PRovoke Podcast: PR Newswire's Susan Wohleking On Brand Authority In The Age Of AI

0:01The Provoke Podcast brought to you by Provoke Media and produced by the international broadcast specialist, Marketeers.

0:25Hello and welcome to the Provoke Media Podcast. My name is Camilla Das, APEC Editor at Provoke Media. Now, we've just recently wrapped up the Provoke Media Asia-Pacific Summit in Singapore, where unsurprisingly, AI was everywhere. But what I found particularly interesting this year was how much the conversation has moved on. We're no longer simply talking about whether communicators should be using AI. We're talking about what happens when AI becomes an audience in its own right, when it starts deciding what sources are credible, which brands are authoritative, and ultimately what information people see.

1:00Today, I'm joined by Susan Walking, Senior Vice President of Marketing at PR Newswire, to unpack what the shift means for brands, marketers, and communications teams, particularly here in Asia Pacific. Susan, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So I want to start with the summit because we've both just come out of it, And, you know, there's so many issues that were being discussed throughout the day. We were talking about AI. We were talking about trust and the changing role of communications. What stood out to you from the conversations or did anything challenge or reinforce your thinking?

1:38Yeah, I think, you know, if we're if we're honest about what we do for a living, right, communicators should always have been considering the trust that their audiences have in their brand. So I think much of what we see and hear at conferences like the recent APEC Summit or when I'm speaking to colleagues, clients, partners, you know, there's maybe a return to this focus on trust, but it shouldn't have ever gone anywhere. That's what brands should rely on and live by. What I think is exciting is that there seems to be kind of a common hunger for information about this sort of changing landscape.

2:18And that's why the discussions that you were having at the Provoke Media APEC Summit are so exciting and interesting. There's anticipation, sure. There's some trepidation about the changes that need to be made. But I think overall, this is a tremendous opportunity for the community. I hear a lot of conversations about how so much is going to change and things are going to be drastically different. and will communicators even be necessary? Will corporate communications exist? I think it's as important as ever. And I think we need to all stick to the core of what we do, what we should be doing, stay diligent in what we say about our brands and to do it consistently.

3:05That's how you establish that credibility and that trust. And then, you know, layer in a bit of agility and being open about challenging the way we communicate, where we send our messages, what channels and networks we send them through, and then consider what tools we use to do so and what metrics we measure, right? This is a, it's a, it's a change that I think it's more an evolution than a revolution, even though at times it feels very much like we're throwing all the old out and starting fresh with new. So I think generally the conversations I'm a part of and the thought leadership that I hear sort of reinforces my thinking on this.

3:48AI is undoubtedly shaping, reshaping communications and doing so rapidly. And it's challenging for sure, but I feel like it's an opportunity and the industry is at varying degrees of speed aligning around that opportunity. I actually agree with you because I think, you know, when AI first came into play a few years ago, you know, a lot of communicators were grappling with, you know, what's our role now? Because if AI can put out a press release, then, you know, and if AI can decide who to send things to, then, you know, where do I sit in the ecosystem? and it's been so exciting to kind of see how the role has developed as AI has developed over the last four or five years.

4:35So I really like that you mentioned trust and I think that leads nicely into this idea of authority. So we talk constantly about brand visibility, about being seen, being found, you know, getting attention but visibility and authority aren't necessarily the same thing, right? So what does brand authority actually mean today, particularly when brands increasingly need to communicate with both human audiences and AI systems? Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, our visibility. I've started referring to that more as discoverability, right? It's not just about that visibility, but But how are you discovered and what are these new platforms and LLMs helping to do for your discovery?

5:21And sometimes, you know, just creating the wrong perception about your brand as well. And both are still really important, visibility and authority. A lot of what we care about and have focused on in the marketing world is making our brand as visible as possible and ensuring that the message is on brand and that we are being surfaced as the solution to a question. a problem, right? And that hasn't changed, nor is the concept of brand authority. It is still vital for brands to be trusted and have credibility. I have a feeling in this conversation, I'm going to be saying trust and credible a lot because those are the core of what your brand should have for audiences.

