Thursday, October 08, 2026
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Orla Clancy:
The AMEC Global Summit returned to Dublin this year – and for Raina Lazarova, Muck Rack’s VP of Global Insights and the newly re-elected Chair of AMEC, it carried more than professional significance. It was in Dublin that she attended her very first AMEC summit back in 2012. It was in Dublin that she and her business partners co-founded Ruepoint – a name derived from a lighthouse on the northern shores of Ireland, chosen deliberately: we will help you navigate. And it was in Dublin, on the day we sat down to talk, that the Ruepoint brand officially retired, its services and identity now fully absorbed into Muck Rack’s global media intelligence platform.
“It’s our baby, of course,” she said, with visible warmth. “But we feel it’s the right time to move on.”
Few people in communications measurement carry that much personal history with a single city. Fewer still carry it while running one of the industry’s most consequential associations. Raina was re-elected as AMEC Chair for a second two-year term through June 2028 – and the priorities she has set are as much a reflection of the moment the profession finds itself in as they are of her own convictions.
AMEC is a global association of just over 200 member organizations – not individuals, but organizations – spanning Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa. It is, as Raina puts it, “truly a global body, with truly global ambitions.”
For her second term, she has outlined three priorities:
The first is staying relevant. “The moment our members realize that something’s out of date or not relevant to their reality, you start losing credibility,” she told me. “And credibility is one of the big words at this conference.”
Staying relevant, right now, means grappling seriously with AI – not as an efficiency tool but as something more structurally disruptive. “For us as a PR profession, AI represents a new channel in the media mix,” she said. “A new stakeholder that interfaces with our clients, with our audiences, with our stakeholders. A whole new world.”
The second priority is expanding AMEC’s global brand and influence – particularly into the large in-house comms teams of North America, where Raina sees significant untapped opportunity, and into the emerging markets of Latin America, Asia Pacific, and MENA.
The third is member value – making sure AMEC’s five membership categories (media intelligence providers and vendors; agencies; in-house comms teams; not-for-profits; and independent researchers and consultants) each feel individually served, not just collectively acknowledged.
Running beneath all three is a single urgency: the profession needs to demonstrate its value more convincingly, more consistently, and more quickly than it has done to date.
One of the more significant announcements at this year’s summit was AMEC’s launch of a set of GEO measurement principles – a framework for measuring generative engine optimization and AI visibility for PR practitioners and brands. The principles were developed by practitioners across AMEC’s membership categories and vetted by the association’s academic advisory group, whose members include respected researchers with decades of experience in communications measurement theory.
Raina was at pains to characterize them as a foundation, not a solution. “We all appreciate it’s a changing landscape,” she said. “Algorithms and large language models evolve. So we want to make this a living and breathing piece of work.”
That means reviewing and updating the principles every three to six months – a cadence that would have been almost unthinkable for previous AMEC frameworks. The Barcelona Principles are updated every five years. The Integrated Evaluation Framework (IEF) is reviewed periodically but not constantly. The GEO principles demand a different rhythm entirely, one that reflects the pace of the technology they are trying to capture.
She also confirmed that updates to the IEF itself are coming – and that the process will be consultative, representative, and thorough. “I can’t tell you what those changes are,” she said, “because the way we approach changes at AMEC is to make sure all membership categories are represented and all views are taken.” But the direction of travel is clear: AI as a channel in the media mix needs to be formally reflected in how the profession evaluates communication activity.
The most striking moment in our conversation came when Raina turned her attention to what she is most worried about.
She wears a badge at AMEC events that identifies her as a “professional AVE hater.” Advertising Value Equivalent – the now widely discredited practice of measuring PR coverage by its notional advertising cost – which is considered the profession’s original sin in AMEC circles. It provided a number that looked like a metric but told you almost nothing meaningful. It satisfied clients who wanted a number. It was easy to sell. And it set the profession back decades.
Now, she sees the same dynamic threatening to repeat itself.
“We are all in a rush to commercialize GEO measurement, AI visibility,” she said. “Agencies, media intelligence companies, vendors. We work in a competitive landscape. But in our rush to compete and commercialize, what I want us to remember is not to fall into the trap of creating another AVE.”
The fear is a world in which “your AI visibility is 35%, so it’s gone up” becomes the new “your AVE is €2.4 million.” A number. Presented as insight. Disconnected from what the organization is actually trying to achieve.
