AI Has Redefined PR…But Some Agencies Just Don’t Get It.
AI-determined reputation is already here.
The future of PR is no surprise. It is completely visible all around us. And it has been self-evident for a very long time.
Pure-play PR practitioners and pure-play PR agencies (those focused on news media engagement and coverage) have long known that the world was changing.
But surprisingly few have had the wherewithal to adapt at the speed that they needed to.
In many ways these firms have been complacent for far too long. And now anecdotes are aplenty of these agencies making redundancies and ‘right-sizing’ to their dwindling relevance.
Driven by AI, conventional media is no longer definitive to reputation in the way that it once was.
Whilst for over a decade mainstream legacy media companies have been struggling to monetise in a world of democratized media and social media, many pure-play PR firms continued to flourish by charging fees to clients to obtain editorial coverage within those same media titles.
The pandemic PR boom created a false flag that this model remained valid. So many firms continued to operate on old pure-play models focused on delivering year-end profits at the cost of adapting and innovating for what was coming next.
What did come next was the breakdown in the value of PR and conventional news coverage. Driven by AI, conventional media is no longer definitive to reputation in the way that it once was.
Conventional mediated media within mainstream legacy media titles is now, in my estimation, less than 10% of what contemporary future-focused PR should be. That last 10% is about the credibility and validation of a story that must already be substantiated as being interesting to audiences through proven engagements within owned content channels.
Those owned content channels need to have eyeballs, and it is the opportunity to share in these eyeballs by co-creating the next iteration of a story that appeals to the legacy media organisations.
Today, a story is rarely of any value to a legacy media title by virtue of his own merits alone. A story has to bring clicks. It has to bring audience. It has to bring eyeballs.
And it has to be within a trope of an affinity where the public interest is already proven through the performance of the story through owned multi-media channels.
This future of PR is no surprise. It is completely visible all around us. And it has been self-evident for a very long time. The problem pervading the industry now is that a cohort of large agencies have failed to adapt. Short termism and complacency have been pervasive. And what we find now are agencies seeing their mandates declining rapidly as the value they deliver to their clients when expressed only in media coverage, is questionable.
Modern PR means embracing the world of content creators and democratised media
Major legacy media organizations are cutting back journalists and cutting back coverage. Many major US titles have cut their UK teams to the bone or are no longer covering stories that don't meet a very high minimum hurdle. Given this entirely predictable and visible climate, it should have been no surprise then, that the value of pure-play PR diminished.
Modern and future-facing PR means clients owning their own communications and content channels. It means democratisation in the same way that media itself has been democratized. Most individuals get their ‘new’ news not from websites but from social media. Most get their opinion not from news websites but from YouTube or TikTok.
It is easy to dismiss the modern culture of influencers as shallow and meaningless. But influencers are indicative of how modern audiences prefer to engage directly with content creators.
All companies and all individuals who value reputation need to adopt the precepts (but not necessarily the vacuousness) of content creators, producing and curating their own channels with interesting and relevant content to engage with the specific audiences that they want to communicate with.
As their audience grows and their stories grow, opportunities present themselves based on that substance, for legacy mainstream media to take an interest in an element of co-creation to extend the reach of that story to wider audiences.
But no longer can companies or individuals jump straight to legacy media. First there needs to be a substantive story, substantiated in content through a company's owned news channels, and only from there, when a story is proven, might a mainstream media organisation decide to become evolved to lend credibility and validation – and maybe to expand reach.
The legacy model for the monetisation of media made no sense.
If you think about it, this makes sense. The model we have had for the last decade, where legacy media organisations struggled to monetize the eyeballs they had, yet were expected to produce free editorial content for the clients of PR agencies, when the agencies were taking payment from their clients for securing said editorial, made no sense. Clearly it was unsustainable, because the lions share of the monetization was in the wrong place.
Some think that what this means is that all future content in legacy news organisations will be sponsored and paid for. And indeed, many PRs have suggested this is the way forward and, in the USA in particular, this switch to paid content has been fully embraced already.
Whilst this has some value, we are in the age of AI. And AI knows which content has been created independently and which content has been paid for. Even the algorithms of Google, which seem basic and naïve compared to the generative engines of AI-powered search, know how to diminish and give lower value to sponsored content in their results. The future, therefore, is a mix. Some sponsored, but mostly owned media, primarily video.
If you think about the obviousness of this further, most younger demographics do not read news. Many younger demographics do not read at all. And so, it stands to reason that contemporary PR and communications should be tailored to those audiences.
Which means video-based content delivered in channels that audiences recognize, often in bite size form, and then ‘cascaded’ through other media types. It seems painfully self-evident and obvious.
The irony of all of this is that one of the reasons that PR managed to escape having to adapt for such a long time is the conventional method of SEO, the algorithm-based method. Google algorithms are based on trust. Google knew to trust, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Forbes – and anything that those organisations wrote appeared at the top of search.
However, AI powered search powered by generative engines (which can be optimized) are cleverer than that. They don't need to just ‘trust’ media organisations. They can ‘verify’ by looking at the substance, the quality, the breadth and depth of content that exists around an organization, and making an intelligent – an artificially intelligent – determination as to what the correct result is.
AI prefers media-rich content from which more can be interpreted.
A result in Bloomberg, for example, is no longer guaranteed a top spot in Search. In fact, the notion of a ‘top spot’ is going to disappear entirely.
The future of search, which is where most reputations manifest, will be lots of content aggregated together and interpreted by AI and presented to users. Moreover, AI-powered search prefers media-rich content because it can interpret a lot more from videos and images than it can from pure text.
(Side note: ongoing political arguments about whether big tech and AI engines should be fined and forced to pay for access to content on legacy media sites is also a disincentive for those generative engines to rely on legacy media and is also an incentive for them to find other data sources, which may further diminish the importance of conventional news media titles in a world of AI-mediated reputation).
So what does this all mean?
It's very simple really. All of this has been visible, evident and obvious for a very long time. But because the AI transition in Search has only just started to take hold, PRs have been able to survive longer using pureplay PR, because of its value in conventional algorithm-based SEO. The trouble for the PR industry is the world of the algorithm is nearly dead.
AI is coming. The future is obvious.
But then, it always has been.