Is AI a stakeholder now?

Tony Garner
So, Stuart, welcome to our studio in Rawtenstall.

Stuart Bruce
I’m looking forward to this and it was a great drive here.

Tony Garner
Excellent. You’ve worked in agency, corporate comms, politics. Looking back, what experience has shaped your thinking on PR the most?

Stuart Bruce
You think, gosh, there’s so many because the all kind of keeps adding on in layers. But I think the one that would probably shaped my experience the most was my second job, which was with a. It was a bit odd. It was a. I had my first job, then I moved to an agency. But I was only there a few weeks because the director that I was working for then quit to start his own and I went with him. So technically it was my third job. But, you know, I just learned. I just learned so much from Pete Ward, you know, about kind of how you could. Because I’ve always been interested in kind of the strategic side of pr.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
But he had this kind of ability to combine the creative and the strategic side.

Tony Garner
That’s left side and right side brain going at the same time.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. And Pete was interesting because he was also. He’d just won the Radio Times Drama Award for. As a playwright. So like kind of amateur writers kind of. And it was meant to be kind of made into something. So. Yes. That gives you an idea of kind of how creative he was.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah. I mean. And your early-ish career, you came across our now Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Tell us, tell us about how that came across and what you got involved in doing that.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, that wasn’t so early. So that was. That was a kind of 2010.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
I was asked to go and work with Andy to be his director of communications for his first bid to be Labour Party leader. So it’s his third one that he finally succeeded. I didn’t actually run. I didn’t see it through to the very end. I worked with him at the start of the campaign and I would have loved to have continued, but it was basically like a time I was running an agency at the time and it’s a full time job. You’d have to do it properly. You know, there were some other kind of amazing people kind of took over and kind of kept it running. But I kind of got to know Andy well then it was the start of the campaign.

Tony Garner
What did you, what did you learn Right. At that point about how he wanted to communicate?

Stuart Bruce
I think he’s always been a natural communicator.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
What was kind of quite fun then given how well known he is now for his kind of social media videos and his use of Social media is. That definitely wasn’t true then. Not that he couldn’t do it’s just that he didn’t. And as Secretary of State for Culture, he had actually done an interview or made a speech where he’d criticised people that use Twitter and kind of made fun of them slightly. And a tech journalist called Mike Butcher, who a lot of people might know, actually had the Andy Burnham empty Twitter account, and he used it as a kind of parody cat, which. And he basically set it up because of that, because I kind of knew Mike a little bit, I thought, okay, I’m gonna see if I can persuade him to hand it back. And luckily, he kind of agreed.

Tony Garner
So, I mean, it’s a massive transformation 16 years later in terms of just how he uses that. Has he transformed himself, or is it just getting the right people around him, you think?

Stuart Bruce
I think it’s the right people around him. You’re still seeing kind of the real, authentic Andy, you know, and this kind of, you know, he. He’s genuinely passionate about things like music and. And kind of football.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
You know, he has a proper hinterland outside politics, and I think that’s what enables him to kind of do all these things.

Tony Garner
Yeah, I mean, you use that word authentic, then.

Stuart Bruce
And.

Tony Garner
And that’s one of the things that we always train in corporate, encourage, you know, senior leaders that we get involved in today. But it’s. It’s often a bit overused. How do you kind of get somebody to be authentic?

Stuart Bruce
I think that. I think that’s the problem. Even just the way you face. If you’ve got to get them to be authentic, they’re not being authentic. And I think. Use Andy as an example. Kind of one of the things that, when he kind of first took to Twitter, you know, I was talking about, you know, it’s social media, so it can’t just be about kind of politics, you know, talk about music, talk about football. And there was at one point where we had to remind him, you do have to mention politics occasionally. Yeah, but it’s not. Be afraid of mistakes.

Tony Garner
Yeah, we’re not afraid of mistakes. That’s why we set up this podcast.

Stuart Bruce
But, yeah, but it is brilliant that you’re doing this type of thing. But I think sometimes, especially in kind of the corporate or B2B sectors, you know, clients can be kind of very conservative with a small C, and they’re afraid of mistakes. And kind of going on a tangent slightly, one of the things I’m kind of really big on is kind of corporate storytelling.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And if you kind of look at things like the meta plot and, you know, it’s got five stages, one of which is called Nightmare. And when you do a corporate case study, they don’t want you to put that bit in. But if you think about your favourite book or your favourite film, what’s the most exciting part? It’s the Nightmare where everything goes disastrously wrong, but then you get the resolution and everything works out. Include that in your case study. It just makes it come to life. And I remember doing that once for an IT client. I mean, what IT project ever ran to time and ran to budget? It’s a really big one.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
Put that in and everybody reads and think, wow.

