✅ Monday briefing: Trust, management and technology

A week in management, media and public relations

Thank you to everyone who sponsored our team in the Great North Run. It’s a long 13.1 miles from Newcastle to South Shields.

We raised almost £2,500 for Winston’s Wish, a child bereavement support charity that has helped our family over the past nine months.

It was a tough day, with a slow start, heat around the course, and a monsoon storm as we finished. The mobile network and transport infrastructure of South Shields struggled to cope.

Sarah got a ridiculously fast time. Dan also did well. I took it steady with Freya, but still managed to beat the time it took us to get home by a significant margin.

Have a great week.

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Management

🤝 TRUST AND MANAGEMENT: The 2023 European Communication Monitor report finds that building organisational trust and aligning public relations with management remain top challenges for the public relations profession. The report provides key insights into priorities such as leveraging data, developing new competencies, motivating teams, and relationship-building to drive public relations success over the next decade. Source Wadds Inc.

🏛 SCHILLINGS PR: Law firm Schillings, known for aggressively enforcing celebrity privacy rights, is expanding into public relations. It signals that legal tactics alone are no longer sufficient to control reputational damage in the digital age. It reflects how reputation management is an ever-growing industry as individuals and brands struggle to protect their images in a volatile media environment. Source Financial Times.

🕵️‍♂️ DEEPFAKES CHALLENGE: As much as 90 per cent of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026. A Europol report describes how deepfake technology can be used maliciously to spread disinformation and commit fraud. It creates challenges for law enforcement agencies to detect deepfakes and ensure the integrity of digital content. Source Europol.

🎓 MANAGEMENT TRAINING: The London School of Economics has launched a six-week executive education programme on strategic communications in society.  Prof Dr Lee Edwards leads the course and covers the VUCA environment, ethics, stakeholder mapping, strategic planning, and narrative development. It is exactly the sort of intervention we need to improve the quality of practice and the reputation of public relations in management. Source London School of Economics.

Good and bad practice

🥩 MEAT, OFF LIMITS: The French government plans to ban meat-related terms such as "steak" and "sausage" on plant-based food labels, arguing it is misleading to consumers. Vegan groups oppose the move, saying it unfairly favours the meat industry over plant-based alternatives. Source The Guardian.

⚽️ FOOTBALL DISASTER CLASS: The president of the Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales, refuses to step down, citing "false feminism" despite provisional suspension by FIFA. The scandal highlights how organisations are defined by the attitudes and behaviours they tolerate rather than the values they promote. Source CIPR.

Measurement

🗞 MEDIA MATTERS: Research for an upcoming book by Proof Analytics CEO Mark Strouse reports that earned media is a key contributor to awareness as part of a business-to-business sales cycle. It also contributes significantly to building trust and confidence in a buying decision. Source House of Marketing & PR community of practice.

📊 CONTEMPORARY MEASUREMENT APPROACHES: Measuring the output of public relations activities in ways that management understands has been a challenge for public relations since the 1900s. A paper published by the AMEC agency special interest group covers pricing, the potential and limitations of tech, the need for human analysis and wisdom, and new approaches. Source AMEC.

Artificial intelligence

©️ AI INDEMNITY: Microsoft will legally defend customers against copyright infringement claims for content generated by its AI systems such as Bing Chat and CoPilot. It extends Microsoft's intellectual property coverage to copyright issues related to its AI technologies amid concerns over generative AI's potential to create infringing content. Source Reuters.

🧠 AI TASKFORCE: The UK's Frontier AI Taskforce, renamed to reflect its focus on advanced AI risks, reports progress in building expertise through an advisory board, recruiting researchers, partnering with technical organisations, and providing infrastructure. The startup within the UK government aims to increase government capacity to assess AI systems nearing human ability to manage potential threats in areas such as cybersecurity and biosecurity. Source UK Government.

Tools 

💷 PAID AI BOT: Anthropic has introduced a paid subscription plan for its Claude Pro large language model. Users can access longer conversations, more file uploads, priority access during high traffic, and early access to new features. The tool is good at analysing documents and extracting assumptions and arguments. Source Anthropic.

🔍 THREADS KEYWORDS: Meta has expanded keyword search to more markets on its Twitter alternative app Threads. The UK is expected to be added this week. It’s a much-needed feature that enhances the app's utility as a real-time discussion platform and potential Twitter competitor. Source Social Media Today. 

Media

📰 NEWS TRENDS: The UK leads the world in declining interest in the news. Trust has plummeted post-Brexit. Over 55s prefer TV as a news source, but younger audiences choose social media. Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute discussed ten major trends in news consumption at the recent Press Gazette conference. Source Press Gazette.

💀 CMO EXTINCTION: Scott Galloway predicts the end of the traditional CMO role, claiming that its focus on advertising and branding will be obsolete within 18 months while those evolving into supply chain and innovation roles will survive and potentially become COOs. Galloway argues that innovation and making better products are more valuable than advertising, which he calls a "tax on the poor." Source B&T.

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Thank you to the following community members for sharing and debating stories covered in the newsletter over the last week: Rod Cartright, Adrienne Cohen, Ben Lowndes, Alan Morrison, Andrew Bruce Smith, Mark Stouse and Sarah Waddington CBE.