6:06And they need to be the reliable source of information and offer thought leadership and subject matter expertise to their audiences and do that consistently. This has been as desirable for humans, if we're honest, as it will be and is for AI. So again, I think if we stick to the core of what we do or return to that, we'll find success in this AI environment. Both audiences, human and machine, need to trust the brand offering the answer to their question or the solution to their problem. I do think, however, that the ways we measure that authority has evolved and needs to evolve. I'm not throwing anything out yet.

6:51I'm still using the traditional digital measures like search, ranking, position, the source of the traffic, still really important. We're looking now, though, in addition at things like citations and mentions, how AI is referencing our brand and whether it is doing so accurately, right? That's a challenge that people are facing now is that their brand might be talked about, but maybe not in the way they thought it would be or were targeting. And if your brand is a part of the answer set and for those questions that you want to be answering, right, that's an important component of the equation too.

7:33So those are some of the elements that factor into the measurement of your brand that are new and different and often require additional tools and different approaches. Yeah, I fully agree in the sense that the way that the brands have to show up now, they're so different than what they used to be. So as you were talking, actually, I was just thinking about how, you know, I was looking at a study today and it was an australian study and it was about how australians actually now believe friends and family over you know brands and uh kols and i thought that was a really interesting um study because that's not the only study that i've actually come across that mentioned something similar and i think brands are no longer coming in as i mean you're right when you say that the key authority, but also they need to know how to wield their power such that they're showing up in the right ways when you consider like, you know, family and friend recommendations and things like that.

8:38Yeah. You know, I've always, I've always said to somebody who's bringing me some fact that even, especially if it sounds a little questionable, I've always said, what's your source? Where is that from? And look, to be honest, as I use AI for search and to find information and to answer my questions, I do look at the source. And if the only source is the brand itself, then I'm a little skeptical, right? I'm looking for other channels and for other voices to also reinforce that brand perception. So this is why we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about, you know, earned media. It's not you can't always and you shouldn't always just be the source of the information and control the message that tightly.

9:25You have to have other voices reinforcing that message because it is trusted, because it is credible and because it is it is relevant to audiences. And I think what's also interesting is that what it potentially does to the value of earned media, you know, the changes in discoverability. So there was an assumption for a while that generative AI might diminish the importance of traditional media. But if AI systems themselves are looking for authoritative information, you could argue that credible third party coverage becomes even more valuable. Right. So does the rise of generative AI then make earned media and credible third party coverage more important to marketers rather than less?

10:10Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think this is perhaps the aspect of AI search that sort of snuck up on me, surprised me, because, you know, I think I think press releases are always important and a core part of a communication strategy. but I think they also started to be kind of just like the box that you checked like yeah we need to do it but that's it that's where it starts and ends um but yeah don't sleep on the earned media piece and its relevance to AI discovery earned media tends to be cited more by AI um press releases are considered and I'm I know I'm from PR Newswire but press releases are considered a source of truth um and so LLMs look to them as the authority on a brand especially if there's nothing else available.

10:57And we know press releases are the start of your earned media strategy, right? And you distribute those press releases across a trusted distribution network. They get picked up by journalists that your distribution network may partner with in particular industries. And suddenly you're targeting your story and your news in all the right directions so that it's seen and picked up. You know, I think PR Newswire, it's interesting because I'm a marketer, right? And I'm able to use the PR Newswire tools and networks to do what I do and to promote what PR Newswire does particularly well. So it's been a lot of fun because I'm evolving, but I'm evolving with access to this fantastic tool and network.

11:49we've launched something called Amplify that is really as much a communicator's tool as a marketer's tool because it takes that press release, it allows you to create it and or refine it, to learn from our decades of press release distribution experience and help you optimize it for AEO and GEO and then send it out across this distribution network. I'm using it too. But then the next step in Amplify is that you turn it into other types of content, blog posts, articles. We have feature story amplification, which puts that story out in a different format over different channels to get picked up again and treated as earned media.

