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Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR
For nearly 20 years, Steve Rubel was a key figure at the global public relations and marketing consultancy firm Edelman, shaping its approach to media strategy and digital communication. A pioneer in blogging and digital PR from the early 2000s, Steve has long been at the forefront of emerging media trends, helping businesses navigate the ever-evolving landscape of content, journalism, and corporate communication.
In December 2024, Steve’s journey at Edelman came to an unexpected close when he was affected by a reduction in force at the agency. He has embraced the transition as an opportunity to reconnect with industry peers, reflect on the broader PR profession, and explore his next chapter. His announcement on LinkedIn in December drew an overwhelming response, reinforcing the deep connections he has built throughout his career.
Now, Steve is focused on one of the most untapped opportunities in communications: using AI and analytics to uncover hidden patterns in media. He believes that by leveraging these insights, PR professionals can craft smarter, more mediagenic narratives, improve media engagement, and redefine the future of thought leadership.
He plans to help agencies adopt AI-powered media analytics and drive innovation in communication. His advice for PR professionals: stay curious, experiment with AI tools, and learn how to extract real value from data.
In this FIR Interview, Steve joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz – for the fifth time in an FIR Interview – to discuss the role of AI in modern communication, how data-driven storytelling is transforming PR, and why agencies must adapt to survive in an AI-driven industry.
About Our Conversation Partner
Steve Rubel is a media analyst, innovation catalyst, and communications strategist with a proven track record of identifying emerging trends and delivering actionable insights to help organizations thrive in the dynamic media landscape.
Over a 19-year tenure at Edelman, he advised hundreds of global corporations and nonprofits, shaping strategies that drove meaningful impact. Beyond providing strategic counsel, he played a key role in advancing Edelman’s competitive edge by championing innovative capabilities, accelerating the adoption of new services, and positioning the firm as a leading authority on media.
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Verbatim Transcript
@nevillehobson (00:02.766)
Hi everyone and welcome to this FIR interview. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.
Steve Rubel (00:03.279)
you
Shel Holtz (00:09.072)
And I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California, and we have a very special guest with us today. Steve Rubel is joining us. Steve is one of our more regular guests on FIR Interviews, having appeared as we counted five times, the last one in 2013. So it has been a while. Welcome, Steve. It’s great to see you.
Steve Rubel (00:31.692)
Thank you, it’s an honor to be part of the Five Timers Club. So that’s an SNL reference for those who may not know.
Shel Holtz (00:34.998)
It is, the jacket’s in the mail.
I asked ChatGPT to tell me about you, Steve. Just curious to see how accurate it would be and where it would focus. So I’m going to read these three paragraphs and you can let us know how ChatGPT did on this. says, Steve Rubel is a prominent public relations executive and professional blogger known for his expertise in media trends, digital culture and content strategy. He has held significant roles at Edelman.
the world’s largest public relations firm, including serving as chief content strategist. In this capacity, Rubel has been responsible for advancing Edelman’s thinking on the evolving media ecosystem and helping clients develop innovative programs that blend paid, owned, and earned media. Throughout his career, Rubel has been a thought leader on the future of media consumption, advising clients such as Adobe, Starbucks, Samsung, and GE. He has emphasized the importance of companies operating in real time, like media organizations,
leveraging technology to create compelling content and synchronize communications across various channels. In recent years, Rubell has focused on the potential of analytics and artificial intelligence to uncover hidden patterns within the media landscape. He believes that these insights can benefit communications professionals, the organizations they represent, and the press. By analyzing untapped data, companies can craft more compelling and mediogenic narrative platforms, develop content strategies,
Steve Rubel (01:55.15)
Amazingly accurate, maybe a little over the top in the flattery. And I would say just the one part that was wrong.
Shel Holtz (02:08.231)
and established thought leadership. So Steve, how’d Chachipiti do?
@nevillehobson (02:19.726)
Thanks for watching!
Steve Rubel (02:21.696)
He says that it was a prolific blogger. am a prolific blogger. I mean, it’s not true anymore. I was for many years, but not recently, but certainly at one time. At one time I was.
Shel Holtz (02:30.867)
Yeah, Yeah, media persuasion was a very influential blog in this day. Micro persuasion.
@nevillehobson (02:33.676)
Yeah.
Steve Rubel (02:35.822)
Well, micro persuasion and then later and then later for the later for adage and so forth. Yeah.
@nevillehobson (02:38.51)
Yeah. That was that was the the start of things back in those early days 2005 2004. Yeah. So in December, you wrote a post that really caught my eye like Whoa, on LinkedIn, announcing that you were leaving Edelman. And that you’ve been there nearly 19 years.
Steve Rubel (02:45.454)
Oh yeah, a long time ago.
Steve Rubel (02:57.682)
@nevillehobson (03:04.526)
And you’ve received, I left a comment I know you did as well, Shell, but you’ve had like 200, nearly 300 comments from people on that post. It’s quite extraordinary outpouring of well-being, I think, and warmth all around. So that’s two months ago, and here we are having this conversation. I’m just curious, as Shell is, we both are really, what’s your journey now and leaving after 19 years?
How was that? So, you know, what’s happening?
Steve Rubel (03:37.381)
Yeah, well, mean, first of all, I just want to say, just, you know, put a flag here that just it was a remarkable privilege to work for such a quality organization for for almost 20 years. And so I have nothing but love and respect for the Elman family.
I was caught in a reduction in force that they made in the beginning of December. it was just shocking and disappointing, just it’s a business decision. And so I don’t in any way take it personally. like I said, I’m just grateful for every minute that I got to spend there. As you guys may or may not know, I was…
I was very vocal and active online for many years and then about six, seven years ago, kind of a deliberate decision to step back and to really focus much more on element client work and teams. There’s no story behind it. I just kind of got tired of it and wanted to really do something different. I’m of the belief that the internet has a short memory.
I put that up just to have something on the record, just to say that I wasn’t there anymore. And I was really blown away just by how people just were responding to that post, but also just the outreach I got. had people contact me from 30 years ago I worked with, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago. It was staggering. And from all ways, from LinkedIn, from email, from text messages and so forth.
And that was something I totally did not expect at all. I just really wasn’t, I wasn’t ready for that. So I took some time and I said, okay, look, I’m going to use this time to just catch up with people because that’s something I really hadn’t done in the last few years. And so I just said, I’m going to book myself silly. I’m going to have one to three Zooms a day with people just to catch up and see what they’re doing.
Steve Rubel (05:50.502)
to kind of poke my head above ground and really kind of get a better understanding of the profession and where the profession’s at beyond Edelman because as great as Edelman is, it’s one view. And I really wanted to have a little bit of a broader perspective. So I took the time to do that. And then I took the time to also think about kind of what I want to do next, which we can talk about. And then
Just to kind of, I mean, I had no infrastructure. mean, just to give you an idea of how, where did I was and planning to stay with Edelman for the run. I had no CV, had no, my LinkedIn was completely out of date. It was a mishmash of stuff. So I had to take time to go through the process of just emotionally and mentally coping with a layoff. And the community was just incredible.
in helping me do that. And then also just had to kind of start to think about what’s next and which we can get into. so, and it was just, in their case, it was just a business decision and I have nothing but respect for them.
Shel Holtz (07:04.457)
Well, let’s talk about this issue that you’ve embraced, I guess, later in your career at Edelman and since then you’ve been doing more than just holding Zoom sessions because we know that you did a session for Muckrack on this topic of analytics and AI and their ability to transform the way communications professionals understand and engage with the media landscape. Can you elaborate on that? Because
Certainly most of the people in PR and communications that I talk to about generative AI are trying to figure out how to write with it.