Tony Garner
Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s, that’s really interesting. How do you think he’s going to. Kind of going forward? It’s been a bit of a honeymoon period when he first came in and he’s become the, the first TikTok PM in. In. In a sense. But what do you see as the trajectory if you had your crystal ball going out there?

Stuart Bruce
I think he’s got, there are a couple of. I mean, he’s got some very good people working for him.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
So like Abby Tomlinson, who does kind of the social. But people have been saying that kind of one of the tests is going to be. Is when he has to deal with really difficult subjects. Yeah. But actually, knowing Andy, I don’t think he’s gonna have a problem. If you look at things like one of the kind of iconic moments is when he was speaking to the Hillsborough families.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And he was starting to be heckled. He dealt with it. Yeah. And he solved it. So I don’t think, you know, whatever the issue is, it’s going to be that different for him. Obviously, you know, we’ve got some difficult things coming up, like the first budget. Yeah. But there’s a really good line from Alistair Campbell and that. I remember kind of hearing music when he gave a talk of cut a few years ago and he talked about people can be more reasonable than you, you think they’ll be. And what he meant by that is actually if you’re honest with them and explain what the problems is, why it’s got to be like this, they will understand if you try to spin your way out of it and pretend it’s, you know, it’s something else, they’re not going to give you any leeway.

Stuart Bruce
And I think Andy’s far more likely to kind of be honest about it.

Tony Garner
Yeah. So one of your big arguments now is that communications professionals need to start thinking of AI as a stakeholder. And AI is a topic that I really want to delve into today. I had to bring the Burnham question up, but AI is stakeholder. What do you mean by that?

Stuart Bruce
Okay, so too often discussions about AI are all, especially in PR and comms, all about AI adoption. How can we use it, how does it work for content creation, for writing a press release, you know, for editing a video and all this type of stuff. But that’s actually missing the much bigger picture, which is how AI is becoming a stakeholder kind of an intermediary that’s shaping people’s perception of organisations. So we used to call, kind of Google, say that Google was the world’s biggest reputation management engine. AI has become the world’s biggest reputation management engine. And it’s not simply a replacement for search. There are a lot of kind of SEO companies and digital agencies that are pivoting really rapidly into generative engine optimisation. But that’s missing the point.

Stuart Bruce
What AI is doing is it’s working much more like a journalist or a politician or a think tank because it’s taking information from multiple sources and it’s using that information to create some new content.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And that’s shaping people’s opinions. But it’s even more complicated because if you just say you just use journalists as an example, everything that they write, you know, most of them will be using AI to help with their research. To help, kind of. So, you know, they’re being influenced by AI to start with, then what they create is influencing AI. And that’s why I talk about AI as a stakeholder.

Tony Garner
So do we as PR professionals need to start thinking in terms of how do we influence AI? Is that what you say?

Stuart Bruce
Yes, absolutely. So, so, but before you can start about talking about influencing it, you’ve got to think about how you can understand it, how you can measure it, how you can understand the landscape.

Tony Garner
So, yeah, you need to have a kind of baseline essentially of what is AI saying about said client or individual or so on.

Stuart Bruce
And it sounds really easy to say. The reality is to do. It’s incredibly difficult. And it’s a really kind of hot market where there’s so much hype. You’ve got companies like Profound who are kind of one of the kind of tools that you can use to measure AI answers and to give you an idea of the scale of it. They started about two years ago. Earlier this year they got 950 million as investment, which value kind of values them at just under a billion. So they’re almost a unicorn just for a tool that measures. And the point is none of the tools work particularly well. And that’s not having a dig at them, it’s just the nature of how AI works.

Stuart Bruce
You know, if you could media monitoring or social listening or search, you’ve got data, you know, you’ve got robust data sets for all of those things. AI companies, none of the large language model companies reveal what the prompts are that people kind of put in or what the answers are that they get back. And even then they’re not consistent, they change.

Tony Garner
So I’m a simple man, so if I put in a prompt or a question into an AI tool, I might get a different answer to the same question within a few minutes, seconds of one another. Is that what we’re saying, that the information that you get back.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, it can vary because what a is actually doing, you kind of get down into the weeds of how it’s actually tokens, you know, it’s kind of, you know, it’s predicting what’s going to come next, which is why it can vary. But then the kind of, the further complication is we talk about large language models. There are lots.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
You know, and just having, you know, just some look at some of the clients we’ve worked for, you know, we had one where its own website was the number one cited source for one large language model. For another, it wasn’t even in the top five.

Tony Garner
Really.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. So it was that much of a variance.

Tony Garner
And those are kind of big large language models, like.

Stuart Bruce
Yes. No, no. So, yeah, so, yeah, so I can’t remember which was which of those, but one of them was. One of them was ChatGPT and the other one was Gemini.

Tony Garner
So we’re not talking an obscure one.

