Unknown: 0:00

so

Chris Norton: 0:03

Hi everyone and welcome to a very special live edition of Embracing Marketing Mistakes. I'm Chris Norton and today we're marking two big milestones. First, it's our second birthday and second, this is our very first LinkedIn Live. So whether you're joining us from the major brand, the agency world or somewhere in between, thank you for being here. We appreciate it. We've got a huge session lined up for you, packed with insight, practical tools and hopefully no fluff. To help us make sense of it all, we've brought back one of the most popular guests Stuart Bruce. He's a global expert on PR measurement and someone who's been helping marketers cut through the noise for years, including me because he's my ex-boss. In the first half of the session, we'll be talking about the Barcelona Principles 4.0. If you've ever struggled to prove the impact of your work or justify the budget, you're going to want to pay close attention to this. Then after a short break, we'll move into something every marketer is talking about right now, which is AI. Yes, AI. We'll be asking Stuart to share the three AI tools you need to be using in 2025 if you want to stay ahead and actually improve performance like we said no fluff throughout the session we'll be taking you through questions so drop them in the comments as we go and if you know someone who'd benefit from this tag them and invite them now to join us live too we're really excited about what lies ahead today so let's get straight into it and welcome the guys onto the show so Hi, everybody. Welcome. Well, hopefully it's all working on the hottest day of the year so far. In the studio, I've got My compadre co-host Will Ockenden, hello Will.

Will Ockenden: 1:42

Hello.

Chris Norton: 1:43

And our special guest, third time on the pod, friend of the show, ex-boss, so don't say anything too bad, Stuart Bruce. Welcome to the show, Stuart. Thank you, Chris. If you

Stuart Bruce: 1:52

drop bribes into the comments, I'll tell you some tales about Chris.

Chris Norton: 1:56

Please don't, please don't. Okay, so quite an exciting show we've got on today. We're going to have it in two parts and we're going to walk you through a couple of things. So one of the first bits we're going to cover is the Barcelona Principles, which was bizarrely was last week's reset in vienna so is that vienna what 4.0 stewart what do we call them yeah so

Stuart Bruce: 2:17

barcelona principles 4.0 rather than vienna 1.0 uh jokes aside it actually makes sense to keep calling the barcelona principles because it's probably the thing that amex best known for so changing them and nobody would have a clue what you're on about

Speaker 02: 2:31

yeah

Will Ockenden: 2:32

i mean do you know uh Sorry, we're diving straight into it. There's a second part as well, isn't there, where we're going to look at AI and some of the kind of the must-adopt AI technologies, which is the second part. But Barcelona principles then, and Amec, there's a lot of kind of jargon there. Taking a step back then, what are the Barcelona principles or the Vienna principles? What is Amec, and why should people care?

Stuart Bruce: 2:55

Okay, let's deal with the what's Amec first, because that's kind of really important. So it stands for, and I'm only going to say this once, the International Association for the Measurement and Innovation evaluation of communications. Well done. Which is kind of quite a mouthful. And it's basically mainly made up of a lot of the big monitoring and measurement companies. That's kind of the base of its membership. But it also has some sort of big global PR agencies. It has kind of smaller kind of agencies. It's got individuals. And it's basically, it's a community of people who are passionate about kind of using planning, measurement and evaluation so as we can do better work for Thank you. you know, we can actually show that comms works and to make it better.

Chris Norton: 3:38

And it's to demonstrate, the difference is that if there's people out there just measuring lots of different things, paralysis by analyses, we've all been, there's marketing people out there that are struggling with all sorts of bits and pieces, but the Barcelona Principles was set up to demonstrate like a true business impact, right, from communications and marketing.

Stuart Bruce: 3:55

Yeah, well, if we take the step right back to basics, so 2010, that's when the first Barcelona Principles were launched. The idea behind them is, I'm going to be the first one to say, share, to swear here, is that basically PR and comms people are **** at measurement. And it's kind of because most people say, what's your favourite subject at school? Nobody's going to say maths, because everybody hates numbers. Yeah,

Will Ockenden: 4:17

everyone's favourite friend is the percentage increase calculator in a PR agency, isn't

Stuart Bruce: 4:21

it? Absolutely. So nobody likes them. So they pulled together these principles of kind of how to do it. And they've been updated every five years since. And the thing is that originally they didn't tell you how to do it but they did it did mean if you were like putting a system in place for your client or your company you could kind of go through and say okay does it do this does it do that and once we get into the changes i can kind of explain some of the things it did but yeah it was basically all about making comms more effective

Chris Norton: 4:51

Okay. And so how has it moved on then? Because we use Amec and the Barcelona Principles at Prohibition with our clients. Well, it's the first thing when we're onboarding the client, we'll go through, break down what business impact they want and we'll work back. So it means that from the beginning that we're demonstrating some kind of business impact for our clients. But how has it changed then? What's changed since last month? Well, first up, congrats

Stuart Bruce: 5:16

on the fact that you're using it. And I know we did some work with you on this because there is a hell of a lot of companies out there that don't and they do stuff in a really kind of mediocre way so when you're actually doing that impact stuff for clients it makes a huge difference to the client the benefit they see from what you do from them

Will Ockenden: 5:32

and board engagement as well is one of the big changes we've seen you know suddenly you're having conversations with the FD the CEO and they can actually see the impact and the ROI of every pound they're spending on marketing.

Stuart Bruce: 5:43

Yeah, and you're talking their language. You're talking about things they cared about. I mean, do they really care about clicks or views or reach or all these kind of bizarre metrics that some people talk about? And I think that was actually one of the key, talking about the changes that we're seeing in these Barcelona principles, one of the kind of, there were quite a few, but one of them was often people made the mistake, because we talked a lot about the impact and about the outcome, of thinking we were saying that outputs don't matter and you don't need to measure them. But actually you do. You still want to know how much media coverage you've got. You still do want to know how many people viewed your video. You still do want to know how many people are watching this LinkedIn Live. You know, those metrics matter. It's just that they're not the most important ones. And I think sometimes, because we emphasised impact It's an outcome. thought they didn't. And so we've made it clearer that that's what they really do.

Chris Norton: 6:38

I should have said, actually, being the first LinkedIn Live, firstly, I'm delighted that I'm not the one to swear first. So whoever bet on that, you're wrong. But second thing, if you've got questions for Stuart during the show, fire them over because I've got a live feed here of the questions. So thanks to everybody that's watching. So if you've got any questions, because Will and I can ask some questions about how we use it. But if you've got questions on, obviously AI is the second part, but if you've got questions on the Barcelona principle Just fire them on here and we'll do our best to get them into the show today. So

Stuart Bruce: 7:10

just kind of talking about the changes again, we've got a graphic here that we can show you, because one of the problems of the old principles is people found it quite hard to kind of relate them all together. So you hopefully should be able to see on screen now a graphic that's kind of colour-coded against the seven principles, and it shows which are the ones where you're kind of aligning your objectives, which are the ones where you're... Sorry, Chris just moved my iPad, so... You can't do that, Chris. I'm

Chris Norton: 7:40

breaking the fourth wall.

