PR Futurist | Stuart Bruce | Purposeful Relations - 🚀 PR Futurist #70 | Finance leaders anxious about AI | Global PR body's AI ethics | AI Revolution bigger than the Industrial Revolution

Welcome

Welcome to Wednesday

Did you miss your PR Futurist on Monday? Just like the trains the delay is because of Storm Babet. It meant my weekend break to the North East and Yorkshire coast became Sunday and Monday.

To compensate we've made this a bumper issue. There's my write up of ICCO's new Warsaw Principles on the ethical use of AI in public relations and a useful AI FAQ from Professor Ethan Mollick (one of the world's leading academics on AI). We also take a look at deep fake audio and why finance sector leaders are so anxious about AI and machine learning (we can help you make them less anxious!).

There's also a report from a NATO conference where Cision's Ant Cousins compares the AI Revolution to the impact of the Industrial Revolution driven by steam.

News

See you at the PRovoke Global Summit in Washington DC?

In a couple of weeks' time Tim and Stuart will be in Washington DC for the PRovoke Global Summit. Let us know if you're going. Picture of Paul Holmes at last year's summit.

Global PR body ratifies Warsaw Principles for ethical use of AI in public relations and communications

At its Global Summit in Warsaw ICCO ratified the Warsaw Principles for the ethical use of AI in public relations and communications. Stuart has written in article explaining them and considering what PR and corporate affairs professionals need to do now. The TL;DR (too long ; didn't read) is that these are principles so don't tell you what or how to do it. Every comms team or PR agency still needs to urgently put its own ethics policy, processes and strategy in place.

Tim Bailey

PRovoke Industry Survey: How Has 2023 Unfolded For You?

PRovoke Media has again teamed up with chatbot research platform Stickybeak to run a global survey to help understand how the year has turned out for PR agencies and in-house communications teams. It only takes a minute.

Stuart Bruce

Get in touch

Are you getting the most out of your technology?

Innovation and efficiency purposefulrelations.com

Purposeful Relations offers consulting, training and mentoring for PR and communications teams and leaders - in-house and agency.

Budget season is upon us, where thoughts turn to your technology investments for next year. It is an ideal time to review your current platforms to ensure you are getting value for money. Our CommsTransfrom process provides a full technology audit with recommendations for where you can get better value for money. Talk to us about how we can help.

We can also help with:

Better measurement and evaluation through customised frameworks that work for your company or organisation.
Get up to speed on AI in Comms and transform your organisation and your client engagements.
Contact us to start the conversation.

Data, measurement, analytics

Why the least measurable marketing channels tend to perform best

A great '5-Minute Whiteboard' from SparkToro's Rand Fishkin on measurability and scalability. Looks at why the 'harder' to measure tactics and channels such as public relations, content marketing, social media and events can work better than 'easier' to measure channels.

If you're like me and prefer reading to watching or listening, then there's a transcript.

Stuart Bruce

Crisis communication

What comms people need to know about deep fake audio

During the Labour Party conference an audio clip appeared on social media of Labour leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing a member of staff. Except of course it wasn't. It was a deep fake audio using a reproduction of Keir's voice.

Deep fake audio is something I've been warning clients against since 2019. That was when the UK CEO of an energy company was conned into transferring £250k to fraudsters. He thought he was having a conversation with the CEO of his German parent company. In reality it was a real time deep fake audio clone of his German boss. The UK CEO said everything about it sounded real including the tone and rhythm.

Public sector comms trainer Dan Slee has written an interesting article on why it matters for PR and comms folk.

Stuart Bruce

AI, digital and social

University of Cambridge's policy for generative AI for PR and comms

It's essential that every in-house comms team and PR agency has a policy for how they will use AI. Most still don't. The University of Cambridge has just introduced one and made it available publicly.

The policy is just the first step. You then need to ensure your team has the support and training it needs to take advantage of the AI opportunities and minimise the risks. Purposeful Relations can help with policies, advice and training.

Stuart Bruce

How Microsoft’s AI comms tools work as a copilot, not an autopilot

Microsoft's Copilot is already rolling out in Windows 11 and will be available to Microsoft 365 enterprise licence customers on 1 November. This is a helpful reminder that the clue's in the name. Microsoft has designed Copilot to be a smart AI assistant (the ultimate 'Clippy' for those of you old enough to remember). It's not intended to do the job for you.