Stuart Bruce
No, no. And, and I think the kind of the other, the other thing about that is because they kind of change over time as well. Yeah. And there’s been some, you know, we’re beginning to get less of the Wild West. So like earlier this year, amec, the International association for the Measurements Evaluation of Communications, which is a bit of a mouthful, but they published the GEO principles.

Tony Garner
Yes.

Stuart Bruce
Which were kind of seven principles, but principles being the key word, they don’t tell you how to do it. Which is something the PRCA followed up with recently. And I was one of the kind of co authors of that paper. A kind of simple kind of how to do geo guide. I mean it is very top level.

Tony Garner
But one of the things that I remember from that was how not to do it as well and not to kind of like blast the Internet with. With information in the hope that you’re going to game the system. Is that.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah.

Tony Garner
Am I paraphrasing?

Stuart Bruce
No, no. I think that’s. Yeah. I mean we had. We had the kind of and kind of the Today interview with a certain great doyen of the advertising industry was recommending ‘flood the internet’ and Sarah wanted. The chief executive of the BRCA kind of was robust in her defence. So why we shouldn’t do that. But it’s also differences between B2B and corporate. You know, if you’re. There are two basic ways that the measurement tools can work. One is as a panel. So that’s how Profound works. That’s how Peak kind of company in Germany works. They have a panel of kind of real prompts. So these are prompts that real users are using. You have the question about where they come from. Peak are quite transparent that they gather them from browser extensions.

Stuart Bruce
So people install an extension on their browser and it scrapes their prompts. Sometimes it’s in the T’s and C’s. Sometimes I’m not 100% sure it always is. And who reads T’s and C’s anyway? But if you think about that for a moment, that can work for consumers. How’s that going to work in a B2B or corporate market? Most people can’t all browser extension on a work computer. And then also it’s about which models. Often people kind of focus on ChatGPT, which is fine because as a consumer, as a user, that’s probably what you’re sitting on your work computer. You’re probably going to be using Copilot.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s here. We’ve got a few on the go. So yeah, it’s an interesting debate. So how is it possible then to create an audit?

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, so.

Tony Garner
And it’s something that you offer.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, so especially on the kind of. Most of the work we do is in kind of what I would call the kind of the complex space. So it’s corporate, it’s B2B, it’s public affairs, it’s kind of. And one approach that works really well is we kind of create Personas. So most organisations have already got Personas, whether they’re lobbying, whether it’s corporate comms. So we look at those Personas and then look at what prompts would work for each of those Personas. And so each Persona will have so many prompts. And to create those prompts, we can actually use kind of things like search data. They may not be questions, but at least we can look at that. And tools like Answer the public.

Tony Garner
Yes.

Stuart Bruce
You know, is a really good one. Just giving you ideas for, you know, the topics that you should be looking at.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And then if it’s a big enough project, you can also follow up with focus groups.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
So we’re actually just doing one at the moment. I was actually speaking to somebody this weekend. Yeah, he was an employee of our new client about whether we could kind of have her being one of the focus group. So we can actually, you know, take employees as one of the Persona. Typical employees, one of the Personas. We’ll create some prompts, but then we’ll do a focus group just to test and check those prompts.

Tony Garner
And this is all research and information gathering to build a picture.

Stuart Bruce
Yes.

Tony Garner
Because, I mean, it’s probably a year ago or more now that I sat down with Daryl Sperry from Hard Numbers and you gave us kind of like this spiel of this is the big opportunity for the industry. Because one of the findings of the early research on GEO was that PR can have an impact, but we’re not quite sure how or how to do this. So is he right?

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, he is. The research, kind of Hard numbers and Daryl have done, you know, some of. Some of the kind of really robust stuff out there because we published last November a white paper where we took research from a lot of the tool companies, but also from the hard numbers research. And what we did is we looked at what themes were across them because the precise numbers varied. They were all over the place. You know, according to one, earned media was 95%. According to another it was 43%. I’m sorry, but those numbers aren’t true. So we, so that we. What we tried to do was to get those themes and earned media without a doubt is really important. So is owned media and user media. What isn’t is paid media.

Stuart Bruce
That’s kind of basically at the moment, it’s not totally not factory, because that’s beginning to change. But probably because of kind of some dubious activity by publishers. But certainly, but it’s actually bigger than that because if you want to kind of start influencing AI, it’s not just directly about the sources. It’s things like, you know, if AI is going to look is this spokesperson credible and you’ve quoted them in news release. So that’s kind of one source. But if the biographies on the website saying the credible of this is another. If they’re talking about that on LinkedIn, that’s another. If you’ve got them a speaking gig at a conference, that’s another. If they’re at a byline somewhere, that’s another. So it’s. So it’s this combination of sources and I think that’s why.