Stuart Bruce: 7:42

So I could no longer talk about what I'm talking about. Yes, you can see, you know, right at the front, Barcelona principle number one. You know, it's about setting clear measurable objectives is a critical prerequisite for effective communication, planning, measurement, and evaluation. To which kind of my response is, no shit, Sherlock. Because kind of, You know, if you don't know where you're going, how on earth can you know which direction you want to go?

Will Ockenden: 8:04

Well, on that, I think let's briefly talk about setting objectives, because I think it's about being really, really specific, isn't it? And the more specific your objectives, the easier it is to measure against and the easier to know whether you have or haven't achieved it. I mean, what makes a great objective?

Stuart Bruce: 8:48

Well, several things. First of all, you've got to know whether you've achieved it. So people talk about smart objectives. That's good, but sometimes it's actually quite difficult to come up where you're doing every single bit of that smart acronym. So I think the most important thing is that you're trying to get them all. You're going to make them specific. You're going to actually make them achievable. You're going to have a time frame on them. And if you can do most of those things, you're not aiming for perfection. You're going to have much, much better objectives than you've had previously.

Will Ockenden: 9:22

So a bad objective, for example, would be drive brand awareness. Yeah. A good objective would be increase brand awareness by 40% in the UK market within six months.

Chris Norton: 9:31

Yeah, perfect. Yeah. The irony is the amount of briefs that you see that say drive brand awareness and that's it, isn't it?

Stuart Bruce: 9:38

But this is where you can differentiate yourself. You know, if you go back in and talk to a CEO or a marketing director and you're kind of giving them a better kind of objective, most of them aren't going to turn around and say... Oh no, I just want my rubbish one like before. If you can kind of explain why you've done it.

Will Ockenden: 9:53

It can be a difficult conversation though, can't it? When you end up challenging senior people, you know, they've set an objective, but I suppose the outcome is, it's a positive outcome if you can have that conversation, isn't

Stuart Bruce: 10:03

it? Yeah. And you can also start off by agreeing with them, you know, so you don't tell them, you know, raising brand awareness is a rubbish objective. You say, oh, that's a great objective you've set there. And what we've done is we've tried to kind of, is we've tried to refine it and add

Chris Norton: 10:15

to it.

Stuart Bruce: 10:16

Yeah.

Chris Norton: 10:16

Yeah, I have to be honest. A couple of conversations we've had have been quite awkward. You've had a conversation with a client and we start asking questions like, well, what's that going to do to the business? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? What is this for? And they start to get a little bit defensive. Why are you asking me all these questions? I've just been told, I suppose it depends on which buyer you're dealing with, whether it's a financial buyer or the person that's executing the campaigns themselves.

Stuart Bruce: 10:43

Yeah, and I think you've actually just nailed it there. It's critical who you speaking to because also you've got to be realistic about these objectives is yeah the ones that really matter to the company are the ones like sales or recruitment or whatever. But they might not be the same ones as matters to that individual. They might have their own ones which are to do with their internal profile or promotion in the company. So sometimes you've got to kind of walk that kind of double, kind of both sides of that fence.

Will Ockenden: 11:14

So setting great objectives, that's our starting point. Where do we go from there?

Stuart Bruce: 11:17

Yeah. So that's the kind of Barcelona principle number one. And one of the quite good things about how they've kind of updated them is they've produced an e-book that goes with it that explains all of these things in more detail. And also you can see they've got a bit called Where We Started, where they actually show what the changes have been kind of over time. So to use this as an example, in 2010 it was the importance of goal setting and measurement. It barely tells you anything. Whereas now, I think one of the key things that's kind of been added to to the Barcelona principle one, is that word clear? Because very often we make them too hard to understand. One of the things that we've done is we've worked with Google, and there they use something called OKRs. which stands for objectives and key results. And one of the principles behind writing them is you've got to write them in the way that a lay person would understand. If you've got to explain them, they ain't

Chris Norton: 12:17

good. Which ironically is what PR people are supposed to do, right? Write clearly so your mum could understand your press release, right?

Stuart Bruce: 12:24

Yeah, but we use jargon all the time. You know, we've been using it in this podcast, in this kind of LinkedIn Live already. Don't we call it a LinkedIn Live or a podcast or a pod or both? Well, it's our birthday,

Chris Norton: 12:35

Paul. We didn't mention that either. Look at the cake. The

Will Ockenden: 12:37

key messages have gone

Chris Norton: 12:37

out the window, haven't they? Well, we screwed everything up and Stuart's already sworn.

Will Ockenden: 12:41

We'll crack into that cake at the halfway point.

Chris Norton: 12:43

If you ask a question, we'll try and send you a free bit of melted cake all the way across to you guys.

Stuart Bruce: 12:48

I mean, there's seven of these. I probably don't have time to go through all seven in detail. But if we just kind of look at the next one on here. So I'm going to read them out. Defining and understanding all stakeholder audiences are essential steps to plan, build relationships and create lasting impact. OK, so I've got a couple of issues with this one. So overall, I think the improvements to the Barcelona principles are brilliant. I'm going to be more controversial here. I can see some AMEC people shaking their heads. I don't necessarily feel this one has kind of captured what it's about. And I've got two reasons for that. One, what the hell is a stakeholder audience? Because basically what they've done is they, it explains in the booklet that stakeholders is a word that's often used by academics in communications. Audiences tends to be used by brands. So they've kind of merged them together. The problem with that is they're different things. So I actually think it adds to the confusion rather than simplifying it. It's probably going to be the way we talk about it and the way we use it, so that might be resolvable. The other one I have is they've actually dropped a really important word. So the 2020 version said, outcome and impact should be identified for stakeholders, society, and the organisation. Dropping the word society, I think, is a really, really retrograde step. And that's because one of our roles in public relations and communications is an organisation's licence to operate. You know, you're not going to sell stuff if people think you're horrible. Yeah. You've got to have kind of permission to operate within kind of society, within the economy.

Chris Norton: 14:31

I know they inserted a brand's name that operates horribly there, but I held it off

Stuart Bruce: 14:34

because it was a lie. We don't want to be sued. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I just think that's, you know, you can still talk about it. It's just not having that word in there. I know for some, especially for some of the really big clients we've worked with, adding it was a big plus because they were able to kind of understand. So

Chris Norton: 14:51

what's the justification of removing the word society? Because it is, like you say, it does make sense. Oh, Christopher, you shouldn't have asked me that

Stuart Bruce: 14:58

question. Watch the questions come in now. Go on, why? Well, because I've had kind of... One of the great things about going to a summit like Amic is you can have kind of conversations with people who are responsible for drawing them up. Okay. So I do have an idea why it's been kind of withdrawn. Right. I'm personally not entirely convinced that's a valid reason. Okay. Interesting. And I'll probably leave it at that. Ominous.