Steve Rubel (07:40.26)
So this is just absolutely what I’m most excited about today, So where I am in my AI journey was at, know, so ChatGPT launched in November of 22. I didn’t sign up at first because I was a little thrown off by the fact that the only way you could sign up was by giving your cell phone number. And I, you know, it was a little…
And they were an unknown company at the time. so I, you know, you know, by some measures. And so I kind of felt weird about that. And I was like, and I viewed it as a, as a search tool, which I think I honestly, in my, know, I spent two years in Edelman’s AI task force working with and working with Edelman’s own media team on helping to kind of accelerate their use of, of, of AI. And I saw that a lot of people like me used it that way. And, you know, we had in the
@nevillehobson (08:25.07)
You
Steve Rubel (08:37.091)
The winter of 23, we had a freezing cold week here in New York. And I got a text message over the weekend from a colleague saying, hey, have you thought about using AI and what you do with analytics? And which I had been already doing for a couple of years at that point. And I said, hmm, no, I hadn’t thought of that. And so it was freezing. I didn’t want to go out. It was like 10 degrees Fahrenheit here or whatever it was. And so I stayed in the whole weekend and just started to…
try different things. And I was like, wow, this and everyone has one of those moments I think was used one of these tools, but wow, this is such a powerful tool for helping me understand patterns in the media environment. So here’s what I do. I pulled down massive amounts of metadata out of MuckRack. know, the MuckRack, know, full disclosure, I got a license to MuckRack in exchange for some, you know,
some promotional work, basically writing on LinkedIn with their content. So just full disclosure on that. it’s not a paid relationship per se. The data, though, I’ve just become a fan. I’ve known Greg Gellant for a million years. He’s the CEO. But the data is so rich. And I started to pull down the data out of MuckRack, the article data and the metadata, and began to use a whole bunch of different AI tools.
analyze it. And what I found was, know, are, know, earned media remains the bedrock of PR. I mean, PR has, you know, and communications as you both know and have chronicled, has become so much more multifaceted now. It’s so much more diversified. It’s so many different types of activities. But
earned media remains the bedrock of it. I mean, I find, you know, it’s often the starting point for a lot of client relationships that extend out in other ways. And, you know, everyone is challenged with trying to break through in this environment because it’s just, you know, it’s getting, first of all, less reporters, less outlets in some cases, you know, a lot of topics that are just, you know, high volume and drying out the news environment, know.
Steve Rubel (10:57.759)
big rocks, you will, whether it be Trump or sustainability or DEI or whatever, pop culture. I there’s just so many different things that the media is writing about that often the aperture for clients can be narrow. And that’s evergreen problem. And so I, in the last several years of Edelman and now on my own, as to stay fresh as I explore different opportunities, is I’ve just seen that you can…
@nevillehobson (11:05.644)
Hmm.
Steve Rubel (11:25.887)
Take that data and you can bring it into AI and manipulate it and really understand patterns such as to really kind of quantify, for example, what are the themes that a particular writer is writing about, an outlet is writing about, an index of outlets or around a topic. So you could take a topic like for AI, for example, pull down thousands of stories, not the full text, but the metadata and use the AI tools to manipulate that to really understand the patterns.
and then compare different quarters and different periods. So you can start to understand where a story is going or a single reporter to understand where that particular reporter is going. And what I found is not only is that useful for nuts and bolts kind of, know, brass tacks, earned media applications, but so many companies, you know, want to develop executive visibility programs or thought leadership programs or narratives that are consistent
with the media environment and Mediagenic. And when you look at that data set and use AI to manipulate that, that stuff gets to be so powerful because in theory, it’s a triple win. It’s a win for your stakeholder, whether that’s an internal stakeholder or a client. It’s a win for the press because you’re creating a better story that’s consistent with what they’re writing about on the mark, which has long been a complaint of theirs.
And it serves you because you’re going to be much more successful. And so I am just so bullish on the use of AI and analytics to understand the media environment at a very granular or a very wide aperture. And I find that this is completely untapped in the industry right now, completely untapped. And it has the potential if applied at scale.
to be incredibly useful, probably more so on the agency level, but certainly on the corporate level as well.
@nevillehobson (13:30.782)
That’s very interesting. It makes me think that the broad topic of AI is featured in every episode of our podcast for at least a year and half, literally. And new angles are emerging every time we have a conversation. This is the latest one. And I’m reminded, Steve, actually, the interview we did prior to talking to you today with Sylvia Camby a couple of weeks back that was published last week, she talked about
this very topic, finding patterns. She talked about the kind of move from beyond generative AI to what she calls curation AI. And she talks a bit about how AI can provide communicators with better insights, deeper insights, and how messages are received and acted upon. She reckons that communicators who’ve worked with enterprise social networks like Yammer and so forth back in the day have very transferable skills as a result of that.
So it got me just to direct, I guess, the question that arises in my mind. If, and I’ve heard listening to what you’re saying, if AI driven analytics reveal the hidden patterns in media landscape, what, what do you think are the biggest opportunities for communicators generally? And I’m wondering what they need to shift to kind of get a handle on this is something you absolutely need to pay attention to. And so how do you think this shifts the role of PR pros and shaping narratives?
Steve Rubel (15:00.11)
Hugely. so, I mean, the inspiration for this, I mean, started for me during the lockdowns of the pandemic, when my role changed, just the nature of just the way, you know, the travel stopped and so forth. And I’ve just been, I think you both know that I’m
and forgive me here for the Europeans, but I’m a huge sports fan, particularly a baseball fan. And we’re not getting too wonky there. You know, I’ve just been fascinated how analytics have come around and revolutionized any sport, whether it be football, know, NFL football, know, soccer, football, you know, baseball, golf, tennis, you name it. I’ve completely revolutionized it because teams or individuals understand
the statistics and the analytics about how their opponents behave. The media is not our opponent, but the media is certainly a gatekeeper. And so one of the things that I think is most powerful here, so I just looked at that and said, what did they do that we could be applying in our world? And one of the things that I think about with the press is that
They’re really good at writing about analyzing and writing about the problems in a particular, know, or what I would call the critical issues in a particular field. know, one of the critical issues around AI, one of the critical issues around DEI, mean, you and those are changing every week, every day. And it may not be, you know, the entire totality of what they write about around that topic. They’re writing about the solutions as well.
But I find that if you are able to identify and quantify the patterns in the critical issues, what are the problems that they are writing about regularly? And you can position your organization, your solution, your intellectual property as solutions to those particular issues. Or you have a point of view or some way of bringing something
Steve Rubel (17:14.974)
some more perspective around those issues. And those issues are written about at scale. You’re going to be way more successful because you are, you’re not, you know, so much of, of earned media for the 35 years I’ve been in this business is trial and error. It’s knocking on doors. mean, it’s relationships, it’s understanding people, but it’s a lot of trial and error. It’s a lot of waste. It’s necessary waste.
but it’s waste. How do we reduce that? How do we reduce that? Well, I mean, that’s where if you use the analytics to quantify and the AI is useful because it’s able to read huge volumes of information and statistically make patterns out of this. And I’ve mastered the prompts required and the different tools required to do that. But I think that has a transformation in helping us.
in communications. And even if your output is not media, your output is social media, your output is content for your website or LinkedIn or whatever it is. There’s a lot of work done in social listening to understand what people are talking about online. There’s a lot of great tools for that that are advancing every day, but there’s not a lot of work being done to look at what’s going on in the quote unquote professional content creator community and what working journalists are doing.
and using that signal set in addition to the others to helping to really shape content strategies. And so I just think that that is just absolute, probably one of the biggest opportunities with AI right now for communications professionals. Maybe not the biggest, but one of them for sure.
Shel Holtz (19:01.973)
Steve, pictures and catchers report tomorrow.
Steve Rubel (19:05.614)
I’m going, I’m going, I can’t wait.