Stuart Bruce
And you’ve got to do some technical fixes on the website, you know, things like schema and all. But the. Those technical fixes, just a small part of it. So the argument I always made is that because PR looks at the big picture and across the board, that’s why we’re in a position to kind of lead on the strategy for this. Some of the implementation elements, yeah, they could be done by other people, but you can’t take your eye off that big picture.

Tony Garner
Yeah, I have a pet theory about this and it is generally the theory of tomorrow. But pr, sorry, AI had has a bit of a problem in so much as when it launched or semi-launched through ChatGPT letting its beta testing run wild in the public, hallucination was one of the first big things that came through the door. Well, you can’t trust anything it says and it makes loads of stuff up. And I think now that the LLMs can also look at the web, they’re trying to kind of shut that door on it a little bit by going to trusted sources. That’s my theory.

Stuart Bruce
Yes. No, I think that’s absolutely true. And if you actually look at some of the things that impact this. So when we did that kind of, that study of looking at lots and lots of reports, there were three kind of themes that came across as being important. So recency was one. So LLMs are going to look at recent information and the rationale behind that is probably they’ve got this body of knowledge in the large language model which has got a cutoff date. Okay. Gets updated. But to supplement that when they go off and search, you can understand why they’re looking at the most recent stuff. Because if it was old, it’s already gonna. And it was good. It’s already gonna be in the model.

Tony Garner
Yeah, but when we talk about recency, then before we move on to the other two, how recent is recency? Are we looking at like six weeks or do we not know?

Stuart Bruce
No, we don’t know. And that’s deliberately why when I said went through these because more than one make reference to it and more than one put numbers on it, but they varied. So that was why we thought recency is absolutely, definitely a factor. But let’s not pin it down.

Tony Garner
But, but then, you know, to our clients in that B2B space, you know, getting trade media is a good thing for more than just what it’s always been good for. But for this.

Stuart Bruce
Oh yeah.

Tony Garner
Informing the models.

Stuart Bruce
But that also moves on to the second of the three Rs, which is kind of relevance. Right. Because some of these kind of studies that have come out, they’d look at things like what the top 10 top 20 top 100 domains cited by AI are. That doesn’t make any sense because actually in different niches and for different organisations, it can vary dramatically. And basically what they’re doing is they’re looking. Is this an expert source? So, so a like trade magazine might rank far higher than being in a kind of national broadsheet because it actually knows that trade magazine knows about whatever this topic or issue is.

Tony Garner
Yeah. And that’s always been the case, the value, I guess, hasn’t it? But sometimes, you know what it’s like dealing with clients. Egos and politics are also at play here beyond kind of sense and measurement and data. But it’s further strength to that argument that the trade has real value.

Stuart Bruce
Oh, 100%. And it’s also the question of what do we mean by the trade. Yeah. Because you know, another project we did for a client was for a big global trade body which was a kind of membership organisation.

Tony Garner
Okay.

Stuart Bruce
And when you looked at their top 10 media that they were using and basically they did a lot of lobbying on kind of issues around kind of the maritime sector.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
You know, then this top 10 kind of trade titles, which kind of TradeWinds was number one, which anybody that kind of knows the maritime sector gets a publication out of Norway. If you looked at the top 10 that were cited by AI, TradeWinds didn’t even feature.

Tony Garner
Wow.

Stuart Bruce
In fact, out of their top 10 for humans, the top 10 for cited by AI, there was only three that were the same. So basically that means they now have a kind of top tier media list of 17.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah. And what were they, you know, what were the AI citing?

Stuart Bruce
Some of the AI-cited ones were ones that were quite low down on the human list because they were the type of sites where there were some human-written stories on there. But they also aggregated a lot of news releases and newswire content. So ones that we, as a PR person, might be a bit sniffy about it, say that’s not a real publication. Actually, I thought it was.

Tony Garner
And what’s your reaction when you get those kinds of results, especially when they’re counterintuitive to you? Like that one seems to have been a little bit.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, well, this is. This is one of the reasons why in both kind of the AMEC and the PRCA guides, we talk about kind of using more than one tool to do it. Right. Because you’ve got to test your findings. If one tool was telling you that you can’t trust it if you used. And very crude later, it’s down to budget. You know, we will.

Tony Garner
We will.

Stuart Bruce
You know, the bigger the budget, the bigger the sample we can create. And you can test different theories and do things like a repeat run. You know, so you run it once, but then repeat the exercise to see if you can replicate it and document each of those stages. So, yeah, so with that one, because it was counterintuitive, we did test and see whether we could get the same.

Tony Garner
Because it didn’t pass the initial sniff test there.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah.

Tony Garner
Right. So that’s two out of three.

Stuart Bruce
So reputation. No, so recency, relevance and reputation.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
So reputation is the third one, and that’s the one that I’ve actually already partially talked about where it will sort of say, is this, you know, is this source credible?

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
And that’s where, you know, things like the bail on the website LinkedIn starts to come in.