Stuart Bruce

What people ask me most. Also, some answers.

Professor Ethan Mollick is one of the world's leading academics on AI. He recently published a post on LinkedIn where he admitted that even he finds it impossible to keep up. A big part of what our team does is to try to keep up with the aspects of AI that are most important and relevant to PR and comms.

Professor Mollick has also just published this useful FAQ on AI. It's a helpful reminder even if you know some of it already.

Stuart Bruce

Protecting customers with generative AI indemnification

Google is the latest big tech company to indemnify users from the legal copyright risks of using generative AI. This removes the uncertainty currently around the legal implications of using generative AI that has been trained on a wide selection of both copyright and none copyright materials. Copyright law, never the clearest of spaces to operate in, is going to need clarification which could, take years and vary enormously around the world.

There has been a lot of furore about copyright, but the big tech companies appear far more relaxed with Microsoft, Adobe and Google all offering to have your back.

Tim Bailey

Research and reports

A quarter of finance leaders suffer AI anxiety

If you are still finding it challenging to convince colleagues how important it is to take action on implementing an AI policy and strategy, then this research might help. A quarter of finance sector leaders are suffering anxiety about AI and machine learning.

They have a lack of confidence in their organisation's ability to adapt to the technology. Four in 10 (41%) of leaders blamed an internal skills gap.

Stuart Bruce

International survey on consumption and public perceptions of media

Action Global Communications group has published the results of an international survey into media consumption patterns and the public perception of traditional, digital and social media.

The research is interesting because it focuses on countries that are often under-represented in international research.

The research looked at Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

I've worked in several of these markets and too often seen international companies ignore key differences between countries and cultures.

Stuart Bruce

Professional practice

AI will have a bigger impact than steam did - steam powered the Industrial Revolution

This is a fascinating report by Cision's Ant Cousins on his thoughts from the NATO-run conference on Emerging Trends in Social Media.

One aspect that jumped out at me was when Ant reminded us that several studies have said that generative AI will have as much or a greater impact on human productivity than the steam engine.

Steam powered the industrial revolution in Britain, changing the nature of every industry from textiles to transport and Britain exploited its steam advantage to expand its influence globally.

It took the best part of 100 years for steam technology to fully proliferate around the world from Britain. It took less than 100 days for ChatGPT to reach more than 1.5 billion users. Imagine how different our world would look now if the most powerful form of steam technology had been given to every person in every country at the same time.

Stuart Bruce

My quest to find out why my inbox was getting flooded with PR spam

It's 2023 and some communications technology still helps the PR profession go backwards and do a worse job. In this article a journalist rightly bemoans the tsunami of spam that floods his inbox.

The primary reason is that most media databases are still incredibly crude and actually encourage PR people to be less focused. In the pre-internet days PR people relied on paper directories to research journalists. Lists were painstakingly researched by hand and we did our due diligence by first reading the media title and seeing what the journalist really wrote about. We'd then create multiple versions of the same news release to make it as relevant as possible to different media titles. It was better to send out 12 news releases and get nine placements than 100+ releases with three or four placements.

Today databases encourage people to tap a few key words and then spam an email out to hundreds of journalists. It's not entirely the fault of the PR people using it as often there isn't the budget to take the time to do it properly. It does however raise the question of if it's even worth doing.

However, communication technology is now also capable of returning us to the good old days. Tools like PRophet take the hard work out of targeting as they use AI to do the analysis of what a journalist is really interested in. They can even help to create the targeted pitches.

Stuart Bruce

UN's Melissa Fleming on global communications

Melissa Fleming is the under secretary general for global communications at the United Nations. This year she gave the CIPR International's prestigious annual Maggie Nally lecture. Watch the recording to see what she had to say about the UN's global communication challenges.

Stuart Bruce

CommTech newswatch

ByteDance's video editor CapCut targets businesses with AI ad scripts and AI-generated presenters

CapCut is a video editing app from TikTok owner ByteDance. It's available as both a desktop and mobile app and can be used for editing any video, not just portrait format TikTok videos. It has just announced that it has added a wealth of AI features including AI ad scripts and AI-generated presenters.

Stuart Bruce

PR AI platform PRophet adds new AI-driven influencer marketing and news monitoring tools

PRophet was one of the first AI tools built specifically for the PR and communications profession. It is continuing to be a trailblazer and has just unveiled new AI driven influencer and news monitoring capabilities.

Stuart Bruce