@nevillehobson (19:08.142)
You
Shel Holtz (19:09.845)
You gave some great examples of how analytics can shape a pitch, for example, to a journalist. I think what a lot of people are going to be inclined to do is what you have recommended. And then the next step would be to have the AI produce the pitch. And there are a lot of people out there who are talking about AI slop. Chris Penn talks about it.
Jeff Livingston, Greg Verdino. It’s a real prominent topic right now that the internet is being overtaken, overwhelmed by AI generated content. How can organizations balance the use of data-driven insights with that need for having a human in the loop? And what are the ethical considerations around?
Steve Rubel (20:03.065)
Yep. So I don’t think there’s any ethical concerns about the analytics in helping you form the strategies. The ethical concerns are in the content generation after that.
Shel Holtz (20:05.877)
leveraging AI and analytics in developing these strategies.
Steve Rubel (20:21.584)
I don’t think there’s any kind of ethical concerns necessarily around using AI to analyze mass quantities of data unless I’m missing something. But on pitching side of things, I think you can’t let the AI take away your humanity. look, mean, sorry, another baseball metaphor, but it still requires, no amount of statistics is going to substitute for talent.
And Aaron Judge has to go up and hit a baseball. Yes. Yes. You missed the big one in the World Series, but that’s another story. so the talent and the expertise and the humanity is still absolutely necessary. Knowing journalists, having relationships, building those relationships, none of that goes away.
Shel Holtz (20:54.773)
has to catch one too.
Steve Rubel (21:18.394)
So to me, it’s use the analytics and the insights, which I would generate for teams. And then they would then, and with prescriptive advice on what to do with it, I still think you have to write your pitch the same way you always write your pitch. You might take a line here or there, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. I think the way to do it is to write your pitch in your own voice, the way you’ve always have done it because it’s worked for a long time, in some cases, whether it’s five years or 20 years or whatever it is.
Even if you’re new to this, it’s a year. It’s your own humanity and building those relationships are still absolutely necessary. But then I think, you know, taking the pitch and bringing it into an AI tool, whether that be Microsoft Copilot or, you know, chat GPT, or I’ve actually been using the writing tools built into the Apple intelligence writing tools that are built into the iOS and the Mac, not for pitches, but just, for
emails I’m writing and so forth. And just having it, you know, clean up, strengthen it. One of the things I like to do, for example, is to use the AI to improve the subject lines. Because I will bring in the pitch, you know, or would recommend to teams that they bring in the pitch into an AI tool and ask it based on email marketing best practices. How would you tailor my subject line, which I’ve already provided to make it stronger? Right?
And look, you might look at that and you’re going to say, it’s too much written like an e-commerce email. But you might pick up a trick or two that maybe there’s a word ordering where you move one word up, so it’s a little bit earlier in the preview, or some sort of optimization that augments what you do. So I think the use of AI to augment, to take your work from a five or a six to a seven or an eight, which I did with the analytics.
three years ago, definitely took my work, not to a 10, but certainly took it from, I would say from a six to an eight. And the same thing applies. And I think that to me is the opportunity with teaching teams how to do that. And to do that, so, I think you could, depending on the size of your organization, you could do that at a corporate or team level, but it works best in an individual level where you sit down with one or two or three people.
@nevillehobson (23:22.766)
you
Steve Rubel (23:44.545)
And I did this at Edelman and say, what do you do all day? And to then provide expertise and advice on how to use the AI to augment that work to make it even stronger.
@nevillehobson (24:03.406)
interesting. think we talked recently, Shailena, in I think our monthly episode, the last one we did, the long four-monthly one, about the evolution of generative AI within the profession, in the PR profession, where surveys are showing that take-up and use is in the 70-plus, 80-plus percent. The days are gone, I think, when we saw a couple of years back a survey that where a quarter of those surveyed.
Steve Rubel (24:20.301)
.
@nevillehobson (24:30.476)
said they would never ever under any circumstances use artificial intelligence to PR work. That’s vanished, thankfully. Common sense has really prevailed, but people have, I think, acquired a better understanding of some of these tools. And what you’ve explained there, what you mentioned there, Steve, is something that I see happening. I do it myself. AI like chat GPT, Microsoft co-pilots, all the ones that we know of, are great at research.
So I tend to regard them as my research assistants, the same for search as well. Providing the skill, if you will, to do, to trawl through and make sense of huge amounts of data, structured and unstructured, doesn’t matter, and present you the results. Your job is still to make sure it’s accurate. And that’s a whole different, I think, conversation that we probably still need to have because…
I see this coming up a lot in conferences that I have with people that you can get all this input and great, you write your report. No, you’ve got to sift it. You’ve got to understand it yourself. So in the context of this latest idea of revealing hidden patterns in the media landscape, cetera, do you think, you know, AI, the tools are now detecting trends directly themselves and with limited
Steve Rubel (25:26.955)
.
@nevillehobson (25:56.847)
prompting, no, you don’t have to write a lengthy script to tell it what you want it to do for you. The predicting new cycles, what do you think about the effect on companies? What rethinking do organizations, including our profession, if you like, the approach to media relations, and indeed the whole notion of concept of thought leadership, what changes need to be front of mind there?
Steve Rubel (26:05.526)
Okay.
So first of all, I think that some of the uptake, what people may not appreciate is that some of the uptake, the reason why it’s jumped so much has been the acceleration of enterprise ready tools, whether it be ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini for Workspace or Claude having an enterprise ready tool. So I think the enterprise, some of the concerns in the beginning were
because the technology was nascent, but some of it also was because the tools weren’t really necessarily there to protect corporate information in the beginning, and there was a lot of concern about that. I think some of that, each day that goes away and there’s more more adoption of those tools. And so I think that’s part of what drove some of the uptake. In terms of…
So I guess you’re asking more about workflow, Neville, and like, how do you, you what does this mean for, you know, for corporations overall?
@nevillehobson (27:28.47)
Yeah, I would say because some of it can seem a little esoteric, I think, at times when we talk about patterns in data and the average communicator is looking at a report they got to do, or the pitch they got to prepare, or the workflow on their desk right now, how would this impact them and what do they need to do to do it?
Steve Rubel (27:35.922)
Yeah.
Steve Rubel (27:46.266)
So I think the most important thing is that, when people first start using these tools, there’s a hope that they can just be the oracle of everything. And go in and help me identify the 20 most important people who are writing about AI in public relations. Help me understand the storylines.
And I always tell people that the AI tools will always give you an answer. They won’t say, don’t know, right? If you try to get them to say they don’t know, sometimes that’s a fun exercise. They often will not say that they don’t know. They are programmed to give you an answer. And that’s extremely enchanting and also extremely deceiving. When I find where it works best,
is when you take something that you have, either something that you have collected on your own, in my case it’s data, or something that you have already an inventory of, whether it be PDFs or speeches from an executive or content from a website or a whole bunch of, it could be a large corpus of text or it could be something small, or it could be a pitch, a press release.
you know, a short term piece of content that you’re going to be creating. And when you bring that information into the AI tools and ask it to improve it and ask for prompts and ask it to, you know, get you to think of things that maybe you haven’t thought of asking. I think that’s a really important thing is to really not just go in with your own, you know, ideas on what you want to get out of it, but to be a little bit more open-ended.
and to bring it in and say, could you tell me about this? How can I improve this? right now, today, that’s all in the prompts. It’s just getting, which I’m sure you guys have talked about all the time, is getting the prompts right. In the future, that won’t be the case. I don’t know how long exactly, but whether it’s a year or two years or whatever it is, especially through agentic AI and things of that nature, it’s gonna start to understand and personalize.
Steve Rubel (30:02.947)
those requests for you and bring that to you. So I find that for the most part, the AI tools are best when you bring in your own lunch, so to speak. There are a couple of exceptions. I have been extremely impressed, and I’m gonna write about this on LinkedIn, with Google’s deep research. I think it’s called deep research.
