data (perceptions, opinions) for a complete understanding.
• The abandonment of Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs): AVEs are not considered a valid measure of the impact of communication actions.
• Measuring all channels: The evaluation must include all relevant channels, both online and offline.
• Integrity and transparency: Measurement must be conducted with integrity, recognising the need for transparency about context and potential bias.

These principles form the basis of any serious evaluation process are a reminder that measurement should not simply be a collection of data, but a source of learning and continuous improvement.

Overview of existing communication indicators

There are three types of indicator used in business communications, each with its own specific characteristics and limitations.

Indicators on the strategic objectives to be achieved (brand tracking, reputation monitoring, awareness)

• These indicators are derived from ad hoc studies carried out once or several times a year.
• They are described as strategic and easy to understand for General Management.
• They measure the long-term impact of actions, but are not actionable because they do not reveal the reasons why objectives are not achieved.
• They are top-down, as they use questionnaires to measure whether the public’s representation of the company is in line with expectations, by means of closed or open questions based on criteria determined in advance and therefore not spontaneous.

KPIs for actions taken :

• These indicators come from the agencies and are limited to spin-offs: media clippings (PR), reach and views (influencers), visitors and leads (websites), followers, fans and engagement (social networks), open rates and click-through rates (campaigns), and so on.
• They are considered to be operational rather than strategic, and therefore difficult for senior management to understand.
• They are considered actionable but within a family of levers (PR, websites, social networks, campaigns, emails) and are oriented by what the agency wishes to highlight.
• They are purely quantitative.
• As they do not take into account all the channels, they make it possible to monitor the actions carried out in each lever, but do not provide an overall view of the performance and contribution of the lever to the company’s overall objective.

Target behavioural data :

• This data comes from social listening, research and analytics tools: volumes of searches on the brand, volume of quotations from the brand, tone of voice on social network mentions, most visited sections on the site, number of forms filled in, and so on.
• They are both quantitative and qualitative, as they can also be used to track the spontaneous expressions of targets (verbatim, keywords most searched for on the site or on Google, etc.).
• They are considered to be technical, non-strategic and difficult for General Management to understand, apart from lead generation.
• This data is considered actionable, but within a family of contact points, and bottom-up because it provides insights to help decision-making.
• With the exception of e-commerce, where the bottom of the tunnel is conversion, these indicators do not provide an overall view of communication performance.

General limitations of current reporting

An analysis of these three categories of KPI highlights several important limitations:

• Lack of overall vision: Indicators are often compartmentalised by tool or by data source, preventing an overall view of communications performance.
• Difficulty in linking actions to impact: It is difficult to understand how the actions taken (the means) really contribute to achieving the strategic objectives (the impact).
• Vision too fragmented: Technical indicators do not provide a vision of the value and ROI of communication.
• Indicators that are too ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’: strategic indicators are top-down, i.e. they only assess what you want to look at, whereas behavioural data are bottom-up, i.e. they only provide a source of insights without helping to guide action.

In summary, each of these three types of indicator has advantages, but also limitations that underline the need for a more integrated, strategy-led approach. The Impact Factor by Jin methodology seeks to fill these gaps by providing a more holistic and actionable view of communications performance, focusing on impact objectives and linking actions to results.

The Impact Factor approach: an innovative method

The Impact Factor, developed by JIN, offers an innovative approach to measuring the ROI of communications by structuring the strategy around an impact objective, sub-objectives and resources.

The originality of the Impact Factor lies in :

• An impact-focused approach: this allows you to move away from a vision limited to the tool and concentrate on concrete results.
• A structured method: this provides a clear framework for defining objectives, sub-objectives and resources, enabling communication initiatives to be better managed.
• Hybrid measurement: cross-referencing all sources of data for a global, multi-channel view of performance.
• The introduction of qualitative measurement: this uses artificial intelligence to create new types of indicators that are truly specific to the company and cannot be substituted, by working qualitatively on the messages and the reactions expected from the target communities.
• Insightful’ indicators: it also uses AI to create new indicators that are not limited to measuring performance, but also help to understand what is not working.
• A collaborative approach: its cross-functional approach and initial methodology ensure that all teams are aligned with the strategy and work together.

Impact Factor is an innovative solution for companies wishing to assess the ROI of their communication in a rigorous way, based on the Barcelona principles, relevant indicators and a structured approach. It’s time to move on from communication based on tool indicators to communication based on concrete results and impact on the organisation.

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Yet, amid this chaos, businesses appear surprisingly as beacons of stability. According to a recent 2024 study by Odoxa, 56% of French people now believe that businesses are the most capable of driving change. This expectation places corporate leaders in a key position: they are seen both as agents of transformation and as guiding figures for a society searching for direction.

However, this trust appears betrayed by a disconnect between business leaders’ concerns and public opinion. In fact, 60% of corporate leaders’ social media posts focus on environmental issues. While this topic is undeniably important, it ranks only ninth among the issues most discussed by the French public. Instead, online debates revolve around pressing topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fight against the far right, and the taxation of superprofits.

So why, in an era that demands clear commitments to build trust, does the communication from business leaders seem to lack resonance?

Breaking free from corporate imperatives

Despite what is often suggested on social media, businesses are far from being universally despised. However, the way corporate leaders communicate online amplifies the perception of detachment. Their messages, often highly conventional, appear carefully crafted to align with institutional communication constraints or regulatory requirements.

A staggering 98% of executives’ posts adopt a positive, even overly positive tone, avoiding any strong stances. But this excessive optimism makes their statements feel hollow, stripping them of the impact needed to foster genuine engagement. In a world craving authenticity and sincere commitment, such sanitized messaging fails to connect.

Giving leaders back their voice by listening

A company, through the voice of its leader, must take action in response to civil society’s demands. So how can business leaders reinvent themselves to transcend corporate constraints and truly engage with contemporary concerns?

First, by addressing public expectations beyond economic or regulatory needs. French citizens want businesses to make real commitments, not just in response to financial imperatives. This trust places a greater responsibility on corporate leaders to demonstrate tangible actions that benefit society, whether to external audiences such as customers, partners, and civil society, or internal ones such as employees, who increasingly seek purpose-driven workplaces.

Second, by engaging in dialogue with communities. Communication is not just about broadcasting information in a one-way, top-down manner. Platforms like LinkedIn offer a unique opportunity to create authentic, constructive exchanges with various communities. Engaging in conversations within a company’s digital ecosystem helps leaders strengthen their role in society, showing that they respond to community expectations rather than simply following media-driven timelines.

Third, by choosing the right battles. No company can solve all the world’s problems, and no leader should attempt to comment on every issue. Instead, leaders should carefully select causes aligned with their company’s mission and champion them with clarity, relevance, and true engagement. A leader’s activism should be identifiable and legitimate, focused on issues where their voice and company can make a tangible impact.

The end of corporate-speak for business leaders

The era of corporate-style communication from executives is over. In a world where expectations for businesses have never been higher, leaders have a historic opportunity: to become true agents of change, aligned with public aspirations and fostering meaningful dialogue. We must not let this opportunity slip away.

Edouard Fillias, CEO of JIN agency, and Anne Le Brouster, Managing Director of the Leadership team at JIN

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