✅ Outputs from the European Communication Monitor and AI business models

Organisational trust, public relations and management. And budgeting for AI tools

The future of European public relations: key findings from the ECM report

Trust and alignment with management remain top challenges for the European public relations profession.

The latest edition of the European Communication Monitor (ECM) identifies public relations management's most important strategic issues in the past 15 years. The research programme conducted by five European universities also addresses future issues.
 
Organisational trust and aligning public relations with management and business strategy are the leading longstanding issues for public relations practice.
 
Trust is an important intangible asset that provides an organisation with a licence to operate within a market or the broader public sphere. Practitioners continuously prioritise it over multiple other values created by public relations activity.
 
Alignment between public relations and management is also a longstanding issue for practice. Research has addressed many issues but has repeatedly failed to cut through to practice. These include the business model of public relations functions, measurement and evaluation, and benchmarking public relations practices.
 
This is my own area of doctoral research. My analysis is consistent with the report.
 
Sustainability and social responsibility have also been a main concern for European communicators. These issues became less important between 2008 and 2022 because of the financial crash but are now among the top three strategic issues again.
 
The challenges and opportunities related to the intensified speed and volume of information flow in an increasingly digitalised and globalised world is also cited as an issue.
 
The study identifies key insights and drivers of success for the next decade.
  
✅ Leverage potential of data and tools
✅ Develop specialist competencies and new roles for professionals
✅ Reach and impact audiences in a hyperconnected world
✅ Lead and motivate public relations teams
✅ Build relationships in times of misinformation and distrust
 
I’ve published a longer analysis on the Wadds Inc. blog. You can download the full report and previous studies from the ECM website.
 
The ECM 2023 Report concludes the successful phase of this transnational study based on a broad quantitative research design. The research project will recommence in 2024 with a new, more focused, and advanced research design to be announced later this year.
 
ECM is a collaborative research project led by Ansgar Zerfass (Leipzig University, Germany), Dejan Verčič (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), Ángeles Moreno (University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain), Ralph Tench (Leeds Beckett University, UK), and Alexander Buhmann (BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway).

AI business models

AI vendors are using cocaine or crystal meths pricing model. Proceed with caution.

Anthropic has published its pricing model for Claude 2. £18/month gets you unrestricted access to the large language model.

It is a very similar to the $20/month price tag that OpenAI charges for access to the GPT-4 large language model. That’s not a coincidence.

Claude 2 will hoover up documents and extract assumptions and arguments. I believe that in time it will help create new knowledge.

It is incredibly powerful and ridiculous value.

We know that it’s value because neither of these businesses are making any money. We also know that Microsoft intends to charge $30/month for CoPilot, an AI assistant integrated into the Office suite and built on the OpenAI API.

Those enterprise licence fees will mount up very quickly. Make sure that you increase the amount for tools in your 2024 budget.

We can stretch the drug business model metaphor further if you like. A paid subscription to Anthropic or OpenAI may get you a guarantee of service level but there are no warrantees on the quality of the product.

Both large language models have wobbled in the past month.

I demonstrated the reductive capabilities of GPT4 to a community of 100 practitioners in a large organisation recently and it completely made up some of the outputs. It’s why publishers such a The Guardian are nervous about going live with AI systems in their newsrooms.

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