Shel Holtz (30:29.173)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Rubel (30:29.348)
which has the same name as what ChatGPG just launched a couple of weeks ago, which I haven’t, I’m not paying for the pro version yet, so I’m not forking over $200 a month yet. But I have the plus version, but I’ll wait for that to come out. as I go out and I’ve been, no secret, I’ve been actively interviewing with agencies. And we talk about the agency business. I have been using Google Deep Research to prepare for interviews.
@nevillehobson (30:29.422)
you
@nevillehobson (30:38.478)
Thank
Steve Rubel (30:57.027)
And so I will say, am interviewing with such and such company, because I have to be honest, I haven’t really talked to other agencies for many years. I mean, and I’m going in and I’m meeting with the CEO of this agency or CEO of that agency, write a 3000 word report for me or whatever it is that helps me understand that agency’s priorities, their business, their culture, what the CEOs have been talking about. And I found that that stuff is extremely
extraordinarily useful and you know, and it’s and it’s worth the you know, the 10 or 20 bucks I think I I got some kind of deal that I’m paying for Google Gemini advanced to do that. And so I think there are situations like that where you can it can act as the Oracle where you go in and you ask an open-ended question and you get back research with a lot of links so you can go verify everything and you know, less risk of hallucinations. That’s one aspect of it.
But the whole other aspect of it is bringing in your existing assets, ideally in an enterprise protected environment, if you’re in an organization of any size, even if you’re not in a small slice firm too, you probably want to do that too. And begin to ask that questions and improvements on that piece of content. That’s where I think the power right now is today for the most part.
@nevillehobson (31:58.061)
Hmm.
Shel Holtz (32:21.145)
Well, Steve, it’s great having you with us. You may recall from your five previous appearances here that we always ask the same final question, which is what question didn’t we ask that you wish we had?
Steve Rubel (32:37.86)
Well, I don’t know if this is really more too wonky for you guys, but I think that just the nature of the agency business right now and where that’s at. so there, and I’m not sure how much you cover that, but the, know, there’s four major holding companies and, you know, two of them are larger, two of the largest ones are merging, you know, later this year. And so there’s going to be three holding companies. And so it’s going to be WPP,
it’s going to be Omnicom and PulvoSys. And then you have Edelman, which is a large independent and the largest. And then you have a whole array of smaller and mid-sized firms. And there’s questions overall about AI’s impact on the agency business. There’s a business model that is largely, yes, it’s retainer in some cases, but it’s often
it’s built around billable hours. Yes, those retainers are calculating against billable hours. And this is not just in public relations. It’s gonna be very important on the advertising side as well on the media buying side and so forth. It’s gonna be highly disruptive. AI is gonna be highly disruptive. So I would say that I am extremely bullish though about the future of the agencies because I think there’s still a absolute need for
shared expertise, whether it be, I mean, I saw the abundance of resources that I don’t have on any topic. could find anybody in the network who knew something about the most esoteric thing, they were there. And even in a mid-size firm, the same thing, you get that benefit. In a small firm too, because they tend to specialize. So I think that the agency business is gonna go through some serious disruptions with AI. The business model is gonna have to change, but the opportunity to…
to train and develop people and young people to me. I’m very excited about that in my next role. And so the things I’m looking at doing are, one is taking this media analytics approach and bringing it somewhere else and to really build on that with their expertise. Two is to really work as an innovation catalyst and help them really accelerate with their adoption and use of AI and not just generative, but overall, I would say augmented AI, if you will.
Steve Rubel (35:00.134)
And three is just to be a calm strategist. think that there’s never been a greater time in need for that given the chaos in the world right now, not just in the United States, but worldwide. So I think that the future of the agency business is bright and I’m looking at everything, but I’m excited to be staying and to be coaching and to stay in the agency world.
@nevillehobson (35:24.11)
terrific. So I’ve got a final question. That, yeah, yeah, it might seem an odd one, but there’s a kind of hit you in the the immediacy for a quick answer, which is, look back over the last 20 years since Micro Persuasion Days, since that Businessweek cover on blogs, from there to now, how would you sum up your journey in those 20 years?
Steve Rubel (35:27.086)
Sure. I mean, we could talk forever, I’m sure.
Steve Rubel (35:45.722)
my goodness. Less hair, does that count? I mean, I didn’t have a lot of hair then either. How would I sum up my journey in 20 years? Well.
@nevillehobson (35:55.791)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Shel Holtz (35:55.797)
Hmm
Steve Rubel (36:06.908)
I would say I’ve always been, my whole life, well, mean, for most of my life, I was always fascinated by two different things. I was fascinated by technology and I was fascinated by news and journalism. I was a journalism major. And then I became fascinated with public relations and the communications in the early 1990s. And so I’ve been just, those three, the Venn diagram of those three things has just fueled my entire career.
And the reason why I ended up in Business Week, which was incredibly fortunate and certainly catapulted me into an amazing role and introduced me to Richard Edelman and so forth, was because I just saw that I was reading blogs by people like Dave Weiner or Robert Scoble years ago. I said, know, or Docs for Alls. And these are all names that people may not know, but certainly you should read up on them. Oh, yeah, you guys know that for sure.
Shel Holtz (37:03.007)
We know.
Steve Rubel (37:05.74)
And I said, you know, this is unbelievable that these writers have their own voice, that they’re acting like journalists and not journalists. They work for corporations in some cases. And what’s going on here? And that’s scratched an itch. And I just started to mess around and that led to blogging and that led to, you know, becoming, you know, pretty well known in my industry at the time. And then, you know, I chased that later on with understanding shifts in the media business and just how sponsored content was coming in and really disrupting stuff.
So I was looking at, at, you know, native advertising and also brands becoming content creators and said, okay, what does that mean? And that scratched a niche to just know more and more and more about that. And then now it’s AI, right? And analytics. And look, I mean, I, I didn’t touch Excel for the first 30 years of my career. And I, know, two, two, three years ago, I sat by the, you know, by the pool and I, and I, you know, I read a book on how, and so I’m 55 years old. And so.
If I had to, so yes, it’s those three things, but if I had to sum it up is I have an insatiable curiosity. I am always trying to learn. I’m always nervous about what I don’t know. And I’m not expecting anybody to teach me. I’m expecting for me to just learn as much as I can through reading. And so I am constantly reading and trying new things just to stay at the edge of the trends.
and what’s happening and to anticipate what’s next. And so I think that where I, mean, those skills, which I think anybody can do have allowed me to really be good at understanding what I think is going to be next and what may not be, what might just be a fad.
Shel Holtz (38:46.825)
Sounds like great advice for anybody in this industry, For listeners who would like to read your writing and be in touch, how can they find you?
Steve Rubel (38:49.228)
It absolutely is critical today, yes.
Steve Rubel (38:58.146)
So I’m going be doing more. got time. And at least for the moment until I get scooped up, hopefully. I am going to be active on one and only one channel. That’s LinkedIn. And I mean, I might do some stuff on Blue Sky. You can follow me there. I mean, I haven’t posted anything yet. mean, I’ve engaged a couple of people on some sports stuff, but that’s it. And, you know, but I would say right now you could follow me on LinkedIn and I will be, you know, I’m going to be posting.
be doing different analyses there using the MockRack data. I’m going to be sharing tips and techniques on how to be more effective as a communicator and staying ahead of these technologies. And I’m open to ideas. But I just see the power of that channel. took it for granted. And I think that’s where I’m going to be doing things. It’s linkedin.com slash en slash steve.
Shel Holtz (39:51.487)
Great. Well, Steve, thanks very much for your time. It’s been great.
Steve Rubel (39:53.921)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
@nevillehobson (39:54.329)
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
The post Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.
