The irreplaceable magic of human artistry’ is not a phrase you would typically associate with PR account management, but let me explain why I think we should borrow it unashamedly from Led Zepplin’s Jimmy Page for a moment.
Speaking to the NME, Page was talking about Artificial Intelligence and how he believes that a lack of regulation is going to stymie human creative endeavour in the music business. And it set me to thinking about our industry and how we do what we do, and where our magic happens.
We always joke in our recruitment process that we are looking for mythical PR beings who are not only creatives – brilliant ideas people, writers and visual producers, but who can also be epic suits –lead generators, business developers and problem solvers. Oh, and good in a crisis – did I forget to mention that too?
And even if you are ‘just’ the suit and have other super beings to wrangle your creative output, it strikes me that what we are really good at in PR is reading the room. Whether it’s getting to the bottom of what will make the client (and their Board) happy, listening to what a journalist is saying will make a story work, or picking up the buying signals in a pitch, emotional intelligence – reading between the lines – is essential to excel at what we do.
At a time when AI is promising so much in terms of productivity gains, and generative AI is learning how to approximate what creatives do too, it feels important to acknowledge that AI is going to struggle to read the room for a good while yet.
And massive gender stereotyping klaxon warning, but I happen to believe that women are particularly good at this. Call it intuition, call it cunning, but it evolved because we didn’t tend to have the brute strength or speed of our male counterparts in the days when it used to matter. So to mark International Women’s day, my colleague Rebecca Oatley, commissioned by Elizabeth Howlett (two women with bags of EQ to spare) has this to say on the subject: https://www.prmoment.com/opinion/ai-will-never-replace-emotional-intelligence-in-the-pr-industry
