✅ Exploring the contribution of comms and public relations to management
A week in management, media and public relations
We’ve partnered with NewsWhip, a real-time insights provider, to explore the opportunity for corporate communications and public relations to support management with data and insights for a report to be published in January 2024.
It’s an assertive opportunity from both an issues and crisis perspective and to help understand media and public opinion. Both situations raise the management challenge of when to stay quiet and listen versus when to speak out.
We’d welcome your perspective via this short survey. The findings and results from the survey will be anonymised and no personally identifiable information will be shared.
We’re also hosting a series of invitation-only virtual roundtables with in-house organisations. Please reply to this newsletter if you'd like to express interest.
Artificial Intelligence
🤝 AI SAFETY SUMMIT: World leaders and AI companies agreed on a plan for the safety testing of advanced AI models, involving pre- and post-deployment evaluations and a role for governments in testing for critical harms. Countries also agreed to support a report on the science of frontier AI risks and capabilities to inform future international collaboration on AI safety. Source: HM Government.
📜 AI EXECUTIVE ORDER: President Biden issued an executive order ahead of the UK AI Safety Summit establishing new standards and actions for safe, secure and trustworthy AI. It aims to manage risks while fulfilling AI's promise in healthcare, education, cybersecurity, and more. Source: The White House.
🎶 COMPENSATE CREATORS: Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus argues that AI music creation tools should have access to copyrighted music for training, but a fair system is needed to compensate original creators. He suggests creators like him should get subscription revenue from professional AI tools trained on their music, so innovation can thrive but musicians are protected. Source: Financial Times.
💣 DATA POISONING: A new tool called Nightshade lets artists subtly alter pixels in their work before it’s posted online, causing models such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion to malfunction. The open-source tool aims to help artists fight back against the use of their work without consent to train generative AI models. Source: MIT Technology Review.
💻 AI IN PRACTICE: Pattern published a feature based on a conversation between Arlen Pettitt, Christopher Owens and myself about AI and its impact on society. A follow-up version generated entirely by AI is both fascinating and terrifying. It’s an insight into the future we face regarding the reputational impact to individuals and organisations and the threat to creative and professional work. Source: Pattern.
Management
🧑💻️ MANAGEMENT PUBLIC RELATIONS: Join me for an EUPRERA webinar at 10am GMT on Friday to review the latest findings from the European Communication Monitor. During the free one-hour session we’ll discuss workflow, skills, hyperconnectivity, leading comms teams and misinformation. Source: EUPRERA.
♀️ GLASS CLIFF: Female CEOs of public companies worldwide have shorter tenures than male CEOs, lasting an average of 5.2 years compared to 8.1 for men. It adds credibility to the glass cliff theory that women are more likely appointed as leaders during times of crisis, setting them up to fail. The study analysed companies on 12 global stock exchanges. Source: The Guardian.
📉 CMOS CHALLENGED: Three-quarters of CMOs have found the last six months more challenging than the height of the pandemic due to inflation and a global slowdown. It has led to budget cuts and reduced agency support, however almost 90% acknowledge the importance of investing in brand marketing during a recession as a defensive marketing move. Source: Marketing Beat.
Media
➡️ MIXED GROWTH: Twenty-two of the UK’s 50 biggest regional and local news websites saw year-on-year growth in audience in September, according to Press Gazette’s latest ranking. Reach dominated the top ten spots. Manchester Evening News was the UK’s largest regional newsbrand reaching 11m people, followed by Birmingham Live (10.3m) and Liverpool Echo (7.8m). Source: Press Gazette.
Social Media
🧵 THREADS FUNCTIONALITY: Threads has rolled out new updates including improved web posting options such as adding polls, GIFs, alt text to images and videos, dragging and dropping attachments and seeing who has reposted or quoted your tweets. Threads is among many platforms aiming to replace X / Twitter. Source: Threads.
💬 CHATBOT EXPLAINER: The Guardian has published a useful explainer showing how chatbots or large language models such as Bard and ChatGPT work. It shows how they are trained on vast datasets and use machine learning models to generate human-like text responses to natural language prompts. Source: The Guardian.
🌐 NEW DOMAIN EXTENSION: Google has announced a new .ing domain extension that enables brands to create adverb-inspired URLs such as mak.ing or edit.ing, which could make URLs more memorable. It is useful as a branding, but there's no evidence it drives more traffic versus standard domains. Source: Google.
💻 TOP PR BLOG: Thanks to everyone who reads and contributes to my blog. It has been named as the top UK PR blog for the seventh year running by Vuelio. It’s notable how the blogging community thrives despite the algorithmic whims of social media. Many of the blogs listed in the top ten have been running for 10-20 years. Source: Vuelio.
Thank you to the following members of the House of Marketing & PR community of practice for sharing and debating stories covered in the newsletter over the last week: Julian Christopher, Tricia Fox, Alan Morrison, Jack Richards, Nigel Sarbutts, Andrew Bruce Smith, Sarah Waddington CBE, Samuel Wallace and Rob Yeldham.
If there’s anything we can help you with, please let me know. In the past week, we’ve supported agencies and organisations with competency assessments and management training, 2024 planning, and AI horizon scanning.
Have an excellent week.