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For nearly 20 years, Steve Rubel was a key figure at the global public relations and marketing consultancy firm Edelman, shaping its approach to media strategy and digital communication. A pioneer in blogging and digital PR from the early 2000s, Steve has long been at the forefront of emerging media trends, helping businesses navigate the ever-evolving landscape of content, journalism, and corporate communication.
In December 2024, Steve’s journey at Edelman came to an unexpected close when he was affected by a reduction in force at the agency. He has embraced the transition as an opportunity to reconnect with industry peers, reflect on the broader PR profession, and explore his next chapter. His announcement on LinkedIn in December drew an overwhelming response, reinforcing the deep connections he has built throughout his career.
Now, Steve is focused on one of the most untapped opportunities in communications: using AI and analytics to uncover hidden patterns in media. He believes that by leveraging these insights, PR professionals can craft smarter, more mediagenic narratives, improve media engagement, and redefine the future of thought leadership.
He plans to help agencies adopt AI-powered media analytics and drive innovation in communication. His advice for PR professionals: stay curious, experiment with AI tools, and learn how to extract real value from data.
In this FIR Interview, Steve joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz – for the fifth time in an FIR Interview – to discuss the role of AI in modern communication, how data-driven storytelling is transforming PR, and why agencies must adapt to survive in an AI-driven industry.
About Our Conversation Partner
Steve Rubel is a media analyst, innovation catalyst, and communications strategist with a proven track record of identifying emerging trends and delivering actionable insights to help organizations thrive in the dynamic media landscape.
Over a 19-year tenure at Edelman, he advised hundreds of global corporations and nonprofits, shaping strategies that drove meaningful impact. Beyond providing strategic counsel, he played a key role in advancing Edelman’s competitive edge by championing innovative capabilities, accelerating the adoption of new services, and positioning the firm as a leading authority on media.
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Verbatim Transcript
@nevillehobson (00:02.766)
Hi everyone and welcome to this FIR interview. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.
Steve Rubel (00:03.279)
you
Shel Holtz (00:09.072)
And I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California, and we have a very special guest with us today. Steve Rubel is joining us. Steve is one of our more regular guests on FIR Interviews, having appeared as we counted five times, the last one in 2013. So it has been a while. Welcome, Steve. It’s great to see you.
Steve Rubel (00:31.692)
Thank you, it’s an honor to be part of the Five Timers Club. So that’s an SNL reference for those who may not know.
Shel Holtz (00:34.998)
It is, the jacket’s in the mail.
I asked ChatGPT to tell me about you, Steve. Just curious to see how accurate it would be and where it would focus. So I’m going to read these three paragraphs and you can let us know how ChatGPT did on this. says, Steve Rubel is a prominent public relations executive and professional blogger known for his expertise in media trends, digital culture and content strategy. He has held significant roles at Edelman.
the world’s largest public relations firm, including serving as chief content strategist. In this capacity, Rubel has been responsible for advancing Edelman’s thinking on the evolving media ecosystem and helping clients develop innovative programs that blend paid, owned, and earned media. Throughout his career, Rubel has been a thought leader on the future of media consumption, advising clients such as Adobe, Starbucks, Samsung, and GE. He has emphasized the importance of companies operating in real time, like media organizations,
leveraging technology to create compelling content and synchronize communications across various channels. In recent years, Rubell has focused on the potential of analytics and artificial intelligence to uncover hidden patterns within the media landscape. He believes that these insights can benefit communications professionals, the organizations they represent, and the press. By analyzing untapped data, companies can craft more compelling and mediogenic narrative platforms, develop content strategies,
Steve Rubel (01:55.15)
Amazingly accurate, maybe a little over the top in the flattery. And I would say just the one part that was wrong.
Shel Holtz (02:08.231)
and established thought leadership. So Steve, how’d Chachipiti do?
@nevillehobson (02:19.726)
Thanks for watching!
Steve Rubel (02:21.696)
He says that it was a prolific blogger. am a prolific blogger. I mean, it’s not true anymore. I was for many years, but not recently, but certainly at one time. At one time I was.
Shel Holtz (02:30.867)
Yeah, Yeah, media persuasion was a very influential blog in this day. Micro persuasion.
@nevillehobson (02:33.676)
Yeah.
Steve Rubel (02:35.822)
Well, micro persuasion and then later and then later for the later for adage and so forth. Yeah.
@nevillehobson (02:38.51)
Yeah. That was that was the the start of things back in those early days 2005 2004. Yeah. So in December, you wrote a post that really caught my eye like Whoa, on LinkedIn, announcing that you were leaving Edelman. And that you’ve been there nearly 19 years.
Steve Rubel (02:45.454)
Oh yeah, a long time ago.
Steve Rubel (02:57.682)
@nevillehobson (03:04.526)
And you’ve received, I left a comment I know you did as well, Shell, but you’ve had like 200, nearly 300 comments from people on that post. It’s quite extraordinary outpouring of well-being, I think, and warmth all around. So that’s two months ago, and here we are having this conversation. I’m just curious, as Shell is, we both are really, what’s your journey now and leaving after 19 years?
How was that? So, you know, what’s happening?
Steve Rubel (03:37.381)
Yeah, well, mean, first of all, I just want to say, just, you know, put a flag here that just it was a remarkable privilege to work for such a quality organization for for almost 20 years. And so I have nothing but love and respect for the Elman family.
I was caught in a reduction in force that they made in the beginning of December. it was just shocking and disappointing, just it’s a business decision. And so I don’t in any way take it personally. like I said, I’m just grateful for every minute that I got to spend there. As you guys may or may not know, I was…
I was very vocal and active online for many years and then about six, seven years ago, kind of a deliberate decision to step back and to really focus much more on element client work and teams. There’s no story behind it. I just kind of got tired of it and wanted to really do something different. I’m of the belief that the internet has a short memory.
I put that up just to have something on the record, just to say that I wasn’t there anymore. And I was really blown away just by how people just were responding to that post, but also just the outreach I got. had people contact me from 30 years ago I worked with, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago. It was staggering. And from all ways, from LinkedIn, from email, from text messages and so forth.
And that was something I totally did not expect at all. I just really wasn’t, I wasn’t ready for that. So I took some time and I said, okay, look, I’m going to use this time to just catch up with people because that’s something I really hadn’t done in the last few years. And so I just said, I’m going to book myself silly. I’m going to have one to three Zooms a day with people just to catch up and see what they’re doing.
Steve Rubel (05:50.502)
to kind of poke my head above ground and really kind of get a better understanding of the profession and where the profession’s at beyond Edelman because as great as Edelman is, it’s one view. And I really wanted to have a little bit of a broader perspective. So I took the time to do that. And then I took the time to also think about kind of what I want to do next, which we can talk about. And then
Just to kind of, I mean, I had no infrastructure. mean, just to give you an idea of how, where did I was and planning to stay with Edelman for the run. I had no CV, had no, my LinkedIn was completely out of date. It was a mishmash of stuff. So I had to take time to go through the process of just emotionally and mentally coping with a layoff. And the community was just incredible.
in helping me do that. And then also just had to kind of start to think about what’s next and which we can get into. so, and it was just, in their case, it was just a business decision and I have nothing but respect for them.
Shel Holtz (07:04.457)
Well, let’s talk about this issue that you’ve embraced, I guess, later in your career at Edelman and since then you’ve been doing more than just holding Zoom sessions because we know that you did a session for Muckrack on this topic of analytics and AI and their ability to transform the way communications professionals understand and engage with the media landscape. Can you elaborate on that? Because
Certainly most of the people in PR and communications that I talk to about generative AI are trying to figure out how to write with it.