Tony Garner
So how did you get involved in this AI malarkey then? You know, why should we trust Stuart?

Stuart Bruce
I’ve always been kind of, you know, right. Since I started my PR career, I’ve always been utterly fascinated by innovation and kind of, why do we do this? Is there a better way to do it? Do we even need to do this? Could we do something else instead? And that’s why, kind of, if you go back to. So the measurement was the first thing I was into. You can have. There’s a PR Week article of me in the kind of early 90s when I was kind of, dig that out, Max Mere Accounting Zach. But I invented this measurement system because basically I was doing something called a CAM diploma, which doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a proper PR qualification. And were taught on that advertising value equivalents were nonsense, yet clients were asking for them and my agency was doing them.

Stuart Bruce
So I thought, this doesn’t make any sense to me. So I basically invented something else. And the client, you know, liked it. We used it.

Tony Garner
Excellent.

Stuart Bruce
Then same with social media. I was, you know, I started my PR blog in 2003 and I think it was what, the sixth, seventh PR blog in the world? You know, Twitter. I joined on 2 January 2007 and I was running a kind of political campaign for Alan Johnson to be deputy leader of the Labour Party by kind of, I think it was about April that year, which would have been the world’s first political campaign on Twitter, but we got beaten to it by Senator John Edwards in the US by about three or four weeks.

Tony Garner
So really.

Stuart Bruce
So an AI came about. So I was kind of. When it began to take off, I was sitting down thinking about how long I have actually been doing this? And I think I can trace it back to about 2015, when I did a project with kind of very early versions of AI where it was with the kind of EU, and we were looking at how you could combat myths about the EU and were using AI to kind of brainstorm what some of those were. So, yes, I’ve been. So when ChatGPT came out, I’d already been using AI for kind of comms for quite a long time. It just hadn’t been a huge part of what I did.

Tony Garner
And as it’s come out, how has it changed your practices and the work.

Stuart Bruce
That you’re doing just by sheer client demand? Most of the work we used to do was around kind of measurement data and evaluation of purposeful relations. But what’s happening now is most of it is around AI, and for the last couple of years it’s been around kind of AI adoption and helping people to kind of introduce it to their teams. And it still is. That hasn’t kind of disappeared. But the real growth one this year has definitely been AI as a stakeholder.

Tony Garner
And we’re talking earlier about persuading clients to take podcasting seriously in a B2B space. You say it’s been demand-driven. You must have some sophisticated clients out there that are grasping this because it’s quite niche, in-the-weeds stuff.

Stuart Bruce
It is. Although I think there’s so much hype about it driven by the tool companies, you know, and it’s like LinkedIn is just full of these kind of like every week a new report comes out.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And I. I’ve done some roundtable sessions with kind of chief communication officers and kind of senior, and they are all thinking about it, but a lot of them are just confused.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
Because there’s so much confusion out there.

Tony Garner
Well, there’s so much conflicting about. I mean, I guess you could say spend your entire working day just on LinkedIn debunking claims that are being made and Myth busting.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. Because there are so many of them out there. And I think my recommendation, if you’re looking for somebody to help you in this space, is if somebody’s really confident they know what they’re doing. They quite clearly don’t.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah. No, and I guess that must fascinate you as well, the fact that you are, you know, making those first steps. First steps on the movie.

Stuart Bruce
Absolutely. Well, even this AI is a stakeholder concept.

Tony Garner
Yes.

Stuart Bruce
So I kind of, you know, that kind of twixt mess. The bit between kind of Christmas and New Year.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
So kind of the bit between 23 and 24 was when I started thinking about this idea.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And I. And we did. We talked in sort of early 24. We talked to some clients about it, but we didn’t really do anything externally because I wasn’t 100% convinced I was onto something. And then in April that year, I, Rupert Younger, who’s head of the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, published a paper on AI as a stakeholder. I think, I might be onto something here. Maybe I should have talked about this a bit earlier, but. Yeah. And that just. Yeah, it was kind of validation because we had done a lot of thinking, but I still had these doubts. Yeah.

Tony Garner
How do you. I mean, one of the things that I find when I. When I start delving in these areas is that I soon, very much go start going down rabbit holes that I get told by my AI companion. That’s a really interesting question, Tony. You should do this and this. And then before I know it, four hours later, I’ve built a new racking system for the warehouse that I never really wanted and never really needed. How do you stop yourself from being pulled in all these different directions?

Stuart Bruce
Okay, two things there. First, to listeners, I can guarantee this is the real Tony, even though he just used the word delve, which is meant to be an AI tell. And I’m guilty of. It’s one of my favourite words is delve. And I have to keep reminding myself not to use it.

Tony Garner
I love an EM dash. I want to reclaim the.

Stuart Bruce
So do I. Yeah. 100%. You know Virginia Woolf? Yeah.

