A Bold Call to Embrace Technology and Avoid Falling Behind in Communications
The future of technology in the communications industry is a subject that demands insight from the best minds in the field, and few are as qualified as Larry Weber. As Chairman and CEO of Racepoint Global, recently ranked second in the Top 10 PR Rankings, Weber has not only shaped the industry's trajectory but also defined its benchmarks for success, having led the Weber Group to become the world’s top technology agency and Weber Shandwick to a period as the largest PR firm globally. In a candid interview with Simon Erskine Locke, Founder and CEO of CommunicationsMatch™, Weber shared his expertise, optimism, and forward-thinking vision exclusively with the CommPRO audience.
Having worked for more than 40 years with technology leaders, written multiple books, the latest of which, A New Age of Reason: Harnessing the Power of Technology for Good, Weber provided valuable insights and perspective for corporate communications and agency leaders around the adoption of technology to drive outcomes, as well as the more nuanced issue of how it should be implemented.
Dive in and embrace communications technology
It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that technology in communications was the typewriter, fax machine and phone notes Weber. With the personal computer and the internet, the communications industry started to really understand the power of using technology to reach audiences and effectively to tell stories. Generative AI is now helping us to more quickly access data and generate content. Weber states, “AI’s only going to get better and more sophisticated.”
His advice: It’s important for agencies and communicators to dive into new technologies and learn about the companies applying them in communications applications. “It’s important that we embrace them. It’s only going to make craft more skillful and impactful.”
How to ensure new technologies will advance the practice of communications
Both corporate communicators and agencies are in the business of telling powerful narrative stories to influence audiences and opinion to create a powerful connection that produces a vote or purchase. Weber highlights the value of using technology to refine narratives and tell stories. Using technology will go “a long way to make sure companies will get the results they want for their brands and agencies want for their clients.”
He also clearly sees the benefits of generative and predictive AI to better understand the potential outcomes of messages, as well as autonomous AI that is able to learn to manage future campaigns, make them more focused and targeted.
Ethics, morality, and the soul of a company
“I’ve always believed that companies have a soul,” Weber shared, noting there have been detractors to his view. The role of the company is more than simply to make money for shareholders, but to do good for the planet, and to do good for issues society is facing. He argues communicators have a responsibility to engage with the C-suite on the importance of managing businesses in an ethical and moral way.
It's particularly important when you use technologies in communications to make sure there is data integrity in everything we do - that means data “that’s gone through a veracity filter of some kind, we’ve tested it with audiences, and have guard rails.”
He notes governments are not going to be able to govern the proper and ethical use of technologies, so there is an opportunity for communications leaders to collaborate to ensure technologies are used ethically. To this point, he believes we will soon see more chief ethics officers.
“There is a generation of human beings that truly want corporations to be moral to wake up everyday and say we want to make money for our shareholders, but we also want to do it in a way that is morally and ethically sound, so we are helping address problems that society faces in in increasingly complex world.”
Artificial intelligence will disappear into the background, but will need human oversight
Weber delights in being provocative when it comes to AI. On the one hand he sees it as the largest plagiarist we have ever seen and notes that it is not really creating anything of its own right. He points out that it’s going to have to be used adjacently with people. Human beings are going to have to monitor it and use it in ways that leverage what it is good at - getting data, managing campaigns and generating content faster.
He sees it as a powerful ingredient in the communications and marketing mix. “Eventually we will not be talking about it.” He uses the analogy of going to a fine restaurant. Nobody says wow, I wonder what yeast is in this bread, it’s the great bread we will focus on.
“Andy Groove used to say the greatest technologies disappear,” he adds. The idea is that we don’t even know what’s going on in the background, it’s all about completing the task at hand.
As technology continues to evolve we need to know when and how to apply it to communications challenges
Weber shares that over more than 40 years one of the powerful lessons from leaders like Sir Tim Berners Lee and Steve Jobs is that technology evolves, it does not just appear. Alan Turing was playing around with AI in the 1940’s. “We need to be students of technology, so we know when the time is right to apply it to communications objectives and use it to impact what we are trying to accomplish, especially in earned media PR world.
By combining technology with our communications thinking, narrative designs, and storytelling, the industry is developing amazing products that achieve communications goals. Embracing powerful technologies like AI holds tremendous promise for the future of the industry.
Racepoint Global ranks second among the top 10 U.S. PR agencies.
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