Steve Rubel (07:40.26)
So this is just absolutely what I’m most excited about today, So where I am in my AI journey was at, know, so ChatGPT launched in November of 22. I didn’t sign up at first because I was a little thrown off by the fact that the only way you could sign up was by giving your cell phone number. And I, you know, it was a little…
And they were an unknown company at the time. so I, you know, you know, by some measures. And so I kind of felt weird about that. And I was like, and I viewed it as a, as a search tool, which I think I honestly, in my, know, I spent two years in Edelman’s AI task force working with and working with Edelman’s own media team on helping to kind of accelerate their use of, of, of AI. And I saw that a lot of people like me used it that way. And, you know, we had in the
@nevillehobson (08:25.07)
You
Steve Rubel (08:37.091)
The winter of 23, we had a freezing cold week here in New York. And I got a text message over the weekend from a colleague saying, hey, have you thought about using AI and what you do with analytics? And which I had been already doing for a couple of years at that point. And I said, hmm, no, I hadn’t thought of that. And so it was freezing. I didn’t want to go out. It was like 10 degrees Fahrenheit here or whatever it was. And so I stayed in the whole weekend and just started to…
try different things. And I was like, wow, this and everyone has one of those moments I think was used one of these tools, but wow, this is such a powerful tool for helping me understand patterns in the media environment. So here’s what I do. I pulled down massive amounts of metadata out of MuckRack. know, the MuckRack, know, full disclosure, I got a license to MuckRack in exchange for some, you know,
some promotional work, basically writing on LinkedIn with their content. So just full disclosure on that. it’s not a paid relationship per se. The data, though, I’ve just become a fan. I’ve known Greg Gellant for a million years. He’s the CEO. But the data is so rich. And I started to pull down the data out of MuckRack, the article data and the metadata, and began to use a whole bunch of different AI tools.
analyze it. And what I found was, know, are, know, earned media remains the bedrock of PR. I mean, PR has, you know, and communications as you both know and have chronicled, has become so much more multifaceted now. It’s so much more diversified. It’s so many different types of activities. But
earned media remains the bedrock of it. I mean, I find, you know, it’s often the starting point for a lot of client relationships that extend out in other ways. And, you know, everyone is challenged with trying to break through in this environment because it’s just, you know, it’s getting, first of all, less reporters, less outlets in some cases, you know, a lot of topics that are just, you know, high volume and drying out the news environment, know.
Steve Rubel (10:57.759)
big rocks, you will, whether it be Trump or sustainability or DEI or whatever, pop culture. I there’s just so many different things that the media is writing about that often the aperture for clients can be narrow. And that’s evergreen problem. And so I, in the last several years of Edelman and now on my own, as to stay fresh as I explore different opportunities, is I’ve just seen that you can…
@nevillehobson (11:05.644)
Hmm.
Steve Rubel (11:25.887)
Take that data and you can bring it into AI and manipulate it and really understand patterns such as to really kind of quantify, for example, what are the themes that a particular writer is writing about, an outlet is writing about, an index of outlets or around a topic. So you could take a topic like for AI, for example, pull down thousands of stories, not the full text, but the metadata and use the AI tools to manipulate that to really understand the patterns.
and then compare different quarters and different periods. So you can start to understand where a story is going or a single reporter to understand where that particular reporter is going. And what I found is not only is that useful for nuts and bolts kind of, know, brass tacks, earned media applications, but so many companies, you know, want to develop executive visibility programs or thought leadership programs or narratives that are consistent
with the media environment and Mediagenic. And when you look at that data set and use AI to manipulate that, that stuff gets to be so powerful because in theory, it’s a triple win. It’s a win for your stakeholder, whether that’s an internal stakeholder or a client. It’s a win for the press because you’re creating a better story that’s consistent with what they’re writing about on the mark, which has long been a complaint of theirs.
And it serves you because you’re going to be much more successful. And so I am just so bullish on the use of AI and analytics to understand the media environment at a very granular or a very wide aperture. And I find that this is completely untapped in the industry right now, completely untapped. And it has the potential if applied at scale.
to be incredibly useful, probably more so on the agency level, but certainly on the corporate level as well.
@nevillehobson (13:30.782)
That’s very interesting. It makes me think that the broad topic of AI is featured in every episode of our podcast for at least a year and half, literally. And new angles are emerging every time we have a conversation. This is the latest one. And I’m reminded, Steve, actually, the interview we did prior to talking to you today with Sylvia Camby a couple of weeks back that was published last week, she talked about
this very topic, finding patterns. She talked about the kind of move from beyond generative AI to what she calls curation AI. And she talks a bit about how AI can provide communicators with better insights, deeper insights, and how messages are received and acted upon. She reckons that communicators who’ve worked with enterprise social networks like Yammer and so forth back in the day have very transferable skills as a result of that.
So it got me just to direct, I guess, the question that arises in my mind. If, and I’ve heard listening to what you’re saying, if AI driven analytics reveal the hidden patterns in media landscape, what, what do you think are the biggest opportunities for communicators generally? And I’m wondering what they need to shift to kind of get a handle on this is something you absolutely need to pay attention to. And so how do you think this shifts the role of PR pros and shaping narratives?
Steve Rubel (15:00.11)
Hugely. so, I mean, the inspiration for this, I mean, started for me during the lockdowns of the pandemic, when my role changed, just the nature of just the way, you know, the travel stopped and so forth. And I’ve just been, I think you both know that I’m
and forgive me here for the Europeans, but I’m a huge sports fan, particularly a baseball fan. And we’re not getting too wonky there. You know, I’ve just been fascinated how analytics have come around and revolutionized any sport, whether it be football, know, NFL football, know, soccer, football, you know, baseball, golf, tennis, you name it. I’ve completely revolutionized it because teams or individuals understand
the statistics and the analytics about how their opponents behave. The media is not our opponent, but the media is certainly a gatekeeper. And so one of the things that I think is most powerful here, so I just looked at that and said, what did they do that we could be applying in our world? And one of the things that I think about with the press is that
They’re really good at writing about analyzing and writing about the problems in a particular, know, or what I would call the critical issues in a particular field. know, one of the critical issues around AI, one of the critical issues around DEI, mean, you and those are changing every week, every day. And it may not be, you know, the entire totality of what they write about around that topic. They’re writing about the solutions as well.
But I find that if you are able to identify and quantify the patterns in the critical issues, what are the problems that they are writing about regularly? And you can position your organization, your solution, your intellectual property as solutions to those particular issues. Or you have a point of view or some way of bringing something
Steve Rubel (17:14.974)
some more perspective around those issues. And those issues are written about at scale. You’re going to be way more successful because you are, you’re not, you know, so much of, of earned media for the 35 years I’ve been in this business is trial and error. It’s knocking on doors. mean, it’s relationships, it’s understanding people, but it’s a lot of trial and error. It’s a lot of waste. It’s necessary waste.
but it’s waste. How do we reduce that? How do we reduce that? Well, I mean, that’s where if you use the analytics to quantify and the AI is useful because it’s able to read huge volumes of information and statistically make patterns out of this. And I’ve mastered the prompts required and the different tools required to do that. But I think that has a transformation in helping us.
in communications. And even if your output is not media, your output is social media, your output is content for your website or LinkedIn or whatever it is. There’s a lot of work done in social listening to understand what people are talking about online. There’s a lot of great tools for that that are advancing every day, but there’s not a lot of work being done to look at what’s going on in the quote unquote professional content creator community and what working journalists are doing.
and using that signal set in addition to the others to helping to really shape content strategies. And so I just think that that is just absolute, probably one of the biggest opportunities with AI right now for communications professionals. Maybe not the biggest, but one of them for sure.
Shel Holtz (19:01.973)
Steve, pictures and catchers report tomorrow.
Steve Rubel (19:05.614)
I’m going, I’m going, I can’t wait.
