Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO & Publisher
Katie has been a pioneer in the field of communication measurement for three decades. She founded two measurement companies, KDPaine & Partners Inc., and The Delahaye Group. Her latest and third company, Paine Publishing, is the first educational publishing firm entirely dedicated to making more Measurement Mavens. Click here to read more about Katie Paine
Bill Paarlberg, Editor of The Measurement Advisor
Bill is a freelance creative, editor of The Measurement Advisor. He also teaches and paints watercolors.
Why are we called Paine Publishing?
To say that printer’s ink runs in my veins is an understatement.
In the early 1900s, my grandfather Ralph Delahaye Paine wrote some 46 novels from a cabin he built here at Shankhassick Farm. My other grandfather, Thomas Justin White, was the general manager of the Hearst Corporation; my father was the managing editor, and later Publisher, of Fortune Magazine. My great aunt and my mother were editors-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar.
My other great aunt was the editor of House & Garden; three of my uncles ran or wrote for newspapers.
When I moved from journalism to public relations, most of my family no longer wanted to talk to me. I got into measurement as a way to make life easier for journalists, not PR people. I figured that if the people doing the PR had a better idea of what worked and what didn’t work, they wouldn’t bug the editors with as much mindless, irrelevant junk. It sort of worked. Much of my work for the past 25 years has helped PR people and their bosses understand that what works in PR is having interesting, authentic stories to tell.
Somewhere along the way, I got distracted from wanting to be in the publishing business by the idea of public relations measurement and running a company ... or two. But at the age of 60, who knows how much time I have left on this planet, so I decided it was time for me to go back to doing what I’ve always wanted to do. So, I’m writing and publishing interesting things that help people do their jobs easier and better.
Why is our logo purple?
My therapist, of course, would tell you that it is a subconscious rebellion against my mother, who so hated the color purple that I don’t think I owned a single piece of purple clothing until I was old enough to buy my own clothes. I didn’t even know that flowers came in purple until I visited my grandmother, who grew the most spectacular Queen of Night tulips. I’ve had them in my garden as long as I've had a garden. But I digress.
My logo color is in part a tribute to then-senator Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in which he said, “there is no Red America or Blue America..."
A bunch of us started wearing purple as a sign of support for Obama’s ideas.
When I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, barriers and silos were collapsing in our industry in a way that Obama could only dream of. Today, to paraphrase Obama, there is not public relations or social media—there are customers and there are influences on those customers. There are no internal communications vs. external communications. There are relationships.
When I began to measure consumer generated media, we noticed that customer-generated reviews were exerting a greater influence over buying behavior than the traditional magazine reviews. Next, we saw that the walls between internal and external communications were coming down, as employees became ambassadors and spokespeople that were far more effective than some of the people being PAID to be spokespeople.
Social media was also breaking down the barriers between geographies, as millions of people declared their allegiance with the street protesters in Iran by changing their geographic location on Twitter to Tehran.
All of a sudden, it didn’t matter where you were tweeting from; it mattered who and what you were tweeting about. So, when it came to telling our fabulous website designer Dawn Boyer what color I wanted to use to represent my new venture, purple was the natural choice.