12:33So yeah, it's super important. And I think it alone, a press release, won't accomplish as much as that press release and the story and the tone in which you tell it told over multiple channels in multiple places and consistently over time. is that all of the tools that you use and all of the content reiterates the same narrative using the same proof points. That reinforces the credibility of the message and how you both, and that is how you both build and protect your brand. And, you know, I think it's, as I said earlier, it's always been important to be credible, to be trusted, and to stick to your kind of core narrative across channels.

13:28I think more than ever, we need to be conscious of doing that. I think the challenge is to do so maybe more regularly and with a more frequent cadence so that just like in the early days of SEO where you couldn't just get your content right and walk away and assume you were going to be at the top of the search lists. you've got to keep kind of feeding the beast a little bit, right? So it sees you as the persistent source of that information and doing so, you know, with the right structure, the right format so that machines can scan it and read it and absorb it as easily as people can. I like that you brought up Amplify because I think, you know, back in the day when I was first starting out to be a journalist, you know, PR Newswire used to just, you know, just put out press releases and that used to just be it.

14:17But I really like that you guys are now, you know, taking that information and actually like doing something with that information and making yourselves like that one source of truth, which is also very helpful for me as a journalist, by the way, because, you know, when I'm searching for something on a brand on ChatGPT, very often it will pull from PR Newswire as well. And that's extremely helpful because you know that that's a credible source. Yeah. And, you know, we are very focused on not only our clients who are putting news out, but on the journalists who are, you know, more and more challenged to find the news that they want to cover and the credible source for that news.

14:58You can't get it from all just your friends and family, right? You're still looking for, you know, industry sources. sources. PR Newswire puts out every fall the state of the press release. And we've been asking for the last couple of years how our clients and the people and the brands that put out press releases use AI and what they consider to be an effective use of AI. But we also, from the decision side, ask journalists how they like to see AI used by the people putting out stories and press releases. And as you might imagine, both audiences are seeing an increase in their use of and their acceptance of and tolerance of AI.

15:43I think there's a lot of hesitation and sort of suspicion in the early days. But I think as people see purpose-built tools like Amplify coming onto the scene, who are doing it thoughtfully and with bespoke technology and by focusing on industry best practices, it tends to be a more valuable tool because it is more specifically focused on the purpose. You know, people ask us, well, why can't I just use ChatGPT to create a press release that works? Because ChatGPT doesn't craft press releases for a living. So, yeah, it could learn over time, over a long period of time. But PR Newswire has a 70-year history of sending out effective press releases that the media picks up.

16:34So we're feeding our platform AI with all of that, you know, vast knowledge and layering in our, you know, exceptional human layer of subject matter expertise to make sure that your press release has the absolute best chance of being seen. Very true. And, you know, I really like that you kind of mentioned, you know, the whole idea of feeding the beast. You know, so whose job is it really, do you think? Because, you know, we still we tend to still have, you know, marketing, communications, SEO and digital teams that kind of operate with their own remits and their own metrics. But AI doesn't necessarily recognize any of those internal boundaries when it's trying to understand a brand.

17:20So who should ultimately own a brand's visibility in AI? Is it marketing? Is it comms? Is it SEO, digital? Or is it no longer making sense? Yeah, I mean, I feel like this could almost be a little bit of a cop-out answer because I'm going to say what I believe, which is all of those teams and more or less, depending on how an organization has decided to structure their communications teams, they need to work together. There needs to be a narrative strategy that all of those teams are aligned with and working towards. So, you know, I think historically marketing has controlled the brand narrative and the tone and the approach that we take to telling our brand story.

18:11I don't know that that has to change, but I also don't know that it has to be so distinctly defined. I think when the most successful organizations have that close collaboration between all of those teams that are somewhere telling to the market. And I think, you know, historically, with the advent of digital, variations on that narrative or departures from that narrative were kind of surfaced more quickly. Right. So it became really imperative for everybody to be aligned. I think it's even more so now with AI because AI is moving even faster and surfacing even more and from places that you might not expect it.

18:59AI goes back. They will go back and find things that were written about your brand or that you posted about your brand from years ago. It's learning and training all the time. So I think that's the other reason why I feel like the beast needs to be fed from whoever can feed it, but does so in a way that is on message, on brand and aligned with with all of the teams that are doing so. But how much control can a brand like, you know, realistically have over the way it appears in an AI generated answer, you know, because, yeah, you think you're feeding it current and good stuff. But but like you mentioned, you know, it can really scale and like go back and dig up stuff.