@nevillehobson (19:08.142)
You
Shel Holtz (19:09.845)
You gave some great examples of how analytics can shape a pitch, for example, to a journalist. I think what a lot of people are going to be inclined to do is what you have recommended. And then the next step would be to have the AI produce the pitch. And there are a lot of people out there who are talking about AI slop. Chris Penn talks about it.
Jeff Livingston, Greg Verdino. It’s a real prominent topic right now that the internet is being overtaken, overwhelmed by AI generated content. How can organizations balance the use of data-driven insights with that need for having a human in the loop? And what are the ethical considerations around?
Steve Rubel (20:03.065)
Yep. So I don’t think there’s any ethical concerns about the analytics in helping you form the strategies. The ethical concerns are in the content generation after that.
Shel Holtz (20:05.877)
leveraging AI and analytics in developing these strategies.
Steve Rubel (20:21.584)
I don’t think there’s any kind of ethical concerns necessarily around using AI to analyze mass quantities of data unless I’m missing something. But on pitching side of things, I think you can’t let the AI take away your humanity. look, mean, sorry, another baseball metaphor, but it still requires, no amount of statistics is going to substitute for talent.
And Aaron Judge has to go up and hit a baseball. Yes. Yes. You missed the big one in the World Series, but that’s another story. so the talent and the expertise and the humanity is still absolutely necessary. Knowing journalists, having relationships, building those relationships, none of that goes away.
Shel Holtz (20:54.773)
has to catch one too.
Steve Rubel (21:18.394)
So to me, it’s use the analytics and the insights, which I would generate for teams. And then they would then, and with prescriptive advice on what to do with it, I still think you have to write your pitch the same way you always write your pitch. You might take a line here or there, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. I think the way to do it is to write your pitch in your own voice, the way you’ve always have done it because it’s worked for a long time, in some cases, whether it’s five years or 20 years or whatever it is.
Even if you’re new to this, it’s a year. It’s your own humanity and building those relationships are still absolutely necessary. But then I think, you know, taking the pitch and bringing it into an AI tool, whether that be Microsoft Copilot or, you know, chat GPT, or I’ve actually been using the writing tools built into the Apple intelligence writing tools that are built into the iOS and the Mac, not for pitches, but just, for
emails I’m writing and so forth. And just having it, you know, clean up, strengthen it. One of the things I like to do, for example, is to use the AI to improve the subject lines. Because I will bring in the pitch, you know, or would recommend to teams that they bring in the pitch into an AI tool and ask it based on email marketing best practices. How would you tailor my subject line, which I’ve already provided to make it stronger? Right?
And look, you might look at that and you’re going to say, it’s too much written like an e-commerce email. But you might pick up a trick or two that maybe there’s a word ordering where you move one word up, so it’s a little bit earlier in the preview, or some sort of optimization that augments what you do. So I think the use of AI to augment, to take your work from a five or a six to a seven or an eight, which I did with the analytics.
three years ago, definitely took my work, not to a 10, but certainly took it from, I would say from a six to an eight. And the same thing applies. And I think that to me is the opportunity with teaching teams how to do that. And to do that, so, I think you could, depending on the size of your organization, you could do that at a corporate or team level, but it works best in an individual level where you sit down with one or two or three people.
@nevillehobson (23:22.766)
you
Steve Rubel (23:44.545)
And I did this at Edelman and say, what do you do all day? And to then provide expertise and advice on how to use the AI to augment that work to make it even stronger.
@nevillehobson (24:03.406)
interesting. think we talked recently, Shailena, in I think our monthly episode, the last one we did, the long four-monthly one, about the evolution of generative AI within the profession, in the PR profession, where surveys are showing that take-up and use is in the 70-plus, 80-plus percent. The days are gone, I think, when we saw a couple of years back a survey that where a quarter of those surveyed.
Steve Rubel (24:20.301)
.
@nevillehobson (24:30.476)
said they would never ever under any circumstances use artificial intelligence to PR work. That’s vanished, thankfully. Common sense has really prevailed, but people have, I think, acquired a better understanding of some of these tools. And what you’ve explained there, what you mentioned there, Steve, is something that I see happening. I do it myself. AI like chat GPT, Microsoft co-pilots, all the ones that we know of, are great at research.
So I tend to regard them as my research assistants, the same for search as well. Providing the skill, if you will, to do, to trawl through and make sense of huge amounts of data, structured and unstructured, doesn’t matter, and present you the results. Your job is still to make sure it’s accurate. And that’s a whole different, I think, conversation that we probably still need to have because…
I see this coming up a lot in conferences that I have with people that you can get all this input and great, you write your report. No, you’ve got to sift it. You’ve got to understand it yourself. So in the context of this latest idea of revealing hidden patterns in the media landscape, cetera, do you think, you know, AI, the tools are now detecting trends directly themselves and with limited
Steve Rubel (25:26.955)
.
@nevillehobson (25:56.847)
prompting, no, you don’t have to write a lengthy script to tell it what you want it to do for you. The predicting new cycles, what do you think about the effect on companies? What rethinking do organizations, including our profession, if you like, the approach to media relations, and indeed the whole notion of concept of thought leadership, what changes need to be front of mind there?
Steve Rubel (26:05.526)
Okay.
So first of all, I think that some of the uptake, what people may not appreciate is that some of the uptake, the reason why it’s jumped so much has been the acceleration of enterprise ready tools, whether it be ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini for Workspace or Claude having an enterprise ready tool. So I think the enterprise, some of the concerns in the beginning were
because the technology was nascent, but some of it also was because the tools weren’t really necessarily there to protect corporate information in the beginning, and there was a lot of concern about that. I think some of that, each day that goes away and there’s more more adoption of those tools. And so I think that’s part of what drove some of the uptake. In terms of…
So I guess you’re asking more about workflow, Neville, and like, how do you, you what does this mean for, you know, for corporations overall?
@nevillehobson (27:28.47)
Yeah, I would say because some of it can seem a little esoteric, I think, at times when we talk about patterns in data and the average communicator is looking at a report they got to do, or the pitch they got to prepare, or the workflow on their desk right now, how would this impact them and what do they need to do to do it?
Steve Rubel (27:35.922)
Yeah.
Steve Rubel (27:46.266)
So I think the most important thing is that, when people first start using these tools, there’s a hope that they can just be the oracle of everything. And go in and help me identify the 20 most important people who are writing about AI in public relations. Help me understand the storylines.
And I always tell people that the AI tools will always give you an answer. They won’t say, don’t know, right? If you try to get them to say they don’t know, sometimes that’s a fun exercise. They often will not say that they don’t know. They are programmed to give you an answer. And that’s extremely enchanting and also extremely deceiving. When I find where it works best,
is when you take something that you have, either something that you have collected on your own, in my case it’s data, or something that you have already an inventory of, whether it be PDFs or speeches from an executive or content from a website or a whole bunch of, it could be a large corpus of text or it could be something small, or it could be a pitch, a press release.
you know, a short term piece of content that you’re going to be creating. And when you bring that information into the AI tools and ask it to improve it and ask for prompts and ask it to, you know, get you to think of things that maybe you haven’t thought of asking. I think that’s a really important thing is to really not just go in with your own, you know, ideas on what you want to get out of it, but to be a little bit more open-ended.
and to bring it in and say, could you tell me about this? How can I improve this? right now, today, that’s all in the prompts. It’s just getting, which I’m sure you guys have talked about all the time, is getting the prompts right. In the future, that won’t be the case. I don’t know how long exactly, but whether it’s a year or two years or whatever it is, especially through agentic AI and things of that nature, it’s gonna start to understand and personalize.
Steve Rubel (30:02.947)
those requests for you and bring that to you. So I find that for the most part, the AI tools are best when you bring in your own lunch, so to speak. There are a couple of exceptions. I have been extremely impressed, and I’m gonna write about this on LinkedIn, with Google’s deep research. I think it’s called deep research.