Will Ockenden: 15:23

Yeah, okay.

Stuart Bruce: 15:23

Okay.

Will Ockenden: 15:24

Um... So anything else on Amec before we move on that you want to talk about? I mean, well, a question people would be, sorry, I keep using the term Amec, boss learner principles. Where can people sort of see this e-book and where can they find out more about them?

Stuart Bruce: 15:41

Okay, so yeah, so if you go to, I've got to remember the URL now. We can drop it in the comments as well. If you go to amec.org.

Will Ockenden: 15:49

That's A-M-E-C.

Stuart Bruce: 15:50

A-M-E-C.org. And then I can't remember. And then it pops up .com. Are they updating the free tool then? Because there's a free tool out there and it walks you through the process. Well, this is the other really good thing. So that's what I was going to begin to talk about before is that it's now much easier to actually relate the Barcelona principles because that colour code we were talking about, it also maps back to the integrated evaluation framework tool.

Chris Norton: 16:14

The tool, which is basically a free tool that walks you through the process so you can do it yourself.

Will Ockenden: 16:18

And that starts at the very, that starts at the, the business impact stage, doesn't it? So it forces you to think, okay, what what do we want to do as a business? What

Stuart Bruce: 16:26

are our business objectives? What are we trying to achieve here? And then it kind of takes, from that, it gives you the opportunity to think about, okay, so how do we need to communicate in order to achieve that business thing? What activities are we going to do? How are we going to know if that activity works? And I think that's the other one of the key changes that they've made in these principles is, and you can see that from the graphic that we had on screen before where there was a grey circle running around the outside, and that's because this is about learning and iteration. You know, too often we treat this as a campaign. It's a kind of one-off. You know, so we set the objectives at the front. Then at the end, we kind of measure it and see whether it's worked. Well, actually, what are we doing to kind of learn from it? You know, can we learn during it? Can we actually course correct, you know, by checking some real-time metrics? And if we've started to do something, there's nothing wrong with this is embracing marketing mistakes. There's nothing wrong with admitting we've made a mistake. Yeah, exactly. Actually changing track. Yeah. But you've got to be all over your numbers. Yeah. in order to do that.

Will Ockenden: 17:25

I mean, that's been a big, I think us, you know, 18 months ago, two years ago, we've started rolling out this framework as part of our planning. And I think there's three areas it's really paid dividends. One is that kind of continual improvement. One is kind of ruthlessly focusing your tactics and your execution on what those objectives are, what those business objectives are. And I think that's been really refreshing. You know, if there's an activity that's a nice to have, It looks cool, but it actually doesn't have any impact whatsoever. Why on earth are you doing

Chris Norton: 17:55

it? The bit that was interesting to me for working in what we do is the difference between business objectives. Because when you're talking about objectives, set objectives, great objectives, comms objectives are what we usually get. And the bit when it gets awkward is when you're going, yeah, I know you want to do this. objective in comms, but what does that mean and why are we doing it? And then they go, oh, sometimes they go, generally I don't really know why we're doing it. Because those

Will Ockenden: 18:17

comms objectives feed into the business objectives, don't they?

Stuart Bruce: 18:20

Yeah. So often, I mean, I love the word when you use the word ruthless because so often people are just doing the wrong stuff and people say, oh, I don't have time to do all this and planning and it's kind of, yeah, you do because actually you're wasting so much time at the moment doing activities that are

Will Ockenden: 18:38

pointless. Yeah, that don't move the dial at all.

Chris Norton: 18:40

You actually judge a lot of awards, right? Yeah. So you'll go through looking at people's objectives and looking at how agencies and brands in-house present themselves. What are the biggest mistakes you find? Have you seen some absolute humdingers? You don't have to name them.

Stuart Bruce: 18:58

So, well, two common mistakes is one, it's quite easy to spot the awards where they've retrofitted the objectives to the results. And when I'm judging, that's what I do. I will not read the full entry to begin with. I'll read the objectives, I'll read the results, and that's my short list. I will scan the rest, but that's how I get my short list. Because the creativity elements and stuff and how amazing it was, unless it's worked, it doesn't really matter. So, you know, so usually it's going to be the most creative campaign out of those that have worked really well that I'll

Will Ockenden: 19:30

score highly. I suppose it doesn't really matter, does it? If these are your objectives and these are the results.

Stuart Bruce: 19:36

Yeah.

Will Ockenden: 19:36

I mean, it does matter and it doesn't matter.

Stuart Bruce: 19:38

Well, so, you know, this week we're sitting on sort of beside the canal in sunny Leeds and lots of our kind of colleagues are sitting on the croisette in Cannes, kind of shipping kind of warm rosé and kind of celebrating celebrating the Cannes Lion Awards. Shout out to the Cannes posse. Yeah, they're having a great

Chris Norton: 19:56

time.

Will Ockenden: 19:57

Next year we'll do this from Cannes, I think.

Stuart Bruce: 19:59

Yeah, are you paying

Chris Norton: 20:00

for that budget?

Stuart Bruce: 20:00

That would be cool and expensive. Yeah, we'll fly you over. But the thing is, people forget about Cannes, because it's the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. The campaigns that win are the most creative campaigns, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But they're not the best campaigns. The best campaigns are the ones that work, which don't necessarily always require massive creativity.

Chris Norton: 20:22

That's good. I've got a couple of things. So first of all, we want to thank Mr. Tim Bailey. Thanks, Tim, for dripping the Amec link in the chat. So he's already shared it. If you want to find it, we'd have to remember it off the top of our heads.

Will Ockenden: 20:34

Dripping.

Chris Norton: 20:35

It says dripping. That's a typo from our Jamie off the Joe Rogan podcast. And also we've got an Amec topic suggestion, which is from someone in the crowd. Basically, it's on over-measurement. Is there a risk of over-measurement with AI reportedly taking over? Okay, so

Stuart Bruce: 20:54

that's kind of two separate things. So the over-measuring, 100%. One of the things I always talk about is less is more. And that's actually what the framework helps you to do and the principles help you to do. It helps you to drill down to the metrics that matter. Because there's like hundreds of things we could measure.

Will Ockenden: 21:13

Drowning in data. I remember when social media first emerged and some of the monthly reports you'd see, there'd be 500 different metrics, none of which tell you anything.

Stuart Bruce: 21:21

No, absolutely. And this is where when you said about the incremental improvement before it's about understanding what the different numbers are for you know so some of these like 101 numbers for that incremental improvement for the team to use it can be brilliant you know they can really help you see on a day to day basis what you need to do to get better but why the hell would you report them they're just not relevant to anybody you know the ones you should be reporting are the ones that matter and that might actually be quite a small list you know has it changed behaviour you know has it changed what people think you know How's it done when it's kind of sits on the tin?

