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| Joe Anthony |
We’ve been building our agency for thirty-five years, having been founded in early 1990. In the beginning, we were a public relations firm focused on delivering earned media and sharply written content. We measured our impact in column inches and where our clients’ stories fell in the publications. Did we make it above the fold? How many pages deep in the section was the story?
The value of being featured in a prestige publication like Forbes, Fortune or The Wall Street Journal was seen as a difference maker for brands and executives looking to make a mark on their industry and grow their business. The most eyeballs read these publications and there were fewer outlets for information sharing and gathering than there are today. Influence was synonymous with inclusion in these sorts of publications.
Richard Branson famously said, “Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front-page ad.” Bill Gates had his own classic quote about PR: “If I had one dollar left, I’d spend it on PR.” Both of these men rose to prominence in the golden age of earned media and saw value in how it could impact brand visibility and credibility. There was no mistaking how important this was in our agency’s early days.
By the time our agency became a teenager, the ground beneath our business had already shifted tremendously. Google search and Facebook became forces that businesses had to contend with in terms of how information was served up to their audiences and how influence was gained. Traditional earned media venues had some competition as the Internet’s evolution took hold. Facebook’s arrival was just the tip of the social media iceberg as more channels and choices for social sharing emerged. Ten years ago, it was clear that earned media wasn’t the only place a brand could establish its credibility. We adapted to that change and brought forth more services and took on an integrated approach to our clients’ marketing and PR needs. The question loomed: What would happen to the value of old-fashioned PR?
Our agency evolved significantly over the past dozen years, building out full-blown service areas in social media strategy, digital marketing, creative services, video and photography to go along with our original core services of public relations, content writing and investor relations. The questions came as we evolved. Will public relations and earned media lose their importance to our clients and the work we do? Given the shrinkage of newsrooms and the repeated arrival of new information channels, it was a fair question.
| This article is featured in O'Dwyer's Aug. '25 Financial PR/IR & Professional Services PR Magazine |
Three years ago, the world was gifted with AI-powered engines like ChatGPT and Claude. The torrent of change that has followed has forced agencies and the clients we support to think differently about how we approach content generation, what it means for thought leadership, what it means for digital marketing and how the arrival of AI impacts how we’re found in search. As we all wrestled with this, a funny thing happened.
The LLMs were learning on what was deemed to be the most credible, most reliable and authoritative sources of information. The prestige media outlets like The Financial Times, Barron’s, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg were seeding the engines with information. Thought leaders promulgating well-researched, source-driven content on LinkedIn, Medium, Substack and Reddit were unwittingly steering the learnings of these LLMs, too.
The full extent of how LLMs are learning and serving up information is still a bit of a black box, but the evidence of journalistic content factoring in to answer engine results is undeniable. So, what does this mean for PR agencies?
Earned media, good old-fashioned PR, is back. And its trusty sidekick, thought leadership content, is still as important as ever.
As more people look to ChatGPT and similar platforms for answers to issues they’re confronting, showing up in answers to user queries is essential to brand visibility. This is a no-click search effort where the answers are teed up in a way that most don’t have to go off-page. And what shows up in those answers is very much shaped by those media outlets that have the most credibility and relevance.
For marketing leaders and agencies like ours, the evolution has reaffirmed the importance of earned media in the broader marketing mix. Search, answer engines and PR—and their collective overall impact—are now inextricably linked in how communicators and marketers need to think and plan.
Chief marketing officers are forced to prioritize a game plan for their marketing around the influence of AI. “I was just thinking that just a year ago, I wouldn’t have been focused on AI. This wasn’t fully in focus until just six months ago,” shared Angela Giombetti, CMO at Wealthspire Advisors, during a recent episode of the Marketing Matchup podcast.
Recently, MuckRack conducted a study that honed in on the issue of “What is AI reading?” to provide insights into which publications were most often cited by Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Outlets like The Financial Times, Reuters and the Associated Press were among the top six most referenced publications by at least two of the three engines. Websites like CNBC, Good Housekeeping, Axios and Time also made the top end of most-cited outlets. This is consistent with the idea that the LLMs and average Americans are very likely finding the same outlets most credible for information gathering. Again, this underscores the relevance of inserting your firm’s voice in respected media.
There will be other developments and impacts attributed to the rise of AI on marketing and the work agencies do, but just because the changes are still happening doesn’t mean firms should wait to act. We’ve taken this head-on at our agency in terms of how this shapes our new website that we’re launching in the fall.
We’re developing tools and processes to help our partners revise how they’re engaging with media, setting up their website content and developing their presences most thoughtfully in places like Quora and Reddit.
The full story of AI’s impact on PR, journalism and the world of search is far from written, but the time for action is here. It’s never been more important for brands to engage positively with traditional media. For those PR lifers out there, there’s renewed excitement over the reemergence of earned media as a keystone for marketing and brand visibility success.
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Joe Anthony is President and co-Owner of Gregory FCA.
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