Shel Holtz (30:29.173)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Rubel (30:29.348)
which has the same name as what ChatGPG just launched a couple of weeks ago, which I haven’t, I’m not paying for the pro version yet, so I’m not forking over $200 a month yet. But I have the plus version, but I’ll wait for that to come out. as I go out and I’ve been, no secret, I’ve been actively interviewing with agencies. And we talk about the agency business. I have been using Google Deep Research to prepare for interviews.
@nevillehobson (30:29.422)
you
@nevillehobson (30:38.478)
Thank
Steve Rubel (30:57.027)
And so I will say, am interviewing with such and such company, because I have to be honest, I haven’t really talked to other agencies for many years. I mean, and I’m going in and I’m meeting with the CEO of this agency or CEO of that agency, write a 3000 word report for me or whatever it is that helps me understand that agency’s priorities, their business, their culture, what the CEOs have been talking about. And I found that that stuff is extremely
extraordinarily useful and you know, and it’s and it’s worth the you know, the 10 or 20 bucks I think I I got some kind of deal that I’m paying for Google Gemini advanced to do that. And so I think there are situations like that where you can it can act as the Oracle where you go in and you ask an open-ended question and you get back research with a lot of links so you can go verify everything and you know, less risk of hallucinations. That’s one aspect of it.
But the whole other aspect of it is bringing in your existing assets, ideally in an enterprise protected environment, if you’re in an organization of any size, even if you’re not in a small slice firm too, you probably want to do that too. And begin to ask that questions and improvements on that piece of content. That’s where I think the power right now is today for the most part.
@nevillehobson (31:58.061)
Hmm.
Shel Holtz (32:21.145)
Well, Steve, it’s great having you with us. You may recall from your five previous appearances here that we always ask the same final question, which is what question didn’t we ask that you wish we had?
Steve Rubel (32:37.86)
Well, I don’t know if this is really more too wonky for you guys, but I think that just the nature of the agency business right now and where that’s at. so there, and I’m not sure how much you cover that, but the, know, there’s four major holding companies and, you know, two of them are larger, two of the largest ones are merging, you know, later this year. And so there’s going to be three holding companies. And so it’s going to be WPP,
it’s going to be Omnicom and PulvoSys. And then you have Edelman, which is a large independent and the largest. And then you have a whole array of smaller and mid-sized firms. And there’s questions overall about AI’s impact on the agency business. There’s a business model that is largely, yes, it’s retainer in some cases, but it’s often
it’s built around billable hours. Yes, those retainers are calculating against billable hours. And this is not just in public relations. It’s gonna be very important on the advertising side as well on the media buying side and so forth. It’s gonna be highly disruptive. AI is gonna be highly disruptive. So I would say that I am extremely bullish though about the future of the agencies because I think there’s still a absolute need for
shared expertise, whether it be, I mean, I saw the abundance of resources that I don’t have on any topic. could find anybody in the network who knew something about the most esoteric thing, they were there. And even in a mid-size firm, the same thing, you get that benefit. In a small firm too, because they tend to specialize. So I think that the agency business is gonna go through some serious disruptions with AI. The business model is gonna have to change, but the opportunity to…
to train and develop people and young people to me. I’m very excited about that in my next role. And so the things I’m looking at doing are, one is taking this media analytics approach and bringing it somewhere else and to really build on that with their expertise. Two is to really work as an innovation catalyst and help them really accelerate with their adoption and use of AI and not just generative, but overall, I would say augmented AI, if you will.
Steve Rubel (35:00.134)
And three is just to be a calm strategist. think that there’s never been a greater time in need for that given the chaos in the world right now, not just in the United States, but worldwide. So I think that the future of the agency business is bright and I’m looking at everything, but I’m excited to be staying and to be coaching and to stay in the agency world.
@nevillehobson (35:24.11)
terrific. So I’ve got a final question. That, yeah, yeah, it might seem an odd one, but there’s a kind of hit you in the the immediacy for a quick answer, which is, look back over the last 20 years since Micro Persuasion Days, since that Businessweek cover on blogs, from there to now, how would you sum up your journey in those 20 years?
Steve Rubel (35:27.086)
Sure. I mean, we could talk forever, I’m sure.
Steve Rubel (35:45.722)
my goodness. Less hair, does that count? I mean, I didn’t have a lot of hair then either. How would I sum up my journey in 20 years? Well.
@nevillehobson (35:55.791)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Shel Holtz (35:55.797)
Hmm
Steve Rubel (36:06.908)
I would say I’ve always been, my whole life, well, mean, for most of my life, I was always fascinated by two different things. I was fascinated by technology and I was fascinated by news and journalism. I was a journalism major. And then I became fascinated with public relations and the communications in the early 1990s. And so I’ve been just, those three, the Venn diagram of those three things has just fueled my entire career.
And the reason why I ended up in Business Week, which was incredibly fortunate and certainly catapulted me into an amazing role and introduced me to Richard Edelman and so forth, was because I just saw that I was reading blogs by people like Dave Weiner or Robert Scoble years ago. I said, know, or Docs for Alls. And these are all names that people may not know, but certainly you should read up on them. Oh, yeah, you guys know that for sure.
Shel Holtz (37:03.007)
We know.
Steve Rubel (37:05.74)
And I said, you know, this is unbelievable that these writers have their own voice, that they’re acting like journalists and not journalists. They work for corporations in some cases. And what’s going on here? And that’s scratched an itch. And I just started to mess around and that led to blogging and that led to, you know, becoming, you know, pretty well known in my industry at the time. And then, you know, I chased that later on with understanding shifts in the media business and just how sponsored content was coming in and really disrupting stuff.
So I was looking at, at, you know, native advertising and also brands becoming content creators and said, okay, what does that mean? And that scratched a niche to just know more and more and more about that. And then now it’s AI, right? And analytics. And look, I mean, I, I didn’t touch Excel for the first 30 years of my career. And I, know, two, two, three years ago, I sat by the, you know, by the pool and I, and I, you know, I read a book on how, and so I’m 55 years old. And so.
If I had to, so yes, it’s those three things, but if I had to sum it up is I have an insatiable curiosity. I am always trying to learn. I’m always nervous about what I don’t know. And I’m not expecting anybody to teach me. I’m expecting for me to just learn as much as I can through reading. And so I am constantly reading and trying new things just to stay at the edge of the trends.
and what’s happening and to anticipate what’s next. And so I think that where I, mean, those skills, which I think anybody can do have allowed me to really be good at understanding what I think is going to be next and what may not be, what might just be a fad.
Shel Holtz (38:46.825)
Sounds like great advice for anybody in this industry, For listeners who would like to read your writing and be in touch, how can they find you?
Steve Rubel (38:49.228)
It absolutely is critical today, yes.
Steve Rubel (38:58.146)
So I’m going be doing more. got time. And at least for the moment until I get scooped up, hopefully. I am going to be active on one and only one channel. That’s LinkedIn. And I mean, I might do some stuff on Blue Sky. You can follow me there. I mean, I haven’t posted anything yet. mean, I’ve engaged a couple of people on some sports stuff, but that’s it. And, you know, but I would say right now you could follow me on LinkedIn and I will be, you know, I’m going to be posting.
be doing different analyses there using the MockRack data. I’m going to be sharing tips and techniques on how to be more effective as a communicator and staying ahead of these technologies. And I’m open to ideas. But I just see the power of that channel. took it for granted. And I think that’s where I’m going to be doing things. It’s linkedin.com slash en slash steve.
Shel Holtz (39:51.487)
Great. Well, Steve, thanks very much for your time. It’s been great.
Steve Rubel (39:53.921)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
@nevillehobson (39:54.329)
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
The post Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.