Tony Garner
She was quite good.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. Heard a prolific user of EM dashes. But the rabbit hole thing is that running purposeful relations, that’s actually one of the challenges we have because the value that we offer to clients is that we do know these things. So I’ve deliberately got to set aside part of my week to go down rabbit holes because unless I do. I won’t be able to kind of confidently speak to clients about what is. I mean, this is the whole kind of PR futurist thing. I’ve got to kind of waste some of my time because some of it, you come across something you spend some time researching, you think, no, that wasn’t a waste of time. And then there’s things like an AI stakeholder where actually I was onto something, but I didn’t do anything about it as quickly as I should have done. And it varies.

Stuart Bruce
Sometimes you get paid debt, sometimes you don’t.

Tony Garner
Do you think you’re working in one of the most interesting periods of the PR that the PR industry has ever been in?

Stuart Bruce
Oh, absolutely. I think people are, which is why I. I get kind of quite frustrated about this whole kind of hype around Generative Engine Optimisation.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
Because I genuinely think this kind of AI changing reputations is going to give the whole industry a resurgence. And there are so many aspects to it, but at the moment we’re not realising them because it’s getting lost in the hype and it’s turning some too many people off.

Tony Garner
So let’s look at hype and reality then. So in terms of AI being able to be a force for good for the industry, what is the reality in your head and what is the hype saying?

Stuart Bruce
Well, the hype was, you know, there was the Gartner report that came out earlier this year, which kind of, you know, had lots of kind of PR agency bosses dreaming of yachts in the Caribbean, because it said that kind of earned media, kind of PR budgets were going to double by 2027. That ain’t ever going to happen, and it was never going to happen. But their rationale was, because they used the 95% figure, you know, that 95% of citations were earned media. So that’s the kind of hype side of it.

Stuart Bruce
You know, the reality side of it is that actually if you go out and do those audits, you know, the ones we’ve done, even if earned isn’t top, it’s owned, it’s user, you know, so if you’re kind of working with people on LinkedIn, if you’re kind of creating really good content, you know, those are the things that are driving it. So it’s beyond just earned, but it’s also those kind of interpersonal relationships, you know, the speaking at conferences, you know, these are all things that kind of matter.

Tony Garner
If you were going to put a figure on it or a band on it, what would you say? From, from your own kind of work and what you’ve researched, what you said was a more realistic kind of like bandwidth of where earned and owned sits.

Stuart Bruce
Gosh, that’s a question as a PR future session. Probably have an answer. I’m going to be brutally honest and say I don’t. I think there are two aspects to this is there’s how this can help the sector to grow, but there’s also the defensive element, and I think that defensive one is the one we need to look at first. Because when I’m kind often when we, I mean we’ve had it recently with kind of two clients, kind of big multinationals where they already started to do things on this, but it’s being read by digital and if you look at what they’re doing some really good stuff on a fraction of what they should be doing. But it’s been, you know, the CCOs ticked it off. He thinks job done right. But it really isn’t.

Tony Garner
One of the interesting conversations that I got into in this space is with another guest on the pod. And I won’t name them for obvious reasons, but one of the things that they said they were interested in, we’re not sure about it or where it’s coming from particularly, but the misinformation and disinformation that’s out there and understanding what that is at what kind of level and where is it, you know, coming from, it might actually come from some of our more trusted sources. There might even be out-of-date information on our website buried somewhere and so on. And he or she might be interested in learning that. Is that even a possibility?

Stuart Bruce
Okay, so this is quite complicated because there’s quite a lot of facets to this. So the first one is you mentioned you talked about hallucinations earlier. So there’s two types of kind of inaccurate information that AI can come back with. Hallucination is basically it’s making stuff up, but a lot of the time it’s going to be about the wrong sort of knowledge there. So it is things like out of date information on a website. It’s that one of the things that AI likes to do is to kind of balance answer. So it might go back and dig out a negative story from longer ago than a human would bother to do it. So that’s kind of one aspect you’ve got that you need to think about.

Stuart Bruce
But the other one is kind of the disinformation is there was a paper came out earlier this year, published in Nature, where some scientists had basically made up a fake skin disease and they’d published papers on it and written blog articles. And even in them it said things like it was written on board the USS Starship Enterprise, a human being met a cousin, Don. AI didn’t and started citing these papers. So it kind of shows how it’s possible to manipulate them. And you mentioned Darrell, it had numbers earlier. They did something similar earlier this year about who’s the best dressed PR man.

Tony Garner
Never saw it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, interesting, isn’t it?

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. So that. So that’s kind of how that can kind of come through, but in a kind of practical element. You know, we sort of. Last year, one of the clients that we worked with was a university.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And they were having an industrial dispute and all of the AI answers were coming from the trade union perspective. And when you actually began to look, it was basically because the unions saw the university saw an industrial dispute as negative. You know, so it would kind of write this perfect statement and it wasn’t. You know, it was. Neither of us would criticise. It was a really good statement. They’d send it directly to the journalist and it would appear in the media.