“There isn’t one KPI,” she said firmly. “There was a discussion today about the one number, whatever that number is – if it’s only one number, it’s clearly vanity-based. If it’s not contextualized, if it’s not compared to your objectives, if you don’t use it in planning, and if you don’t measure continuously, then you’re missing the point entirely.”
The philosophical shift she is pushing for is this: measurement is not an event. It is not a campaign deliverable. It is a tool for continuous improvement. One of her academic colleagues used the word “hiccups” to describe how the profession typically thinks about campaigns – things that happen, then disappear, then happen again, with no connective tissue between them. That model, she argued, produces no holistic view of organizational impact. It just produces hiccups.
The conversation I have been having across the industry for years – and which surfaced repeatedly during the summit – is the one about PR’s place in the boardroom. The data is dispiriting. Talent management and people functions are far more consistently represented at C-suite level than communications. PR is still underrepresented where strategy is made.
Raina’s diagnosis: “I think it’s a perception challenge. And maybe a confidence challenge a little bit. But that’s where measurement and data can help.”
Her prescription is not complicated, but it requires discipline. Earn the seat by speaking the language of the people whose attention you need. Not impressions – results. Not reach – outcomes. Not AVEs – business impact. “You know, even things like ‘impressions’ are not normal language for the rest of the company,” she said. “We need to walk the talk.”
She was equally honest about the challenge of getting the C-suite to listen in the first place. “You rely on people wanting to listen. That’s probably one of the biggest challenges – how do you get them to listen to what you have to say?” Her answer was not a hack but a habit: show up consistently. Explain what you’ve done and how it works. Don’t get frustrated that it takes time. Chip away at it, day after day, with the right data, interpreted thoughtfully, communicated in the audience’s language.
“Change doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “But if you’re thoughtful about how you interpret results, if you communicate in the language of your C-suite, then gradually you start seeing appreciation and traction.”
The Ruepoint story is, in miniature, a story about the evolution of the whole industry. Raina co-founded the company eight and a half years ago with the ambition of providing a human-led media intelligence service – not just data, but interpretation; not just monitoring, but insight. Ruepoint was sold to Muck Rack last year, and today the brand formally closes. All services, products, and customer relationships now operate under the Muck Rack name.
“Muck Rack is a technology-led company,” Raina explained. “It was started as a media database, and the Muck Rack brand is ubiquitous with relationships between PRs and journalists in the US. But what the leadership team recognized over the last few years is that even the best technology requires a human-led approach. That was the premise for the acquisition.”
Together, she said, they bring the best of both worlds: Muck Rack’s technology platform and AI capabilities – including a GEO product called Generative Pulse – and Ruepoint’s service offering, measurement expertise, editorial capabilities, and human judgment.
The direction of travel is toward decision intelligence. Not reporting for its own sake, but insights that inform strategic decisions by PR leaders. “With AI disruption, some of the more manual reporting work we used to do with people can now be done by technology,” she acknowledged frankly. “And that’s okay. We are moving up the value chain. The people we hire and develop are being upskilled to provide more strategic advice – something more like agency-as-a-service, but specifically around data.”
She described it not as commoditization but as evolution. The profession has always needed to move from output to outcome. The technology is now accelerating that journey whether the profession is ready or not.
I asked Raina for a closing thought. She gave me a word: frenemies.
The communications measurement world is small. As she pointed out, many of the people at this year’s Dublin summit were also in Dublin for the very first AMEC summit in 2012 – but they now work for entirely different organizations. They have crossed between vendors, agencies, in-house teams, and back again. They compete in the same markets. And they need each other.
“We need to be more collaborative rather than treat each other as competitors,” she said. “There are company secrets, confidential information – of course. But that doesn’t mean we can’t share for the good of the profession.”
“That’s when you learn,” she said. “And that’s the power of the community. This is a safe space. People want to help.”
The profession has spent years trying to earn a seat at someone else’s table. Raina Lazarova is arguing, quietly but consistently, that it might be time to build its own.
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Raina Lazarova is VP of Global Insights at Muck Rack and Chair of AMEC (the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication). She was re-elected to a second two-year term as Chair at the AMEC Global Summit in Dublin in May 2026. This interview was conducted at the Summit by Orla Clancy, Founder and Managing Director at Strategic: www.strategic.global
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