This week in PR (17 May newsletter)

There are 30 content links in this week’s roundup. From these, I’ve chosen to highlight three themes.

Reputation, Risk and Resilience?

I used to believe in the rule of three when it came to publicity. It’s easy to ignore one mention; you may begin to pay attention to something when you’ve heard about it twice, but it probably takes three mentions from credible sources for you to sit up and do something as a result of the information.

There was a case in point this week. One day this week I noticed Stephen Waddington, Stuart Bruce and Maja Pawinska Sims all writing about a new report from crisis management expert Rod Cartwright. At that point I paid attention and signed up for this highly recommended free report.

It’s his summary of eight authoritative reports on trust, reputation, risk and resilience published in the past 12 months. From these, Cartwright identifies ten themes shaping the risk landscape ranging from geopolitics to climate via misinformation and polarisation, cybersecurity and more. The tenth of these issues summarises them all: in one word, ‘polycrisis’.?

Coined by French social scientists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, “polycrisis” has become a decade-defining term. The simultaneous, mutually reinforcing interplay of multiple risks or catastrophic events is now a permanent feature of the world’s risk landscape.?

Cartwright talks about intersectional risk and it’s easy to see what he means by this: the ease with which discussions of climate can lead to misinformation and disinformation; how warfare and cyber attacks can both arise from geopolitical tensions.

Cartwright (along with Stuart Lambert) argues that governance is so often the overlooked dimension of ESG, yet ‘at its core, the best crisis preparedness – the process of mitigating risk and maximising opportunity – considers the underlying cultural attitudes and organisational behaviours that are hard-wired into the organisation by good (or bad) governance.’

Our attention is drawn to external catastrophic events and yet so often crises arise from within and are often slow-burning and much less easy to report in the media. The Post Office Horizon IT scandal is an example of this.

Ageism in the workplace

This talk of complex risk and issues might suggest there’s more and more work for experienced and battle-hardened professionals (Cartwright was himself part of the team of experts flown into Kuala Lumpur following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 a decade ago).

And yet, look around at the composition of public relations teams. The heavy lifting of media publicity and the task of digital PR linkbuilding are mostly left to young teams in agencies. It’s sometimes hard to find middle aged or older people in these teams (where do they all go; they can’t all become coaches and yoga teachers can they?).

This issue was my second talking point of the week. The starting pistol was fired by freelance consultant Paul Middleton. He’d been tuning in to WhatsApp discussions in David Gallagher’s Advisory Club in the context of the ‘brutal’ jobs market right now and shared his summary in public via LinkedIn.

Those aged over 50 say it's “demoralising” to reach peak usefulness and gain so much experience only to be put on the shelf.

Among those responding was Louise Thompson who wondered:

Could this also be an economic argument? I've seen plenty of job ads where the salary doesn't match the "experience" required. As if a Head of or even Director role should be grateful for a ￡35-40k salary in "this economy."

Career coach Vicki Marinker also entered the fray:

The workforce is ageing. Those of us with grey hairs aren’t going away! I talk to clients in their 50s planning their next career move, knowing that they have 15 or 20 more years of work to look forward to.

This week in AI

Another week, another major development in the world of artificial intelligence - the strangely-named ChatGPT 4o. As Matt Redley explained: ‘The “o” in GPT-4o stands for “omni”, referring to the model’s ability to handle text, speech, and video.’ He described an AI that’s getting closer to matching human emotions.

Appropriately, PR futurist Stuart Bruce chose the format of video for his ‘hot take’.

Some of the things OpenAI demonstrated on the live feed such as the voice interface - being able to chat to it and it’s responding in real time without a lag - this makes ChatGPT a lot more natural to use.

I’ll no doubt be revisiting AI in general and ChatGPT 4o in future issues, but for now let’s consider this. While AI affects the work we all do, there’s no doubt that it affects junior roles more imminently than senior roles (such as reputation management and crisis management). So while it may be hard for experienced job seekers to find the roles and the remuneration they might hope for, it may become even harder for employers to justify modest salaries for inexperienced starters given the speed with which AI can accomplish basic tasks like drafting news releases and creating digital content.

And Chicago-based Gini Dietrich has shared a case study in praise of CoverageImpact, an AI-assisted measurement tool originating in the UK.

One of the biggest challenges in the PR industry is that we tend to measure outputs versus outcomes—tactics instead of goals. But this tool [CoverageImpact] claims to take one of your tactics—media placements—and correlate those efforts with something the organization cares about, such as sales, stock price, search trends, donations, website visitors, and more.’

That has to be the way to justify higher fees, to pay higher salaries and earn a seat at the top table: to prove the real-world impact of your PR outputs. Failing that, you can always go in with the concept of permacrisis / polycrisis: that’s a sure way to gain the attention of the leadership team.