Tony Garner
You would try and close the story down and keep it as tight as possible and certainly not put anything out on your website.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, exactly. So they didn’t publish it. Union did. The exact opposite is its information was everywhere. So AI started to look. It could find one citation for the university. It could find like eight or nine for the trade union perspective.

Tony Garner
Right.

Stuart Bruce
From a variety of different sources. And they were both including earned media.

Tony Garner
So your advice in that situation would be run counter to what. What they would traditionally be doing in a kind of a negative PR space.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. If you. I’ve kind of got. I spoke something recently where I said, if you’re kind of. If your crisis communications plan doesn’t include AI as a stakeholder, it’s more of a wish list than a. Than a plan anymore.

Tony Garner
But that. That turns a lot of crisis comms plans on the. On this.

Stuart Bruce
And it’s. And it’s not saying that the solution isn’t necessarily always going to go out there and publish. You’ve still got to understand the nuances of each organisation, you know, because there are multiple stakeholders at play, you know, and just some other simple examples. You know, you can pick up the phone to an editor and say, look, this article’s wrong, or there’s a factual mistake in this ad. And if it’s on a website they’ll, you know, most editors, you know, they’re reasonable, they’ll update it. You know, they won’t change opinion, but if there’s a simple factual error, they will change it. You can’t do that with AI. There’s nobody to pick up the phone to.

Tony Garner
Going back to where we came in, we can look on Google Analytics to see what search terms people are putting into our clients’ sites. We can see attribution. But how much of search now is being done on AI and through LLMs? I mean, we had an example of a couple of years ago which kind of first sparked me was we got a new client. And I asked the traditional, “where did you hear about us?” expecting Google? Because, you know, there were an education client based down south. And he said, oh, we put the brief into ChatGPT and your name came up and immediately your brain starts going, right. We need to find out a way of making that happen more.

Tony Garner
But how, you know, when we speak to our SEO people, AI search is quite small on most of our clients, or it comes across on Google Analytics has been quite small. So how do we, how important is AI search?

Stuart Bruce
I think it’s growing is the answer. And I think looking at, I think some of the way, I mean, I spoke to a big multinational recently where this is one of the reasons that they weren’t paying much attention to this is they could see it was such a tiny proportion of kind of their searches. But that’s almost kind of measuring the wrong thing. Because actually if somebody’s been researching the topic and the issue and their understanding and their framing of it, you know, all that kind of happened before you actually get to the bits you can measure.

Tony Garner
And to my point, the one that I have to remind myself is that the guys who did the search from the education client never went through Google, so it would never appear on my Google Analytics anyway. So it’s really hard to kind of know from my perspective where I should be throwing our Viva dollars.

Stuart Bruce
No, it is. And saying throwing your dollars. Part of it is about looking across everything you’re already doing and looking at how you can be, how you can tweak it, you know, and we’re guilty at purpose relations. You know, are we doing everything right at the moment? Absolutely not. We’ve got a plan that tells us what to do. But as a kind of small business, we’re spending time doing client work. So the stuff that is just on the plan, it isn’t actually happened yet.

Tony Garner
Tell me about it. Let’s, let’s flip this to like. So you’re a niche engineering business, which is our kind of run of mill, not huge communications budget to throw at these things. They’d love to have a play at the tools that you mentioned before, but probably out of their league. What are the kind of three or four things that could be within the scope that they could actually start doing next week or next month?

Stuart Bruce
Okay. I think as your starting point, you have got to do that audit.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Stuart Bruce
And you know, there are lower cost ways of doing this. You know, like some of the tools out there have got trial periods or their monthly subscriptions, so you don’t need annual one. You know, kind of quite a sensible thing to do is actually turn it on and off. You know, spend a month doing a really comprehensive audit, you know, revisited in six months to see if the things you’ve been doing have made a difference. You know, that’s not a perfect. And if you had a kind of big cloud, that’s not what you would do. But realistically, you’ve got to be. I actually had this discussion on LinkedIn the other day about the difference between theory and realism. Yeah. And I get so frustrated. I mean, I do a lot of training how conferences where people tell you what the perfect picture is.

Stuart Bruce
Even with some of our big clients, you can’t do that because you don’t have the resources.

Tony Garner
Yeah. This is, are in the real world. This is coming to you from Bake up, not Barcelona.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah, exactly.

Tony Garner
And so we, you know, we know in a perfect world, we would throw all the budget and all the tools and bring all the analysts in that we need to move.

