Welcome back to your essential weekly Briefing on what’s happening in brand content and why it matters.
AI is transforming how C-level executives make speeches
Speechwriters have long been at the forefront of how business leaders manage crises. Companies in volatile, scrutinized industries like oil and gas know this well. As the FT reports, Ben van Beurden, former CEO at Shell, had a speechwriter, Lech Mintowt-Czyz, who wrote and edited speeches for van Beuren to ensure they were delicately balanced and presented both the executive and the company in the right light.
But AI is changing how executives communicate and present themselves: Tools like ChatGPT are now helping executives come up with speeches and written content. Others help analyze delivery for tone, emotion, and impact. So far, corporate comms has been using AI as a copilot: Letting it come up with ideas and fine-tune existing content, such as one PR firm with uses AI to help its clients analyze their own tone and delivery and suggest improvements. It even produces an “impact score” that benchmark’s an executives speech against peers.
Desperate for credit, content marketers get creative with ad space
Brands are increasingly placing advertising alongside the content they produce. Still, rather than pitching it to third-party advertisers, some are finding it easier to “sell” that space to other teams within their own companies. Many are finding the strongest demand for the audience attention they’re generating is coming from other departments and teams within their own companies. That’s prompting some to rethink how they can use ad inventory that they’ve already generated.
“It comes down to credit at the end of the day,” said a content lead at a health brand. “What we do is often unseen, invisible. So one way to get that credit is to use our real estate to advertise actual company products and link those back.”
A new role on content teams
Ad agency Momentum Worldwide is hiring what it calls a synthetic media producer, who will work on reducing risk and liability for the agency’s clients when they use AI-generated content. The role will sit within the content strategy team at Momentum and will assess AI-generated content for issues like inaccuracies, inconsistencies or bias.
Brands are increasingly using AI to aid with content production, but legal questions are arising as they do so. Does use of AI breach copyright laws? Are brands culpable for AI-generated inaccuracies? And are they legally required to disclose their use of AI to consumers? And for agencies, creating this kind of role can ensure they remain in the mix as these issues come up.
New PR firm launches with ‘go direct’ manifesto
Former Activision and Substack comms exec Lulu Cheng Meservey launched Rostra, a new PR firm. Rostra, named for the speaker’s platform at the center of Rome, says it will focus on helping founders and executives “go direct” to audiences. “Going direct means crafting and telling your own story, without being dependent on intermediaries,” reads the company’s website. It already has one project under its belt, Cognition Labs’ launch of AI engineer Devin.
The manifesto is worth reading, and notably, it sounds like the “go direct” mantra is back, at least in some corners of the content and communications worlds. The term has been used off and on for years, but gained some notoriety back in 2021, when Andressen Horowitz publicly came out with a mission to go direct to audiences – without the press or others in the middle. That effort culminated in the launch, and early demise, of Future.com, its own media company. Other tech execs like Balaji Srinivasan and the Besties of the All-In podcast also espoused the idea, exhorting grounds to go direct and create their own content. Of course, “go direct” is about more than raising a metaphorical middle finger at the media. While some may do it as a way to sidestep what they perceive as adversarial relationships, most companies who are investing in content are doing so for other, more pragmatic reasons: The media doesn’t really cover them because they don’t deem them newsworthy, they aren’t reaching the right audiences via the press anyway, and they have the time and resources to invest in quality content.
Starbucks drops CMO role
Starbucks is the latest company to do away with the chief marketing officer role: Brady Brewer, the company’s former CMO, will now take on the CEO, Starbucks International role, and the brand will instead appoint a global creative brand leader to be responsible for brand-building aspects. It joins Etsy, UPS and Walgreens with this move.
It’s yet another example of how the role and purpose of marketing is shifting as content takes centerstage. Marketing roles are splintering, with various “brand,” “growth,” “communications” or “content” titles taking on bits and pieces of marketing responsibilities. CEOs are also becoming more involved and interested in marketing as it expands beyond traditional advertising. And more companies are making content a linchpin of their overall marketing approaches, including building owned-and-operated brand publishing operations designed to help them attract and retain customers. Content is also a key human resource and talent acquisition function, and even in departments such as technology and engineering, content is becoming a key skillset.
A new news initiative at Google
Google has a new initiative that will help news outlets write, produce, distribute and even monetize their work, reports Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology. He has many more details, but the tool will let reporters select a “seed” source, then produce a draft that the journalist can add on to. A little nugget in the report: It’s unclear who will actually get access to the tool, and it’s perhaps obvious that major news organizations probably won’t want to use it. But could brand publishers be a target use case?
A new episode of The Toolkits Show
In each episode, we explore how publishers are monetizing digital content, how content is transforming modern brands and companies, and hear from the people and personalities at the industry’s cutting edge. Check out this week’s episode.
The CAIO
Chief AI Officer roles are popping up. Here’s what brands should think about while hiring for it.
The end of mass media
The end of mass media is nigh, says the FT’s Simon Kuper. And that is very bad news, as sources of trusted information plummet and attention splinters.