How to use AI in your PR strategy

Was that too click-baity?

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Before we dive in, I wanted to make sure you saw that in this week’s episode of the Everything Is Marketing Podcast, I talk with Nik Suresh, who wrote a viral essay about companies getting over their skis when it comes to AI (he used saltier language than that), about why companies have fallen so hard for AI messaging, and why engineers say they’re not susceptible to marketing, but they’re just as susceptible as everyone else (obviously). BTW - you should subscribe to the Everything Is Marketing Podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, then it’ll just show up in your podcast app (my bad - I know you know how podcasts work).

Moving on.

Today:

• Your homepage already has better messaging on it somewhere

• How to use AI as a PR strategy (no, not “these are the best AI public relations tools” I mean, “Why a company might want to get the press to write about their AI strategy as a way to talk about a larger strategy that doesn’t involve AI” - it’ll make sense when you read it, I promise.

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1 Quick Tip: Homepage Edition

If you’ve recently gone to your company’s homepage and you read the headline and thought, “I have no idea what that means.” Or you thought, “that’s not going to help anyone decide whether to get a demo from us” (or whatever) - I have a little exercise for you that should help make your headline more clear for your prospects.

But first - I have a little secret about messaging that I tell my clients. And now I’m going to tell you the secret. Even though most of you are not, nor have been, a client. Which is really a bummer (for me) and also for you, since you would be so happy with your homepage after we’re done. But that’s for another day.

I was saying - I have a little secret about homepage messaging, and here it is:

Your team knows what should be in the homepage headline. They do. Even if you’re not thrilled with your current headline and subhead, they know the answer for how to fix it.

They just don’t know where to FIND the answer.

But I do.

Your homepage headline is - wait for it - likely already on your homepage.

(Gasp!)

But not at the top.

It’s likely buried down below, in the 4th or 5th block. It’s down there where product marketing often gets to clearly describe what the product does. Why is it buried down in the 5th block? Because the homepage is where clarity goes to die (specifically, it goes to die down in the 5th block).

Let me show you a couple of quick examples:

Last week we discussed a stupid story about HR tech company Rippling, which was involved in a spying scandal. I mentioned that I didn’t like how their homepage’s subhead referred to “busywork,” because it felt demeaning to your users. A reminder:

Someone asked me how to improve that, and my idea was to take this block they had down at the bottom of the homepage, and then move it to the top. So this:

Becomes this:

Ta-da! See, they already knew what should be there.

One more example, this one from Aligned, a “digital sales room” (?) tool. Here’s their headline:

End whose indecision? Whatever Aligned does, it won’t “end ghosting” - ghosting is what someone does to YOU. I think they’re trying to be cute by using “ghosting,” which is fine, but at the top of the homepage, it’s not clear how this tool differs from the 35,000 other sales tools “powered by AI.”

But down below, they’ve got this:

That’s something to work with. How about this as the new headline:

Clear, no?

Anyway - moving something up from the bottom of the homepage to the top is another tool in your arsenal to make your message as clear as possible.

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Artificial Intelligence, PR Edition

As much as I blabber pretty frequently about how positioning is one of the more misunderstood parts of marketing, I think PR may actually be even more misunderstood. In part that’s because everyone thinks they understand PR.

Here’s what they think:

You go find a PR agency. You say to that agency, “Hey, our CEO would like us to get in the Wall Street Journal.”

During the PR agency selection process the agency will say, “We worked with this greentech company and got their CEO into the Wall Street Journal. We’ve got a great relationship with the reporter.”

You’ll hire that agency even though you’re not in greentech.

You will have a kickoff meeting with the agency and your CEO, who is very excited because you’re paying $18,000/month to get him (him, natch) into the Wall Street Journal.

You discuss some story ideas that may interest that publication.

Idea 1: “We raised $12 million and hope to revolutionize laundry. With AI.”

Idea 2: The personal angle. “My parents came here from [country] and then I got a degree at [Ivy] and now I’m an entrepreneur. It’s the American dream!”

Idea 3: “Newsjacking.”

Fast forward 3 months and the CEO’s interview in LaundryTech.io is now live! Congrats!

What went wrong here?

I was being a little flip above when I said people don’t understand PR. I think they understand what PR is. I think the struggle is understanding how it fits as a pillar of a marketing strategy.

Way back in the 3rd or 4th issue of Gobbledy, we talked about Warby Parker’s brilliant PR strategy. The short version:

Warby had 2 messages about how they were different:

1. Our fashionable glasses are $95, whereas designer glasses are $500.

2. We are revolutionizing selling glasses online - which everyone said couldn’t be done - because we created this “try at home” program.

