In today’s episode, you’ll continue the exploration of generative AI in public relations with part two of my five-part interview with Stephanie Moore. You’ll discover the significant benefits of incorporating AI into your PR workflow, including how it can drastically save time and even unlock new revenue streams. Learn practical examples of how AI can elevate your PR game and gain insights on using AI for data analysis and audience targeting. Watch now to equip yourself with the knowledge to stay ahead in the evolving world of PR!
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn: In this episode—this is part two of five of an interview I did with Stephanie Moore of Kent State University about generative AI in public relations.
Stephanie Moore: Excellent. So, how has the incorporation of AI tools affected the risk, the roles, and the responsibilities of your team members?
Christopher Penn: At our firm, everyone is expected to use AI. Everyone is expected to find as many efficiencies as possible and be as productive as possible because our model is value-based. The way we build things, the way we do projects, and things is all value-based because you’re not paying for how long it takes me to do something—you’re paying for the final outcome. As a result, we want people to use AI as much as they possibly can, still fact-check it, still make sure that the output is good. In the same way, the way we think of AI is this: it is the world’s smartest intern.
Right? This intern just graduated. They have 255 PhDs—they’ve got a PhD in everything—but they’re still an intern. They still don’t know your company. They don’t know your clients. They still know how you do things. So, you would never say to an intern, “Oh, intern, hey, go write me a press release.” Never do that. You would give the intern a creative brief, say, “Here’s what I want you to do. Follow these steps exactly.” The intern does it great. You’ve got a high-quality output. The same thing is true for AI. If you think of it as the world’s smartest intern, you will get really great results out of it. That’s what we teach our staff.
Stephanie Moore: That’s awesome. So you kind of already got at this a little bit, but in terms of the benefits, what do you think are the most significant benefits of using AI in the field?
Christopher Penn: So, all technologies are measured on three factors: save time, save money, make money. AI saves enormous amounts of time. So, the difference between a 66-hour book pitch or one minute and 52-second book pitch—and the outputs are about the same quality—is a massive time savings. Most PR agencies—this is actually a very serious problem for many PR agencies—most PR agencies bill by the hour. They have an agency blended rate, like, our agency blender, it’s 182 an hour. Well, Gemini did the task in5 and 66 minutes of work. It’s $5.66 of work. So, your bill rate as an agency, your ability to make revenue if you’re billing by the hour is severely endangered by AI.
You must switch to value-based billing immediately. However—yeah—for companies that do figure that out, they can save money. Some of them will be very regressive and say, “Okay, let’s fire as many people as we possibly can.” PR firms that are, say, managed by—oh, I don’t know—private equity firms will be firing people as fast as they possibly can because that’s how you increase profit margins, and all those firms run on net margin.
And then “make money” is—this is the thing that, again, PR folks don’t realize the power of these tools. They are—the AI tools—are skill levelers, meaning that they give you skills you don’t have. So, Suno, for example, the audio company, can make songs—it can make halfway decent songs. I have made custom songs for clients, live on stage, and they’ve been stunned by it. I can’t play music. I don’t play any instruments. You don’t want to hear me sing.
The tool can do it. I know how to prompt the tool to create high-quality outputs. So, anything that is within the domain of communications at all is on the table for a skillful PR firm to say, “Well, we offer that too. Hey, you want analyst relations? Hey, we offer that too, because we have an AI model that can skillfully ingest all these things. Hey, you want corporate strategy? We have that too.”
I was showing an example earlier today to—a talk I was giving where I took all of the job listings of Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, and all the job listings of Pfizer. And I said to a language model, “Digest this down—there’s 4,000 job listings—tell me the corporate strategy for each of these companies for the next 12 to 18 months,” because you never hire for something you don’t care about. You only hire things that are critical to your mission. Otherwise, you find an agency or a contractor. And the tool put together a 20-page business strategic business analysis that is as good of quality as
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anything you would get out of McKinsey or Bain. And your firm could offer that. Your firm could offer that as a value-add to your services. So, it’s a question of, do you know what to ask the tools? Do you know how to think, not like a PR person, but like a communicator and a strategist? And then can you get the tools to do it?
Stephanie Moore: Love that. I think that’s great. That also gives me some ideas for—again—prompt engineering to teach our students. So—a little bit. So, you kind of talked about the effectiveness and the efficiency, sort of, in the public relations field. What about—what type of advantages does AI offer in terms of data analytics, or data analysis and audience targeting?
Christopher Penn: It depends on the kind of AI you’re talking about. There are three different classes. There’s regression-based AI, which is like, hey, do uplift modeling. This is, for example, how you measure public relations. You say, “I have all this background activity in, ads, running emails, and I have the data from that in my various marketing systems. And hey, we got a placement in The Wall Street Journal on this date, and we know these things have a decay rating of about three days. Do uplift modeling, find out how much of the delta between what was before, during, and after we can attribute to that accounting for everything else.” So, that’s a very—that form of modeling has been around for eight years now. We were doing that at my old shop.
This classification modeling, which is, “Hey, I’ve got a great big pile of data, and I need to organize—I need to analyze it.” Social media sentiment analysis, for example, is very, very common for that. That is something that you would want to see people using when it comes to data analysis.
Where generative AI comes into play is that it is extremely good at qualitative processing of text if you have a big pile of unstructured text that you need to analyze and understand. These are the best tools to do it.
Real simple example: I was doing a project for a client two days ago, and this client—a fairly well-known client—I said, “Let me go see what the community has to say.” I went over to the Reddit forum that is about that particular industry. I downloaded 2,000 posts and, like, 4,000 comments about this thing, stuffed it into Google’s Gemini, and said, “Distill out the top-line trends and then the emerging trends in what people are saying about this client.” And it spit out the analysis. Handed it to the client. The client’s like, “That’s uncomfortable.”
I said, “Yep, sure is. But that’s what’s happening in the data.” Now, how long would it have taken me to read 6,000 posts and comments? Certainly, it would not have taken me 90 seconds. That’s how long it took Gemini to process all that and then another two minutes to do the analysis the way I wanted it.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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