19:39Yeah, I mean, I think that's the big question, right? It does feel like we're a little bit out of control of our own brand and brand message. What we have found and what I am going to continue to pursue as a head of marketing is to just stick to my knitting, right? Keep doing what we do. Make sure that we don't get distracted by how scary and unknown AI might feel and what it might do next. I truly believe, and like I said, this is what we practice, if we continue to tell our truth and do so across different channels in different ways, understanding where our audiences get their news, understanding that there's this AI layer that's also looking to get its news from the same sources really that your customers always have and your audiences have.

20:38if you keep a regular cadence of your narrative in front of the market and in front of AI, that's the control you have. That's what you can do. If you can get others to talk about you and to tell your story in a similar manner, and they will do if you're consistent and you stick to your message, that's really what you can do to ensure that, you know, AI search is surfacing the right news and the right perception of your brand. I think, you know, just like in the old, when there were crises that occurred around a brand and a brand had to address that, and your comms person was picking up the phone and making phone calls and you were issuing press releases and you were making statements, you know, maybe think of it as you're sharing sort of more crisis Tom's mode all the time.

21:34Keep telling your story. I think the mistake brands would make in this new environment is to wait until they have a product launch or a new executive or something to announce. Brands need to keep telling their story consistently across all of these channels to be the source and to be relevant. I think gone are the days where you send one press release a year or you attend one conference and have a panelist on the stage telling your story. It's got to be a kind of full suite all year full on approach to storytelling. Oh, I fully agree. I mean, like now with with so many brands popping up with so with so much digital clutter, you know, to stand out, you really need to stand out.

22:24And there are very clear ways to do that. You know, it's really not about about your ads anymore. It's about when I type into chat GPT, you know, what's going to what's going to pop up. and and I mean something something I'm also quite interested in in is so the question of control makes me wonder whether some of the ways that you know we've traditionally measured digital visibility are going to become sort of less useful so if I asked an AI platform a question and get everything I need from its answer I may never visit the brand's website at all right you know even if the brand's information helped to shape that answer so if audiences increasingly get the information they need without ever clicking through to a company website?

23:08Do traditional metrics such as traffic or clicks or search rankings become less meaningful? So in that case, then what should marketers and communicators be measuring instead? Yeah, this is the one that sort of keeps me up at night. It does. We get this question a lot. Yeah. Because, listen, I mean, because we care, right, about that visibility and that discoverability. And a lot of brands and the ones that I've represented included have spent a lot of resources, spent a lot of their resources on ensuring that we're visible both in paid and organic search results and that people click through and we tell them the story we want them to hear on our websites and other properties.

23:57And look, organic traffic is absolutely decreasing. Right. We have seen kind of across the board decreases in some cases of up to 20 to 30 percent year over a year in organic driven traffic to websites. And then, of course, if your your website is the source for your leads and new business, that's going to have an impact on sales. but I still care about SEO and I think even if I think of it as a proxy for AEO and GEO, it's important. Again, those fundamentals still work. If you are aligning your messaging with the searches that people are out doing, whether it's on Google and Bing or if it's on ChatGPT or some other LLM, those fundamentals still work, right?

24:52The information that people are looking for is reflected in search volumes, just like it's going to be reflected in what questions they're asking. So I think the same practices that have helped brands successfully achieve, say, a high SERP will help with AEO and GEO. And traffic information is still relevant. because while organic search traffic might be down, AI source traffic and direct traffic is probably going up for most of the brands out there if they have a good story in market and it is being told across channels, right? And if they're controlling their narrative. And what we're finding and we're hearing from our clients and we're seeing ourselves is that the quality of that direct traffic and the AI source traffic is higher.

25:48And the people who are coming in are better informed about the brand because we are out telling our story and because they might be asking a question that puts us in the answer set, but the answer to their question is aligned with what they need and what they're asking. So the connections are being made. They're just not being made as early on our site. But we still are seeing high quality traffic coming to our website because ultimately people who are looking to buy or are looking to create a partnership need to act, need to take that action to buy or to get more information or to connect with an organization.