Will Ockenden: 21:57

We'll move on to the AI section in a moment. I think taking a big step back, do you want to give us sort of three key reasons or three key benefits of doing this? People will be listening to this thinking, I do need to measure better. But what... what are the tangible benefits of it? Is it improved impact of campaigns? Is it more budget? You know, what,

Chris Norton: 22:16

how will... I think it might be, I want to half answer this. Is it, half of it is actually going to save yourself some time and wasted effort. Because if you measure, all those things you just talk about over measurement with that question we've just had, like measuring just a few things actually means you can focus down and you don't, you know, wasting all that time just measuring everything.

Stuart Bruce: 22:34

Yeah.

Chris Norton: 22:35

I mean, you kind of

Stuart Bruce: 22:36

answered your own kind of questions. But, so I would actually just give one you make yourself matter You know, one of the kind of speakers there, you know, he was kind of talking about kind of what you can do to make the CCO important and kind of essential to a company. And actually, if you're talking this, you know, doing all of this, following the Barcelona principles, using the framework, means you can talk to the CEO in their language. You make yourself count. You make yourself matter. So all the other things that we talked about, you kind of, the more time, the more budget, you know, being taken, well, seriously, so you have an input into decisions earlier. All of that kind of flows from it.

Will Ockenden: 23:16

Yeah,

Chris Norton: 23:17

yeah. The only other time you get that is when we're rolled in for a bit of crisis management and then everybody listens to you, isn't it? That's the only time we seem to get that sort of FaceTime with a CEO or a CFO. So

Will Ockenden: 23:27

they start to raise the profile of PR and comms in an organisation because that's, You know, during COVID, comms kind of had a massive uplift, didn't it, in terms of suddenly it was really visible in an organisation. Perhaps that dropped down a little bit. I mean, that's something we all

Stuart Bruce: 23:42

need to chat about. You know, you're getting away from this idea that it's a fluffy profession. You know, it's just about publicity. It's just about kind of the stuff on the edges. And you're actually showing in kind of hard numbers that it's critical, that it's essential.

Unknown: 23:57

Yeah.

Stuart Bruce: 23:57

So

Will Ockenden: 23:58

are we moving into the AI section then? Yeah, that's a good, when do we eat the cake, by the way?

Chris Norton: 24:02

When do we eat the cake? We're not doing that live on air. Nobody wants to see that. You don't want to have your bacon sandwich moment, do

Will Ockenden: 24:12

you? You're the one wearing a white t-shirt. You're the one most at risk here. He's

Chris Norton: 24:15

going to try and stick it in my face as we live on, maybe at the end.

Will Ockenden: 24:17

Right, let's move

Chris Norton: 24:19

on. Yeah, so AI, right, okay. So the world's most talked about subject. I think everybody here, everybody listening will have done AI in some vein or form that have tested something out. But what I've really noticed, like we've got an AI committee here at Prohibition. You helped a couple of years ago. We had a discussion with you about various bits of AI and looking at workflows and things. That is a constant process, looking at your workflows, how can you automate different bits and pieces of what you're doing. But I was just saying, I've had my committee meeting this morning with the AI guys, and the last month or two has been mental in terms of, like... Things that have come out that have really changed the game on AI, like the reasoning models, the connectors where you can connect. So right now you can connect your chat GPT to your Teams, to your email, to your calendar, to your Google Drive, to your HubSpot. It is insane. And then there's a lot of questions to be asked about... privacy and things like that. So what are the three things that people should be doing today on AI? What's useful for marketers, would you say, Stuart? the three things that people should be doing.

Will Ockenden: 25:32

Tools.

Stuart Bruce: 25:33

Yeah, put it on the spot because that was actually the different question to the one we pre-prepared. Oh, there you go. Not that

Will Ockenden: 25:42

that matters. Or, you know, even if you're not talking specific tools, the categories, the broad categories people need to be focusing

Stuart Bruce: 25:47

on. And I think that's the key thing. I think often people get, and Chris began to kind of talk about it then, people get the kind of, they start AI from the wrong angle. They look at some of the bright, shiny stuff. And actually, the first things you probably want to be thinking about is how can we just integrate it into the day-to-day? And literally this morning, I was kind of sitting there reading an article about the fact that there's a complaint against Microsoft because of some of the advertising it's using for Copilot. And some of it was rejected and some of it hasn't been. But one of the issues they were talking about is how you can kind of demonstrate the ROI of it and how effective it is. And the reality is, if you're putting something like Copilot into a team, it's going to save two to four hours a week for everybody in the team. You know, the UK government just did a really big pilot and they were showing that it's like 26 minutes a day. Savings?

Will Ockenden: 26:47

To each person? Yeah, to each time saving. So that's immediately staggering cost savings, isn't

Stuart Bruce: 26:51

it? Yeah, no, exactly. So we've got, you were kind of talking about the calculator. It's not

Chris Norton: 26:55

cheap. Just to be clear, it's not cheap, Copilot. You have to pay a whole year, don't you?

Stuart Bruce: 27:00

No, you don't. You did when it first launched, but now you've still got to take a year's contract, but you pay monthly the same as you do for the rest of Microsoft 365. So it is quite a financial outlay. It is, but we've got a kind of calculator that we use with clients where we can actually look at what the savings are. Based

Will Ockenden: 27:20

on the time savings, average salaries.

Stuart Bruce: 27:22

Exactly. So we use the Ruben Sinclair kind of average salary survey. So we know when an AD, an AM, et cetera, earns an average. So for a 20-person agency, the savings will be 54K a year, if it's on the two hours, or kind of 108 if it's on the four hours. But that's after you've taken into account all of the licensing costs, costs for us working with you. That's your net saving, right? Yeah, to do the training and to kind of get people up in the

Chris Norton: 27:48

thing. And is it, so I suppose, is Copilot the one you're recommending? Because I find it to be, I find it to be ChatGPT Lite. So, because it's got eight models, it's like... Which bloody model do I use? Reasoning? Yeah. 3, 4, 4.5?

Stuart Bruce: 28:06

And I think this is one of the things that's going to disappear. Yeah. The fact that it is too confusing at the moment. And that's why... So when you say, would we recommend Copilot? Usually, we're going to be recommending two things. There's going to be a team-wide solution that everybody's using, and that's where you get your two to four hours from. Okay. And crudely, it's usually quite obvious which it's going to be. If you're in a Microsoft house, you use Copilot. If you're a Google house, you use Gemini. It is that simple because that's for kind of the general day-to-day productivity. We'll also look and analyse kind of what people do on a day-to-day basis, you know, what their tasks are, what their workflows are, what pressures they get from clients. Because surprisingly, even amongst agencies or in-house teams, it does actually vary quite a lot in terms of where they spend the time, what they find difficult, et cetera. You know, so you can then figure out you know, these are the 50 things where you should be using AI and you train everybody to use them. After that, you're also going to be able to identify specialist AI tools where you might say, well, actually, as well as Copilot or Gemini, you need to use XYZ, but only in these circumstances. So, for example, for some people, we might have some chat GPT team accounts that they can use, but most of the time they're going to be using Copilot or Gemini. And you sort of mentioned privacy and security when you're talking about connectors.

