Written by Leslie Hacker, founder of Hacker Communications and incoming president at Canadian Public Relations Society Vancouver
The public relations industry has spent much of the last decade trying to outrun algorithms. While we were focussed on that unwinnable race, the media and digital landscape shifted to one that has the industry reacting, overreacting, confused and maybe even a little lost. Now, as I prepare to step into the role of President of the Canadian Public Relations Society, Vancouver Chapter (CPRS Vancouver), I have a message for us all: stop.
Fifteen years ago, I began my career as a journalist. It sparked a professional love affair with stories and how they connect us; to ideas, to causes, to brands, and to each other. I shifted to PR in 2012, launched my own PR and communications agency in 2015 and I’ve been helping to bring the PR community together through events at CPRS for the last three years.
From Search to Summary
So what have I found? Trust in traditional media is at an all-time low, AI is rewriting the rules of search, ethical gray areas are expanding faster than our professional guidelines can keep pace, and algorithm-chasing has become ubiquitous. If it feels a little like the traditional PR model is failing, I think it’s because the world it was made for no longer exists.
With the advent of AI search, we’re moving from a world of search results, links, ad values and key words to one of summaries and narratives out of our control. A few of the experts I spoke to recently explained that, more than information, AI is now synthesising credibility. It’s skimming every article and mention of you on thousands of websites and compiling all of that, true and false, into a short summary with no human heartbeat.
In other words, when AI comes looking for you online thanks to a well-placed article or interview, its summary is likely a flat, emotionless, partially-hallucinated story.
The New Legitimacy
As far as trust goes, we, the PR professionals, might be shooting ourselves in the foot just a little bit. We’re trained to tell our stories to those with a high level of journalistic integrity, but is that where people are getting their information? Traditional journalism isn’t the only source anymore and a side-effect of us ignoring that fact is that we dismiss influencers. It makes sense: they don’t hold journalism degrees.
At Hacker Communications we treat influencers like journalists, vetting them for due diligence, brand alignment and authentic audience connection. The results aren’t just likes but real-world impact. Last year, the founder of the Shipyards Christmas Market credited our social strategy as the primary driver for their success. We doubled in-person attendance from 250,000 to 500,000, making it the fifth-largest Christmas market in North America.
That wasn’t because of a standard press release. It happened because audience trust and media legitimacy has moved in a new direction, and we followed it.
Strategic Adaptation or Strategic Obsolescence?
Strange as it may seem, the biggest threat to our industry might not be AI, but a refusal to adapt. Maybe that’s why we’re more reactive than ever, chasing impressions over connection, speed over depth, freaking out about this-and-that technological change.
As incoming President, I feel like my job is to take PR by shoulders and tell us all to take a collective breath. Instead of seeing everything as perceived disruption, let’s slow down, ignore the noise, pinpoint our goal and set off in that direction.
A Vancouver Vision
I see a unique opportunity here on the West Coast. I believe we’re less interested in aggressive, transactional energy and more focused on a sort of radical humanity; I think we should lean into that. And we don’t have to leave our journalistic integrity behind to do it:
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Let’s use our journalism training to vet influencer-audience relationships so that we can leverage that built-in connection to make a story land.
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More than ever, PR practitioners and journalists need to support each other. Let’s start using our respective platforms and relationships to lift, celebrate and spotlight each other’s successes.
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Let’s put the cause of PR front and centre (connecting people to the ideas, stories and organizations they need to know about) and pursue empathy and community-building as the highest-ROI metrics in a digital space (don’t worry, the other metrics go up too when we do that).
I think PR is more important than ever in an AI world. And I’m so excited to guide CPRS Vancouver into it. I think we can do big things for the Vancouver business community if we start chasing the human premium, and we do it together.