26:32so I'm still measuring traffic I'm still looking at my traffic sources my clicks and search rankings but I'm also and I encourage every brand to also monitor the presence of your brand and whether it's mentioned whether it's cited and how early in the citations it's mentioned and what the source of that information is. Is it your press release? Is it your own website, your own social channels? I mentioned earlier that AI loves earned media, but we are seeing that earned media supported and backed up in AI searches with the social channels and the work that you do across social and with some of the owned properties that people are maintaining like their websites.

27:27so yeah I think it's all still really relevant I wouldn't walk away from optimizing your site for organic because I think there'll be a carryover impact in effect on AEO and GEO and then I think find yourself a good source of search intelligence so that you really can understand what AI is saying about your brand the best ones provide some recommendations for how to shape the perception to improve your position and your citations. We've got one built in to Amplify, which, again, I use to understand how AI is preceding my brand, and it has helped me kind of refine some of my tactics and efforts.

28:16Well, that's reassuring because, you know, as journalists, of course, we're all trying to grapple with, you know, How do we get people onto our sites? How do we get them reading our articles? Especially because we have no brand product to promote, really. We're just talking. That's right. Yeah, and it's been a journey trying to figure out how to do that. You know, we've talked quite a bit about what communicators need to start doing. So I want to flip that around for a moment and kind of talk about perhaps what we should stop doing. um i think i need to hear that too you know as a journalist who was raised on seo um what are some marketers and communicators still doing today that kind of belongs to the old search and social media era that you need to think that you know we should leave behind yeah it's a it's a good question i am i don't know that that anything pops to mind that i think oh my gosh if you're doing that stop well i i shouldn't say that i mean look if you're still doing the old school stuff like, um, hashtag stopping or, you know, flooding the zone with content loaded with keywords.

29:27Um, you should stop doing that. But I'm guessing most of your listeners have already kind of evolved away from the practices. Um, if not, they will hopefully after this, uh, after this podcast. But, um, look, I think the, and I've been guilty of this in the past too, move away from a heavy reliance on a single platform, right? I think we all got, especially those brands with, you know, limited budgets, we all got heavily reliant on Google. And I think Google is still a very powerful, I'm not walking away from Google, certainly, but explore some of the other Google offerings as well, like their new-ish developed demand gen tool to put your content and different types of content in front of audiences.

30:18I say a lot, you need to find your audiences where they are and deliver your content there and in the way that they need to receive it. We have started doing a lot more video. We tell our story in video and then we can clip it into short little snippets and put it out over YouTube and advertise in different, different, on different platforms. And that's been really exciting. So I would say, you know, diversify. So it's not necessarily stop doing something except stop being a single channel marketer or communicator. You've got to kind of expand your horizons and try new things. And I think we're in a little bit of a trial and error stage of our lives where we're going to have to try things and fail fast.

31:07Start with the things that you've never tried or that you've never done, but that you see other brands doing, right? You don't have to be the pioneer in this. You just have to kind of look at some brands that you admire or that you consider successful and look at what they're doing and look at where they are. So I think I'm less about, you know stop doing this today um unless as i said it's just old school practices and and look at what you could be doing that you're not that is available to you but you haven't maybe leveraged because you know seo and sem on google was doing fine and you know that was where you were getting a lot of your your inbound that's that's actually really great advice and you know i think that that's a great note to end it on as well because, you know, I, I, I mean, even us personally, you know, we're trying new things every day and trying to see where it goes.

32:07And you're right when you say, you know, try something new and fail fast and try again. I love that. Susan, thank you so much. I think that, you know, we've had a very interesting conversation, particularly this idea that in an AI mediated information environment, you know, being visible isn't necessarily enough. brands increasingly have to think about whether they're understood trusted and authoritative as well so thank you again susan for joining me and thank you it's been a pleasure it really has and thank you to everyone listening we'll see you on the next episode

32:47you've been listening to the provoke podcast brought to you by provoke media and produced by the international broadcast specialist marketers Thank you.