Chris Norton: 29:28

Yeah. That, I mean, so we've got Pro and we've got Teams situation set up and I've set the privacy you know so it asks you basically asks you do you want to share wait do you want to share your searches with open AI so we can improve the model no I don't no I do not want you looking but then you still don't really know if you're turning it off if it's turned off do you think

Stuart Bruce: 29:51

no I think you do you know these are big global trends software corporations. So when you're kind of signing up to your C's and the C's, you know, those are the T's and C's you've signed up to. I think the key thing about, say, a Microsoft one is you've already signed up to the T's and C's. Yeah, so you're all, you know, the security levels you've got by using Copilot are exactly the same ones you've been using for years on SharePoint. The problem arises is if for companies that haven't set up SharePoint properly...

Chris Norton: 30:20

The irony of Stuart sharing this is that he just tried to share me a document before this and he's had all his IT security, marketing state, he's had all his security improved so much so that Stuart couldn't share the document. Is that fair? Yep, that's absolutely true. So he's stopping you from

Stuart Bruce: 30:40

sharing... Just print it out. Go analogue. Or as we did, me handing Chris the phone so he could actually read it on my phone. But yeah, so often people don't set things up properly. And, you know, the risk of that in the olden days of people accidentally stumbling across the wrong balance sharepoint was rare. With Copilot, actually, it becomes a lot higher if you haven't set it up properly. And, you know, once you've cracked that, you know, it becomes really secure and really private. And you can kind of, you can cover all these things off. Often when we go in and you see teams experimenting, the risk of kind of using free tools, even if they know they're not meant to put private information in, people get very confused as to what that actually means. So you get some in the team that are far too conservative with a small C and they don't put things in that are totally safe. Whereas others will be putting stuff in that they really shouldn't. And neither are doing it on purpose. They're It's just a really hard line

Chris Norton: 31:38

to define. What about the big agencies then? So when we were talking last time I saw you, they've been building their own designated AI engines built on the large language models. And I remember you saying that you felt like they'd gone in early, but they'd gone in so early that they're now out of date, half of them.

Stuart Bruce: 31:53

Yeah, I mean, I think that would be... Well, they're doing different things. So I think the massive investments that people like Publicis and WPP have made, because we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars that they're investing in these things. Whether or not you need to is a good question.

Will Ockenden: 32:12

It's like building a social network from scratch when social media emerged, isn't it? Do you need to do that?

Stuart Bruce: 32:17

Probably one of the best examples I've got of this, because we've got first-hand knowledge of it, is the UK Government Communications Service. If you wanted a really advanced example of AI being used for comms, it's that. 7,000 people working in communications in government, 3,500 of them the kind of the last... published figures. And now we're using a tool called GCS Assist, which is a kind of AI kind of tool they've built in-house. It can do about 50 different kind of communications tasks. It really, really is good. About six weeks, two months ago, they open sourced it. You could actually go and have a look at some of the code that we used to build it. But the thing about that is before we knew they were going to open source it, we'd actually built most of it within Copilot using Copilot Studio because we looked at what it could do and because you can kind of create custom agents and connectors and all this type of stuff we'd replicated a lot of its ability now when they started building it that wasn't an option for them but I think that's an example of how quick things are moving you can actually build such sophisticated stuff within Google or Microsoft you know that for most use cases do you really need to do that sort of investment but they're also doing a different some of the big agencies are doing a different type of investment you know so for example Burson have just launched a kind of reputation measurement tool using AI you know and that's a use case where actually you can see that's a real differentiator you know it gives them a competitive edge now There's also third-party companies out there that are building this type of stuff. So if you're in a smaller agency, you can still access something. But I think I've not had a detailed look at what Bursa have done yet, but from what I've seen and heard from talking to people, it looks good.

Will Ockenden: 34:08

So you're having these conversations all the time. The in-house teams, marketing departments, agencies you're speaking to, let's ignore kind of bespoke solutions. You know, what are the more, can you give us some examples of some of the more kind of creative executions around how those agencies or teams are using existing tools? I think that'll...

Stuart Bruce: 34:26

Yeah. So, well, let's take agencies kind of first because one of the examples where both with our own clients and we know from other examples, they're seeing a big impact is in new business and pitches. You know, so for example, there's this whole thing about kind of transparency, about using AI images and the ethics behind it, et cetera, et cetera. But one place where you can use them will we know it's effective because we've seen it, is in a new business pitch. You know, and whether that's to a kind of pitching an idea to an existing client or pitching a kind of new client, you know, you can use AI to mock up the idea and to actually tell, you know, kind of bring your words, your idea to life really,

Chris Norton: 35:02

really quickly. And they look better than they used to look where, you know, like, because like I just talked about, it's developed so much quicker. I know that the The images are looking better. Which model would you use to do

Stuart Bruce: 35:15

that? I think, well, say about which model. Part of it is learning how to use the model. And that keeps changing. You know, so for example, you know, literally just the latest announces is that mid-journey have had, you know, because that used to be kind of the go-to tool for images, you know, but they've just added video on now. How good it is or bad it is, I've not a clue. So it's about the

Will Ockenden: 35:34

quality of your prompts, basically. Yeah, it's the training, the quality of the prompts. Because I keep thinking about that Gordon Ramsay thing. He

Chris Norton: 35:41

looks like melted wax, doesn't he? It's moved on a million miles since then. I mean, I know that Disney and Disney and Universal were suing somebody. Was it Mid Journey earlier this week? Oh yes, yeah. There's a law case and basically they've opened up basically saying that Disney are saying that they've trained the model on Star Wars and all Disney's films because there's been various blogs popping up with all the graphics that are all made in AI based on Star Wars IP. That requires

Will Ockenden: 36:16

some specialist legal counsel, doesn't it? I mean, that such a niche

Stuart Bruce: 36:20

area. Who's going to win with that amount of money? Well, I think that we're seeing these cases happening all over. You've got the New York Times. Getty Images. Getty Images, yeah. Ultimately, it's going to need a refreshed copyright law. And the thing is, copyright laws in different countries. There's a consultation paper out in the UK at the moment as to what ours should look like. Basically, the UK government's stance is basically to be pro-consumer and pro-business and what that's actually meant is they've hacked off the publishers that own the copyright and they've hacked off the big tech companies because neither are kind of happy to me that means I think they're probably getting it kind of right if one side was clapping that have got the balance wrong but You know, just on the other stuff that's happening on AI, you know, I think probably one of the biggest opportunities for PR at the moment and the biggest opportunities for, and the way that brands need to be refocusing what they're investing in is, and it's got various names. So one of them is called GEO, which is basically Generative AI Optimization. That was a really big topic in Vienna. It's something that we've been doing absolutely loads of work on. I think it could be a huge kind of revenue stream for PR agencies. I think it could make a real difference to how brands benefit from marketing. And basically what we're talking about is how can you influence the answers that AI gives you.