But the smart thing was to match the message with the channel for that message. The PR angle - because press loves conflict - was to talk about how the reason glasses are $500 is because of an evil company called Luxxotica. As a founder said in an interview:

When you look at an industry and you see that there's this one company [Luxottica] that's doing roughly $7 billion a year in revenue and we're finding that those glasses are being marked up more than 20 times what they cost to manufacture…we thought that there had to be a better way.

The strategy was to use PR to create an enemy (Luxxotica). They didn’t do interviews on CNBC about second-level messaging themes. They matched the messaging to the channel. That’s PR. PR isn’t randomly doing interviews - there should be a reason you’re doing the interview that aligns with your messaging strategy when you’re talking to the press.

I’m mentioning this because I’ve seen a handful of AI-related stories in the news that I think are good examples of how PR can work for you.

Examples 1a and 1b:

Example 1a: Last week OpenAI founder Sam Altman was quoted in the press complaining (mentioning? bragging?) that Meta has been trying to poach OpenAI employees by offering them (gulp) $100 million signing bonuses.

Question: Why would Sam Altman say publicly that Meta has been offering his employees $100 million signing bonuses?

(Cynical?) Answer: Sam Altman’s actual job is raising funding for OpenAi because it burns through cash like NYC Councilman Shaun Abreu burned through text messages reminding me to vote in New York City’s primary elections this week (that’s for my Upper West Side friends out there. For the others - Shaun Abreu sent a lot of text messages reminding us to vote.) Anyway, is your startup perceived as more valuable because its employees are being offered $100 million to leave? Maybe. Is the best way to get that information in front of potential investors to say it to the press and have them disseminate it? Probably.

Example 1b: After that story came out, the Wall Street Journal put out a piece calling Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg the “recruiter-in-chief” saying he is “spending his days firing off emails and WhatsApp messages to the sharpest minds in artificial intelligence in a frenzied effort to play catch-up. He has personally reached out to hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars and entrepreneurs to try to get them to join a new Superintelligence lab he’s putting together.”

Question: Why would Meta’s communications team be comfortable with stories about their CEO spending his days recruiting people and offering them $100 million salaries?

(Cynical?) Answer: Because Meta is a public company and the market is rewarding companies that invest in AI and punishing companies (Apple, specifically) for not investing sufficiently in AI. How do you show the market that you’re investing sufficiently in AI? You push stories about how your CEO is Whatsapping dozens and dozens of geniuses and paying them $100 million to come work for him.

Example 2: Legacy companies have been pitching articles to the business press about how they, too, are embracing the new AI world and - Lord knows! - they’re not falling behind like their competitors who are not pitching these articles.

Here’s one that’s talking about Dine Brands, the owner of IHOP and Applebees (among other fast casual chains) and how they’re embracing AI “behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers.”

Specifically, their CIO says that “the company’s personalization engine, which also uses generative AI, automatically recommends new or additional items to customers based on their prior purchases and the purchases of diners similar to them…”

Now, when I heard that I thought to myself, “I feel like I’ve heard that before, except it was a bunch of years ago.” And then I remembered (and an article from 2019 confirmed) that “AI-powered personalization platform Dynamic Yield has been acquired by McDonald’s…”

Yes, McDonald’s bought an entire company just so they could get a tool like this in 2019, when the press didn’t care so much about how you were investing in AI (in fact, they cared so little that McDonald’s sold Dynamic Yield to Mastercard 2 years later).

Question: Why did pancake slinger IHOP share a story with the WSJ about how they’re personalizing offers, when competitors were doing that at least 6 years ago?

(Cynical?) Answer: The CIO wants to get hired in his next job for somewhere between what he’s making now and $100 million, and letting the industry know that he brought the latest technology to IHOP is a good way to let people know he’s available.

Final Question: Why are we even talking about this?

(Cynical?) Answer: Because I wanted to write “How to use AI” in my subject line.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end. It’s the best part.

P.S. - Much like at Thanksgiving dinner or on a first date, I don’t like to talk politics here. But I keep thinking about this incredibly thought-provoking New Yorker piece that George Saunders wrote last November called, “Five Thought Experiments Concerning the Underlying Disease.” It’s not about politics, but it is about our relationship with political news, and why we experience it the way we do. This week’s newsletter was really about the reasons we hear different stories in the press. Saunders’ piece is similar, as he wonders about the reasons we hear about the same political stories over and over. It’s changed how I perceive the news (and, thankfully, reduced my quantity of news consumption…which is a good thing). I’ve thought more about this article than I have any other magazine piece in the last year.