Marketing Procurement

Why data-led decision making is replacing gut feel and spam in public relations

Public relations has often been hard to pin down as a communications discipline. Absolutely a key part of any organisation’s marketing toolkit, it still finds itself derided for its reliance on ‘softer’ skills and metrics. Relationships, gut instinct, the ability to pick up a phone and sell a story – these just don’t seem to fit in a world driven by CTRs, impressions and marketing qualified leads or MQLs.

“People are ready now to talk more about how they use data to inform their decisioning,” explains Aaron Kwittken, Founder, CEO and Board Member at PRophet, the PR industry’s first AI platform. He coined the term ‘communications engineer’ 12 months ago. “Relationships won’t go away but now it’s very much ‘hands on keyboard’.”

Let go of spam

Technology has undoubtedly sped up PR professionals’ ability to reach contacts, as well as dramatically extended that reach. However, not always in a positive way.

“Pitching used to be a skill. Unfortunately, the industry writ large has migrated towards spam – spamming journalists rather than customising pitches. Database companies have risen alongside the technology, creating a perceived shortcut. However, they’ve actually decreased the amount of success that PR people have.

“Communications engineering is saying, now we have technologies like machine learning and natural language processing, we can identify and track trends, we can see patterns we hadn’t before. We can use data to replace guesswork.”

In his vision, instead of creating a single release and a list of 300 names, downloaded from a database, to hammer until everyone is thoroughly sick, the way forward is mass customisation.

“I’m going to try and write this pitch 10 different ways, I’m going to test which is the stickiest for which reporter using this data from the cloud. That’s what PRophet does. Before I do this in real life, I’m going to put 25 targets together who will be informed by data and discover which of the versions is going to be the most viable. I’ll spend less time pitching, and more time placing.”

By moving slower, Kwittken insists, you’ll actually be moving faster because you’re taking the time to be more deliberate and thoughtful. Creativity, critical thinking, curiosity will all stay the same skills required of PR people as they have always been, but patience, an appreciation of data and using it to inform strategy will be critical future skills for communications engineers.

Grasp innovation

Kwittken notes that, despite the obvious advantages of these technologies – and AI in general – the PR community has been slow to adapt. “There is inertia. The system isn’t actually broken. And many have a fear of data because data equals maths, and what we do is write – it’s art. But they have to realise that it is still an art. This is blending art and science; narrative and data. It’s a mindset, not a skillset.”

Of course, the question on everyone’s lips is: How can we use generative AI to make us more efficient, effective and – from an agency perspective – cheaper?

“Generative AI is a bit of a false flag. It isn’t going to be a major ‘moment’ or great value add for PR and communications people,” Kwittken warns. “Instead, it’s going to help humans ingest and sort through different data points to inform decision making, giving us options we didn’t have before, ones where we were limited by the human brain.”

He does entertain the possibility of a PR bot, the Kwittken bot, learning his language patterns and how he searches. It will take prompts from human Kwittken throughout the day, working alongside him as he’s working, “and hopefully replace some of the more mundane, ordinary tasks.”

This could be a real watershed moment for the PR industry. “It has been starved of innovation. The last real new technology was probably email.”

Communications engineering is different, he says. Kwittken believes that when agencies are filling out their RFPs for procurement, they’re not going to just talk about their people, processes and case studies: “It’s going to be people, case studies, experience and technology. What’s in my tech stack?”

A new model

This won’t just impact the how and why potential clients scrutinise their future partners, it could very well transform the whole model of PR supply going forward. Kwittken feels that, as part of a shift towards communications engineering, most agencies will move towards fixed fee or value-based pricing.

“As a former agency guy, that’s not a bad thing. If I helped a client through a crisis that saved them $2bn of market capitalisation but it only took me 15 minutes to draft the statement, should I be paid $312 for that 15 minutes, or $100,000? But equally, why should agencies be taking the long way of doing things. Clients incentivise this when they pay by the hour.”

Indeed, this is the modern equivalent of an oft-quoted homily – “It took me 30 years to learn how to do this task in 30 minutes. You’re paying me for the years, not the minutes.” In this case, clients will be paying for the expertise and the tech, not just the time.

Understanding the inputs from the client perspective is just half the battle. Being able to digest and communicate the outputs is equally valuable and yet another challenge PR professionals have struggled with.

Not to put it too delicately, “The CEO, the business manager – they all think they’re way more interesting than they really are,” Kwittken admits. Technology and data will give the PRs the power to manage expectations. Using AI to crunch the numbers and the trends, they can show their clients in black and white the expected performance of certain communications, nipping some of the more egregious uses of the PR’s time in the bud.

“Not everything is a pitch. By not going to reporters with items that aren’t of great importance, you save time, which saves money. It’s another, hugely practical application of AI,” he insists.

Ironically, it’s how AI is branded that is giving rise to the biggest misunderstanding of how it should be used by this next generation of communications engineers. “AI is more augmentative than it is artificial. Artificial only comes about when there’s a neural network and we’re nowhere near having it learn from itself,” Kwittken states.

“But, when it comes to finding the inspiration for the right trend to lean into, to identifying a threat that could disrupt your business, to simply finding the structure for the first draft of a press release, I’m happy AI does that,” he adds. “It’s a starting point, not an endpoint.”

Aaron Kwittken  is Founder, CEO and Board Member at PRophet