Chris Norton: 37:49

Oh my God, we're just talking. So we interviewed Andrew Bruce Smith on Wednesday and I was talking about the fact that Google got caught with its pants down, launched its ChatGPT came from nowhere. Gemini quickly came out and got involved because they've realized the game is over. SEO, like... People aren't going to– the highest downloaded product is ChatGPT. The most searched platforms are the AI tools now, aren't they? Not Google.

Will Ockenden: 38:21

So as brands, how can we influence that? What do you know about the

Stuart Bruce: 38:24

algorithms? Okay, so first up is I've got a whole kind of presentation about this, and it starts off with an AI-generated video of a snake oil salesman. And that's because anybody that's telling you they know how to do it is lying through their teeth because they don't. Okay. Not even the big LLM companies know exactly how their models output an answer. That's the whole point. Now, what we can do, one of the things we've been doing is studying the studies because lots of people have done research. So we've been doing some kind of secondary research of looking at all these different reports, trying to identify kind of common themes and trends because we know if lots of people have found the same results, those are probably the ones to go for because some of them contradict each other, which is the reason we've been doing it. But the big thing and the kind of good news for people like us is the top... driver of AI Answers is earned media. So traditional media. Traditional media sources. It's back in. Yeah. Again. Which is about

Will Ockenden: 39:24

trust and authority.

Stuart Bruce: 39:25

Yeah. So, but interesting is not necessarily the media titles you might have historically targeted. You know, when we're doing our kind of top tier media, we tend to focus on prestige ones.

Chris Norton: 39:37

So can I get a piece of coverage in Rubber and Plastics Weekly and then that'll help my SEO

Stuart Bruce: 39:43

for AI? Chris is joking, but the answer is actually yes. Oh my so trade media is actually far more important than it used to be we think caveat all these statements I'm

Chris Norton: 39:54

saying with the word we think I think I'd be interested in that report because it sounds like a bit of a game changer if you can find a way to optimise your business so you rank better on AI but then all the models are different though

Stuart Bruce: 40:07

no they are and that's why sometimes when studies come out they'll only have studied one model so why trade

Will Ockenden: 40:16

publications then. I mean, is there a rationale for that?

Stuart Bruce: 40:21

I think it's because it's not just them on their own. Yeah, so there's a whole host of other things. Earned media sits there probably at the top of the tree, but then it's also owned media. Owned media matters as well. And I think one of the things that the models are doing is they're cross-checking between these different sources and then, you know, if it's seeing something in earned media and then on the company's website or the brand's website, it's got the same thing. You know that's affirmation i

Chris Norton: 40:49

wonder if it's like just what it's done is actually removed the gamification of seo like it's not links now but

Will Ockenden: 40:56

within gamification of ai

Stuart Bruce: 40:58

yeah this is what we're moving that's what the snake oil salesman is the gamification of ai yeah and the difference is there are there are probably a lot more variables that we don't know about so some of the others are structured data

Will Ockenden: 41:10

you might be able to hear an ice cream van in the background well get outside the joys of a live broadcast i'd like some ice cream what do you guys

Stuart Bruce: 41:16

want i know i'll just put said Chris out to get us all on. But yeah, so what else is structured data they like? So some of the, you know, we are all kind of of an age where you can remember kind of the early days of social media and mysticals.

Chris Norton: 41:31

Yeah.

Stuart Bruce: 41:31

Hey, they're making a comeback because AI likes them. Interesting. And yeah, so there's all kind of risks of these dozen factors and, you know, of things that we know is going to help to influence AI. And I think it's, so one of the things we're doing is we're working with kind of brands to put together a plan as to kind of, these are the things you need to be doing. You know, when you're briefing your agencies, make sure that's part of the brief that they're going to be able to do these things for you. And I think any agency that's actually going in with a realistic offer of what they can do so i.e. not over claiming it but talking about how important it is and that these are some of the things we are going to consider when we're working for you I think it gives them a real competitive edge and if brands are looking for agencies they want to be looking for ones that can do that

Chris Norton: 42:21

I've got a question that's popped in a topic suggestion so we've got AI video creation and how brands can use it while still being authentic AI video creation well the Google's is it Google V that launched a few weeks ago my god the quality of those AI videos that you can't

Will Ockenden: 42:41

tell was that the B from the perspective of the B yeah it's astonishing

Chris Norton: 42:44

yeah well share the B video there's a number I shared it on my Twitter the other day sorry X yeah there's a few quite interesting videos and now there's like spoof videos of that look like news reports have you seen these where they say aliens have landed and it looks like a genuine real but then it goes act I'm not here. This is AI. And it's quite scary.

Stuart Bruce: 43:08

Well, it is. I would actually flip that question on its head. Yeah, so it's not just about kind of how brands can use it because potentially there are limited opportunities. One of the other things I was going to talk about when you asked me about kind of the three things you need to be thinking about are misinformation and disinformation. You know, the threat that brands now face because of this is absolutely huge. you know, of kind of the fake narratives. You know, it's not just going to be a fake story. It's going to be a fake video. It's going to be your kind of CEO saying something they've never said. You know, the risks out there are kind of unbelievably kind of huge.

Chris Norton: 43:50

Shout out to BBC Verify. They've got a right task on their hands now, haven't they?

Will Ockenden: 43:53

Doesn't that give people rogue CEOs plausible deniability if they did say something terrible?

Chris Norton: 43:57

Oh, it was just AI. No, no, we saw that with Trump. We saw that with that referee as well. Do you remember the referee? that said that was allegedly said something about Jurgen Klopp that was disparaging and then was also allegedly caught taking something at a party, and it was all caught on camera. And he said that the video was AI-generated, and then it turned out it wasn't. Yeah, and

Stuart Bruce: 44:20

people have already used that as an excuse. But from a brand's perspective, there are tools out there that can help you with this. There's companies like Saabra, Oceval, who've got basically using really sophisticated AI tools to do things like to detect these threats early, to give you a chance to do something about it, to assess the areas where you're most likely to be under threat. You know, so there's a lot that we, once again, you know, for PR firms, it's an opportunity because, you know, because it's one of the best ways to protect yourself against this type of threat is preempting it, you know, doing stuff. It's quite hard to defend yourself once it's happened. Yeah, being reactive is no

Will Ockenden: 45:00

longer enough, is it? And actually, if you look in our podcast archive, we've done a couple of previous episodes on misinformation, haven't we? Tackling all of these issues.

