The PR Data Revolution Starts Here – with Alex Waddington

Whetstone Communications is the brainchild of Alex Waddington. It’s a consultancy that marries well-worn comms practices with new data-led techniques to provide data-informed storytelling that delivers impact. Data is all around us. We now have vast datasets that are just a mouse click away. We also have AI models hungry to analyse them, and the storytelling potential is huge. Journalists have led the way in recent years but the PR industry in general has been slower to spot the opportunity.

Alex argues, if you know where to look and the pitfalls to avoid, then data-led storytelling has the potential to be a game-changer. Anyone who is curious about this world needs to tune in to this episode.

Fire and Ice

Data kills creativity, right? Wrong. With the right approach, there’s no tension between a cold, hard data-informed story or campaign strategy and fiery storytelling. Fire and ice. In fact, data gives you the ammunition to be more creative, is a catalyst that sharpens your stories and can make them more compelling. But data alone isn’t a story. It needs old fashioned comms skills to craft it into something that resonates.

The Opportunity of Data

With vast data sets readily available, why aren’t more people alive to the opportunity? From social media analytics and Google Trends to Netflix’s consumer insights – data is all around us just waiting to be tapped into. The potential for PR and marketing folk is dizzying. So, what could it look like? Well, take the recent example: Tortoise Media collaborated with Sky aiming to investigate lobbying in the UK. They sifted through the available data on lobbyists, collated it, and uncovered a compelling story about the cashflow into UK politics and where it comes from.

So, think about your sectors and where the data might be just waiting to be exploited. Could you apply that same level of scrutiny, creativity, and storytelling to devise a positive PR campaign?

Data-Informed or Data-Driven

Being data-driven sounds good. Being data-informed is better. The difference is that a data-driven approach blindly follows numbers, whereas a data-informed strategy uses data as a guide. Achieving this balance requires three things. One, basic data literacy, two, curiosity, and three, caution. Let data inform your campaigns, but never let it dictate them. Otherwise, you could be led down blind alleys.

Am I seeing things?

AI can spout falsehoods. It’s a powerful tool but does tend to make rubbish up. Some believe hallucinations will one day be a thing of the past, but we’re not at Skynet or Terminator levels just yet. There is also the danger of AI bias. Right now, the large language models tend to reflect the biases they are trained on.

All that said, when it comes to processing raw data and extracting insights, AI remains invaluable. Something as simple as inputting data into Excel and asking AI to analyse it can unlock powerful insights; just don’t take what it spits out in seconds as gospel and be wary of hallucinations. Check, check and check.

Rounding Up

The PR landscape is evolving, and data is at the heart of the revolution. But as Alex Waddington makes clear, data alone isn’t enough – it needs creativity to bring it to life. The real power lies in being data-informed, not data-driven. AI is a game-changer too, but it’s not a magic wand. While it can enhance PR, it won’t replace the human touch needed for impactful storytelling. The key takeaway is to be mindful of how you can be led astray but stay alive to opportunities of data and AI.