Stuart Bruce
And the type of thing you’re going to do from that first audit, you know, say that the trade body I cited, you know, they’ve changed their target media list, you know, and we’ll begin to see. But if that makes a difference, you know, but unless you’d done the audit, you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of that. And you know, and all, you know, all it means is some of the stuff’s actually quite simple is some of the titles on that 17. Because they do have some human content mixed with kind of wire content. You know, if they had somebody and they had a limited amount of time to do interviews, they might have actually said no. Yeah. Whereas now they’ll say yes.

Tony Garner
And I guess, I mean, we talked about it before as well, that you own quite a lot of the content out there. That’s out there. Make sure that the stuff that’s on your website is up to date and you’ve not got. That’s one thing you could do tomorrow, isn’t it your own little website audit and get rid of anything that’s really out there.

Stuart Bruce
And then there are free tools to do that. I mean, HubSpot have launched one where it kind of grade your site for kind of answering optimization. Now is it kind of perfect? But it’s free. It gives you some insight.

Tony Garner
Is LinkedIn thought leadership worth the effort?

Stuart Bruce
Your audit would tell you that certainly with most of the ones we’ve done so far because of the type of space we work in, the answer is yes. The big one that people talk about from the reports is rediscover. Yes, so far for the types of clients we work with that hasn’t even featured. No. The ones that feature the biggest for us are LinkedIn and YouTube.

Tony Garner
It’s really interesting. Are there any other findings that you’re getting that run counter to that kind of prevailing wisdom? You know, like you say, if you’ve read anything on this world, Reddit is the star. Although it’s fallen a little bit in recent.

Stuart Bruce
Yeah. And interesting. That was something. So, you know, calling myself the PR futurist, that’s actually one where we could, we would say were right because we kind of predicted that in our November white paper last year. No, because I think that’s why the audit’s so important because the results you’re going to get can vary and you know, you’ve got to test them to make sure that they’re right. But, but a lot of the stuff, I mean, things like recency doesn’t have to be hard to do. If you’re say, publishing a thought leadership piece and it might be a big chunky piece that becomes about 10 different items you can just keep recycling and chopping it up. Something like this, you can create a whole series of shorts off the back of it. Okay. There’s some work in editing it, which is kind of.

Stuart Bruce
You might not have time to do, but the intellectual property bit, just make it work harder.

Tony Garner
Yeah. That’s precisely one of the reasons for this whole pod being in existence. I want to kind of. We could chat all day and this has been really fascinating. You’re definitely going to on my Get Stuart backlist. But before we wrap up, one of the aspects that we talked about with Daryl a year ago was he was really determined that PR as an industry shouldn’t miss this moment. He said we missed the boat on social media, the digital agencies mopped all that up and got there very quick in the thinking. We’ve got an opportunity here. Do you agree with him and do you think we’re going to grasp it this time around?

Stuart Bruce
I 100% agree with him that we shouldn’t miss the opportunity. I have less confidence that we. That we will do that. I mean, I’ve been doing some work with the PRCA because Sarah Waddington, the CEO, is very much of the same opinion and she’s been doing some fantastic work. So, for example, one of the things we did earlier this year is Sarah sent a letter to the heads of procurement for really large companies, basically setting out the case, if they were looking at this, as to why they should be approaching from a PR commerce perspective, because I helped with kind of drafting it. So, yeah, the PRCI is taking this really seriously and trying to back their members. I think the members themselves, some of them are really getting it and doing stuff quickly.

Stuart Bruce
Hence the fact we’re here, the Viva PR studio, talking about it.

Tony Garner
You.

Stuart Bruce
It’s because you’re getting it. But I don’t think the same is true across the industry yet.

Tony Garner
Right. And is that the reason for? You’re slightly pessimistic, and it’s-

Stuart Bruce
And it’s just that we are very conservative with a small C. You know, people like to do what they’ve always done.

Tony Garner
So for the confused and overworked comms director who’s listened to this and is maybe taken some steps, but what concrete, positive. Let’s end on a positive note, Stuart. What should they be doing on Monday to kind of like kickstart things?

Stuart Bruce
Well, I’m going to end on a positive sales note. And it’s basically hire Purposeful Relations to do an audit for you and then hire Viva PR to actually help you implement it. But no, in all seriousness, that is what they should be doing. You need those two steps.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Excellent. Stuart, thank you so much for, well, I’ll let the listeners in on a little secret. Stuart diverted from a bank holiday break in the Lake District to be in the studio today. So thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it, and I hope your journey back over the Pennines is a decent one.

Stuart Bruce
It’s been brilliant. Thank you.

Tony Garner
Thank you so much, Stuart. Cheers.

Thanks for listening to PR in the real world. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave us a quick review. Your support really helps spread the word and reach more marketing and PR professionals just like you. And don’t forget to share this podcast with your colleagues or anyone who’d benefit from the insights we share. Thanks again and we’ll see you next time for more tips, strategies and real world stories from the PR frontlines.