In this episode of "Explain it to a Teenager” from Cannes Lions 2024, Rio Damata delves into the evolving world of public relations and marketing with Jason Brandt, Chief Marketing Officer of PRophet. Jason shares his insights on the transformative role of AI in PR and marketing, the diverse opportunities in the field, and the innovative spirit that drives Stagwell Marketing Cloud's success.

Rio Damata:So, what's your name? What do you do?

Jason Brandt: Yeah, so I'm Jason Brandt, I'm CMO of a company called PRophet. We're part of a company called Stagwell, and within that, Stagwell Marketing Cloud has a bunch of software products. And I'm the CMO of a group of products. One product is for PR professionals. A second product is to find influencers and content creators online. And the third product is for monitoring stories and getting alerts on your brand or competition.

Rio Damata: So, what is Stagwell? How does that relate to Stagwell?

Jason Brandt: Stagwell is what's called an advertising holding company. And it's got a bunch of creative agencies, media agencies, and data agencies underneath it, much like many other holding companies. We like to think of ourselves as a challenger agency network because of the types of companies we have. We're very data-oriented, very focused on technology. And yes, we tell stories, and we're very, very creative as well, and we really start from the data and technology perspective. Half the business is about full service; the other part is self-service. So, my company or my part of the company focuses on tools that marketers can use on their own, rather than relying on an agency necessarily to fulfill certain creative needs.

Rio Damata: And then when you said data and technology, I'm wondering, does AI play any part in that?

Jason Brandt: Yeah, I mean, more and more every single day, our products are basically AI-driven products. One product, in particular, is for someone at a brand or an agency in charge of PR. If you have to have your story told to journalists, who will then publish that story in their publication, our tool uses AI to help actually craft the story or the pitch to the journalist by just putting in 20 words. Based on that pitch, it will predict the journalists that will be interested in your story, based on the last three months of what everybody's writing about. So, millions of articles are analyzed against that pitch that you write, and we extract a list of journalists that you can contact and sell your story to. It's so AI-driven that it doesn’t exist without AI.

Our influencer platform is very similar in that it finds influencers who are best suited to tell your brand story through TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram. From there, it helps you brief that creator, set a contract with that creator, and figure out a way to handle all the comments made on the content that creator creates. It can tell you if those comments from the audience are positive or negative, so you can decide what you want to do with that creative as a result of that.

Rio Damata: And then one last thing, what's your advice to someone who might want to pursue that field?

Jason Brandt: Yeah, you know, look, there are tons of roles. If you want to pursue creativity or marketing as a career, there were situations years ago where if you wanted to be a creative individual and represent creativity for a brand, you’d go into an agency or start to become a part of a brand. Now there are so many options. You can become a technologist, be part of a platform, go to a startup, or become an AI designer using AI to prompt new ways where technology can deliver creative assets. There are so many options.

I guess if there's any advice, it’s don’t limit yourself. There are so many tools out there and so many avenues to learn. Read a lot, try a lot out, do your own creator creation. There’s distribution all over the place. And once you try a bunch of stuff, you're going to figure out what you want to do.

Rio Damata: Thank you very much.