Chris Norton: 45:08

Yeah, we asked cousins about misinformation. It's an interesting... I mean, look at what's happened to M&S and Co-op recently with the hacking. And obviously their PR teams and their IT teams, that must be an absolute nightmare. But what I mean is people could then use, you could hack someone and then create a misinformation campaign combined, which is just

Stuart Bruce: 45:28

crazy. No, the whole kind of vulnerability landscape has never been scarier. And, you know, mentioning kind of ant cousins, you know, if you're actually looking for companies to watch at the moment, I would have some serious... on Meltwater. Why is that? Because Ant Cousins has just joined them as the head of AI. Shout out to Ant back on the pod, please. Yeah. You know, and I, at the moment, all of the big vendors kind of say they're doing stuff with AI. There's none, obviously, that kind of say, oh, no, we're not doing anything here. I think in terms of those that really understand it, are doing the proper investment, are doing the proper innovation, that's a lot more fragmented. And it's not necessarily their fault because they've got huge legacy systems they've got to change, blah, blah, blah. They've got clients where they've got specifications they've got to meet now, so they don't necessarily want to meet new ones. But I would certainly be interested in having a conversation with Andy about where he sees this

Chris Norton: 46:23

going. We've got another question in. So a question from Isabel. Thank you. How can PR professionals maintain authenticity in a world increasingly filled with synthetic media? Well,

Stuart Bruce: 46:36

we are sitting here around the table.

Chris Norton: 46:38

Or are we?

Will Ockenden: 46:39

Is it really a table?

Stuart Bruce: 46:41

Absolutely. Is that really a cake? You know, but this could be. a kind of AI-generated video. But actually, I think one of the things we're going to see a resurgence of is the value of face-to-face. Yeah. You know, but, you know, when I went to kind of Vienna last week, you know, the real value wasn't in hearing loads of amazing presentations from some amazing people. It was actually chatting to them afterwards. It was chatting, you know, over the coffee breaks. Connections. Yeah, in the bar at night. You know, let me just use one example. We're doing, it's just great how you guys are kind of embracing video. You know, one of the kind of standout presentations last week was Nicole Moreo from LinkedIn. She's like the head of insights in North America. And she was kind of talking about how kind of powerful video is. And the fact that, yeah, I think it was six, yeah, six in 10 respondents said it helped them to inform, the video helped them to inform buying decisions.

Chris Norton: 47:38

So if you're out there thinking about hiring a PR agency, we do know one available. Well done, guys. Good work.

Stuart Bruce: 47:44

Great video, Steve. You see, they can't use that word up well, didn't they? They'll begin them but the other thing was she also talked about something to do that she called about kind of memories and that's the kind of the key thing about video you know it sticks in your memory Yeah, you will remember it. You might not remember all the details, but it might trigger an emotion. And when people are making buy-in decisions, they always start off with this kind of short initial consideration list. It doesn't matter what model you use. And then they'll do their research and they'll go and expand it, et cetera, et cetera. And then they'll kind of start, after they've expanded it, they'll start reducing it again. Usually... That kind of research bit's a waste of time because it's somebody off that initial consideration list that gets the work, that gets appointed is what they're by. And video is one of the best ways of getting on to that initial consideration list because it triggers that memory. Memory and the trust. Trust, I would think. Digital trust or not? I think trust is part of it, but I think it's more about that emotional connection because, you know, we've just kind of covered how trust can be, you know, how do we know whether the AI video is real? But I think that resurgence of, you know, two things, kind of that face-to-face interaction and that kind of audio-visual content.

Will Ockenden: 49:02

Hopefully we've answered Isabelle's question there. Yeah, I think so. She's given us a thumbs up. She says, yes, we have. Thanks, Isabelle. That's brilliant.

Chris Norton: 49:10

So, I mean, when I had this committee chat this morning, like on AI, I just said the last two months have just blown my mind on AI. I think if you've used it, just revisit it because it is just the reasoning models are incredible. It's like having a barrister in your pocket. It's like having an accountant in your pocket.

Stuart Bruce: 49:27

Yeah.

Chris Norton: 49:28

It's

Stuart Bruce: 49:29

unbelievable. I think that key phrase you just used there, if you haven't used it recently, there are so many people that we talk to where they have doubled with AI, and they're not overly impressed. And usually for two reasons is, one, they doubled too long ago, so it wasn't as good as it is now. And secondly, they were rubbish. They were like asking dumb questions with dumb prompts. You know, if you kind of recognize the advances and you actually use it properly, I mean, that could have, you know, whatever you call it, whether it's deep research, they've all got the different names for it. That's phenomenal. You know, you can, you know, if you want to like prepare for a media interview or something, you know, you do deep research on a journalist, that's phenomenal. You know, why would you need your media database?

Chris Norton: 50:14

Yeah, I mean, deep research is on all of them, isn't it? But you can like, basically, if you haven't used it, you can put in, you can basically come up with your dissertation that you did at university. I spent eight months writing mine and read about 18 books on PR and marketing What a dream that was. It was all about corporate identity. Now, you can do that in a sentence. You can say, do me a research on this, this, and this. Compare this with this. And it will take about 30 minutes, but it will use multiple sources. And you can follow it through its process. And at the end of it, it will spit out a report that is like fully sourced and is PhD level. And those citations, well, I'm not

Stuart Bruce: 50:55

sure about the PhD level, but it's very good. Yeah, okay. Well, it's supposed to

Chris Norton: 50:59

be PhD

Stuart Bruce: 50:59

level. Yeah. And I think the citations are really important because it gets over that kind of hallucination element. But it's also an example of how kind of all of these products have feature creeps. So it's a bit of a pointless argument about which is best, you know, because I think it was last week or maybe the week before that Microsoft added research and analyst to Copilot. Okay. So you can now do the deep research within your secure co-pilot environment, which you couldn't before. So one of the arguments we had with some clients is, yeah, we'll use a paid chat GPT account because you get deep research. You don't need to. It's

Chris Norton: 51:35

now part of it. One of the concerns I've got is if you're a business, like if the marketing team's listening to this, right, you've got 20 people in marketing. They get co-pilot and they go, like a lot of people, they just get the free one or co-pilot you have to pay for. I've got that as well. You install it, you use it, you watch a few videos on the key things, but actually it's rolling it out and staying on top of

Stuart Bruce: 51:54

it.

Chris Norton: 51:54

So we

Stuart Bruce: 51:55

have got something we call the AI adoption illusion, which is what you just described. It was all an illusion. No, people are under the illusion that if you get some AI tools, it's going to make a radical difference to your business. It ain't. It's going to do the squat. We can clip that bit.

