AI means consultants must bring traditional PR back to the forefront of the marketing mix
As AI and large language models begin to add the ability to purchase directly on the platform, it’s important to react to the changing media environment. Charlie Giggle, senior account manager at Lighthouse PR, shares his thoughts on the optimisation of LLMs for marketing purposes.
As the number of users searching for content on artificial intelligence platforms continues to rise, they are also transforming into sales portals in their own right. OpenAI’s announcement that ChatGPT can now complete purchases directly through the platform has excited (and frightened) plenty of marketeers. Starting in the US with brands like Etsy, Shopify and Skims, the shift represents the largest change in e-commerce and marketing since the advent of mobile shopping. And this won’t just be contained to retail and B2C products, either.
Consulting firms will need to augment their marketing strategies, and plan for how the AI-based search tools will define which brands are relevant to each user. For a decent number of years, marketing in the consulting sector has abided by the mantra of ‘quantity is king’, flooding the internet with content to generate leads using traditional search engines. The new era is here, and those unable to reach the places the models respect as sources will lose salience day by day.
Search ranking
Generative AI is no doubt exciting, but AI generated content is still not reliable enough in terms of accuracy. ‘Hallucinations’ or inaccuracies aren’t a bug but a very common occurrence. BBC research into leading AI tools found their news summaries contained “significant issues” in 51% of cases. As a result, putting out reems of quick and easy AI prompted content is not a good idea at all, even in terms of conventional online marketing.
Consulting firms may have already seen this in places their traditional marketing has been built around. Google has already made clear that if, during an inspection, quality-raters determine that all or most of a site’s content is AI-created, that page will be penalised with the lowest possible search ranking. Models are trained to avoid cannibalisation, a phenomenon wherein the models take in their own hallucinations as fact, leading to deeper levels of incorrect understanding. Trying to beat them at their own game is pointless.
We’re currently at a point in time when consulting firms are already using AI generated text to pump out press content and even thought leadership pieces. Ignoring the obvious fact that anything written by AI and by-lined onto a sales team member is an awkward conversation waiting to happen at any conference, this method is missing out on the chance to actually influence the AI models directly. There’s also the possibility of a huge reputational blow which firms run the risk of taking when they lean too far into generative AI with improper oversight. Deloitte is now providing a partial refund to the federal government over a $440,000 report which contained several errors, after admitting it used generative artificial intelligence to help produce it.
Ultimately, using AI to quickly generate content loaded with SEO and keyword manipulation, along the old assumptions that quantity of this type trumps quality of coverage every time, is not the right strategy at this moment in time.
The old-new way
The conclusion, which even the best consultancies with a huge stake in the efficacy of the SEO methodological framework have reached, is that traditional PR is becoming a huge part of the mix. AI models are trained heavily on news, including aspects such as the trade press, which are too often neglected in lieu of manipulation of what is now outdated technology in the search engine.
The reality is, in order to enact influence on the AI’s perception of any company or brand in the B2C or even B2B sectors, the content has to be placed in a trusted media organisation, a scientific journal, and/or in trade association literature. The key here is that it will be in places with editors, human oversight, and if the pieces are obviously human to the models, that helps even more.
What doesn’t go away in the new rules of the game, is targeted marketing, and there are huge opportunities for strategic thinking which come into play now. Huge benefits in visibility can come from placing the right content in right places, and using your thought leadership pieces to hit specific keywords to make sure the maximum number of queries are answered with your content.
Undoubtedly, now is the time to really start reading the media around our clients, and working with editors to create quality content. As wild as it sounds now, what we’ll be seeing is a return to power of the traditional media and spikes in advertising spending to support the content we want the AI to see. With the best thinkers in SEO strategy and quality human copywriters on the same page, it’s a mix which will take the entire sector forward.
