This week in PR (7 June newsletter)

Ethics, PR and AI

There are over 30 content links in #ThisWeekinPR published at PR Academy Insights. Half of the content pieces relate to politics this week (there’s less than a month to go to the General Election). But this issue is not about party politics. Rather, it’s about some important themes arising from political debates that affect us all.

In this issue we discuss the responsibilities of communicators in a post-truth winner-takes-all world; the questions we will all face around divestment or engagement; and a roadmap to the peak of productivity enabled by AI.

Let’s start by praising an astute warning from Alastair McCapra of the CIPR. He published a piece last Friday calling for greater integrity in political campaigning. He wrote:

Rishi Sunak stood on the steps of Downing Street when he became Prime Minister and promised to govern with “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. He might be leaving Number 10 soon but, in the weeks in between, all parties should consider how they conduct their campaigns to uphold these values.

I can imagine McCapra’s dismay when he watched the first of the leaders’ debates on television. This was dominated by the warning about the impending ￡2,000 tax rise and the claim that the figures had been independently verified by Treasury officials.

I’ve not mentioned names or parties because I don’t want to make this personal or party political. The issue for all of us is general rather than specific: how to refute a spurious, false or misleading allegation.

A generation ago ‘rapid rebuttal’ was in fashion. You would quickly seek to squash a rumour before it spread. Now, in the age of snackable social media content shorn of all nuance, we can’t directly address a false allegation as this risks giving it assumed legitimacy and additional attention.

In public relations we’re usually restrained in what we do or say for fear of longer-term reputational damage if we’re found to have acted or spoken dishonestly. Political campaigns work by different rules because there is no long-term interest, only a series of short term imperatives: to gain attention, to set the agenda and to win votes.

Commentators have compared the claim about the ￡2,000 tax rise to the 2016 referendum slogan about ￡350m for the NHS. What’s truth got to do with it? The slogan helped to win the referendum and at that point the debate moves on.

It’s another reminder that we’re in the post-truth era - and there’s still the US election to come later this year.

As if this wasn’t a challenging enough topic to address, we then had the UN Secretary-General reprising in the strongest possible language warnings about the climate emergency and its ‘mad men’ enablers. As PRovoke Media reports:

In a speech marking World Environment Day in New York, [António] Guterres admonished agencies for supporting many in the fossil fuel industry who “have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action — with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies — Mad Men fueling the madness.”

It’s a powerful soundbite and it’s easy to see who it might be directed at in our industry. Those agencies include Edelman which works for Shell. Edelman’s argument for continuing this commercial relationship will be that it’s in a stronger position to enable the transition to clean energy from within than by walking away. Besides, all of us who heat our homes with oil and gas or fill our cars with fuel or travel by air are complicit in carbon emissions; oil companies are not the only guilty parties. Since their profits are a major contributor to our pension funds, and as they’re awash with cash, who would be harmed most by divestment?

Performative campaigns calling for divestment can have unintended consequences as we learnt this week from the case of investment firm Baillie Gifford. The media is reporting that a series of literature festivals are ending their connections with Baillie Gifford following a campaign against its sponsorship of the Hay festival. So a short-term victory for campaign group Fossil Free Books comes at the longer-term expense of future opportunities for readers to meet authors and talk about books. And nor was Baillie Gifford heavily invested in fossil fuel shares; it took a longer-term view of investment. It was not an obvious target - except by making itself visible. So what lesson will other firms learn from this? To keep their hands in their pockets and their heads below the parapet. To pursue private rather than public relations.

Sustainability and ESG occupy a complex and contested territory - especially in an election year. It’s best to think through your personal and professional red lines because these decisions will soon confront us all.

And so to a much less contentious topic. Let’s end with an update on AI.

In a few short months we seem to have sped through the Gartner hype cycle: passing the peak of inflated expectations some time ago and now finding ourselves wallowing in the trough of disillusionment. Is that it? What was the fuss all about?

Yet next in the hype cycle comes the slope of enlightenment followed by the peak of productivity.

Reminding us to look up and seize the moment are the sage voices of veteran For Immediate Release podcasters Shel Holtz, SCMP and Neville Hobson . Shel was keen to warn us that, as an industry, we’d been slow to welcome the web and were not quick in embracing social media.?

It would be equally easy to shrug [AI] off the same way. But look where we ended up with the web; look where we ended up with social media. Pay attention now; don’t wait until we’re playing catch-up.

So let’s get practical. Academic and author Ethan Mollick continues to share his knowledge for free and he’s just published his Opinionated Midyear Edition. It’s a readable report on the state of play along with some practical recommendations. After the fun stuff comes this advice:

To learn to do serious stuff with AI, choose a Large Language Model and just use it to do serious stuff – get advice, summarize meetings, generate ideas, write, produce reports, fill out forms, discuss strategy – whatever you do at work, ask the AI to help.

That’s your roadmap to the peak of productivity, at which point we won’t be talking much about AI anymore, just as we rarely acknowledge the web or a Google search today. They’re simply an assumed part of how we all work.

If we’re entering the age of AI, then it surely follows the age of search. Though dominated by Google, there’s a now-notorious part played by a British startup, Autonomy, acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. Co-founder Mike Lynch was acquitted of fraud relating to this high valuation in a California court yesterday. His defence's rejection of the black and white case presented by the prosecution was that life is messy and nuanced. Public relations practitioners will understand.