Will Ockenden: 52:12

That's the sound bite.

Stuart Bruce: 52:12

We've got 15 minutes left.

Chris Norton: 52:13

It's

Stuart Bruce: 52:14

actually nine minutes left, I believe. But yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned that Australian government one where they saved 14 minutes a week. But that's because they didn't do any training and they didn't have a proper plan. What the

Will Ockenden: 52:24

heck did they expect? So getting the tools is not enough. You need to proactively use them.

Chris Norton: 52:28

And how do you stay on top of the training though? Because it's a new story. Literally in the week so many things come out, don't

Stuart Bruce: 52:36

they? Some of it is how you structure how you're working. So it's like how do you stay on top of the training for anything else in the firm? I was quite amused by you've got an AI committee. That's just a lovely quaint word, committee. Most people we spoke to have got working groups. Well, it's a steering. It's a work steering

Will Ockenden: 52:55

group. What's a more sophisticated

Chris Norton: 52:57

steering group? I'm going to get a more complicated jargon word to make me sound clever. It basically is a group of people to be evangelists on AI on different tools. Whether that's Claude, Gemini, Chachi, BT and Copilot. Because it's basically we're in the Betamax or VHS CD or vinyl stage, aren't we?

Stuart Bruce: 53:17

Which one? Well, no, I'm not sure we are actually, because I'd go back to that thing about, you know, what's your office suite? That's going to be the core product that everybody in the company is going to use. Then you enhance it with the other ones.

Chris Norton: 53:29

Okay. So everyone roll out Copilot if you're Microsoft.

Will Ockenden: 53:32

Because no one wants to roll out Minidisc, do they?

Stuart Bruce: 53:35

Yeah. I love Minidisc.

Chris Norton: 53:36

I know, it's

Will Ockenden: 53:36

great.

Stuart Bruce: 53:37

And people have this argument, but it's not the best. Of course it's not. I would never, ever claim it is. But if you want kind of that productivity research across the team and some, because that's the other thing about kind of your computer I

Chris Norton: 53:51

feel ashamed here. Is this my marketing mistake?

Will Ockenden: 53:56

We call it a council. Is that even more old school? The AI council.

Chris Norton: 53:59

Isabel, you need to rebrand it. Come up with a name. We'll run it through chapter GPT and come up with a cooler name.

Stuart Bruce: 54:04

But one of the key things to making, but if you want to call it work, is you need two types of people on it. You need kind of the AI evangelists and early adopters, but you also need the laggards and the refuseniks. You need, because that's the way. Is that the Gartner hype cycle? Yeah. The extreme ends of it. Yeah. You want both people because actually where you're going to get the biggest impact on the company is if everybody's using it a certain amount. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. And you've got to be careful. And that's why you need a really good AI policy in place. And it wants to be one that kind of makes it safe and reduces all the risk and encourages people to use it. Then you also need an element that allows innovation. So if you do have people that want to experiment and stuff, provide a mechanism, you know. I've

Chris Norton: 54:51

got a question. So let's say we rolled out Copilot to the entire agency, right? So 28 people all get it. Let's say you had a secure server within your server. Would it interrogate that? Or would your security level

Stuart Bruce: 55:05

stop

Chris Norton: 55:06

you looking at different

Stuart Bruce: 55:07

things? So when you'd roll out Copilot to everybody in the thing, it would, they basically have access to what they already have access to. Oh, right, okay. So if there's certain folders and teams, channels and stuff then that's what Copilot would be looking at Yeah because you wouldn't want

Chris Norton: 55:24

to give all your personalised data to a business out in San Francisco would you? Sorry, you lost me. Well, like Microsoft, for instance, you don't want them to have access to all your... But they've already got access, Chris. That's

Stuart Bruce: 55:37

true. If you're storing stuff in the cloud, that's why the security bit's the same. Yeah, fair point. The concern is that you accidentally, because your folders and your team structures and stuff, the permissions aren't set up properly, you give access to the wrong people in the team. So you accidentally let everybody go and have a browse of salaries or something like that. But then

Will Ockenden: 55:58

that, I mean, how would that information ever manage? So let's say a client briefs you on a highly confidential acquisition. You put that into your AI tool. Arguably, could that then show up if somebody did a search saying, what company is X likely to be acquired by? AI could then potentially give a response based on the information you've shared with us.

Stuart Bruce: 56:19

So not AI as a whole. If you were using it in, say, your secure embryo, and you can see there's like a little shield when you use it as a co-pilot. So you know that you can have securities on. You know, the only people that be able to access that highly confidential information are the people that you've given permission to do so within your company. Hence the reason you need to have got your SharePoint set up properly. You know, it depends how, you know, maybe not every account team needs access to

Chris Norton: 56:45

every bit a bit. I'll tell you, we've got like another four minutes, but I'll tell you what is interesting. The fact that ChatGPT, OpenAI owned, you're able to connect it to your Microsoft and Google stuff. So Google, who are selling completely different products, are allowing Microsoft or OpenAI to connect to their... That to me blows my mind. It's like they're all competing against each other. Yeah. Some weird landscape.

Stuart Bruce: 57:10

I think... So when I said you choose between a Google environment or a Microsoft environment, I think what OpenAI are doing now with GPT and connectors is really interesting because potentially it means that's not true. But... Other than you're still always going to have that element of complexity that you're adding in by doing it through a third party. And I think because it's so new, I think it's too early to say whether that element of complexity and cost that you're adding is worth it. Yeah. I mean, that

Speaker 02: 57:40

was fun.

Unknown: 57:42

Good discussion, because there's literally so much going on. I mean, we could cover it monthly.

Stuart Bruce: 57:46

There's that much going on

Speaker 02: 57:47

in

Stuart Bruce: 57:48

this area. It's not something to be ignored anymore for me.

Unknown: 57:51

I think everybody needs to be reviewing it regularly and updating everything. I've got five suggestions for a new name for our committee. It might not even be called a committee. That's probably my fault. Some of these are awful, I've got to be honest. I think they've come straight from chat to you.

Chris Norton: 58:04

Innovation and forward-looking, with a little rocket at the beginning.

Will Ockenden: 58:07

I like the rocket.

Chris Norton: 58:08

You like the rocket. AI Futures Forum. That's quite nice. Really? Yeah, it's a bit of a declaration. I think there's a creative bunch of people we can come up with a few better than this, but thank you for sharing. So if anyone wants to get a hold of you, Stuart, how can they get a hold of you?

Stuart Bruce: 58:22

Oh, I'm on any platform you care to mention. If you kind of look for Stuart Bruce, or if you go to kind of the company website, purposeforrelations.com,

Will Ockenden: 58:32

And if we ask AI for a recommendation into a leading comms AI consultant, will it recommend you? It sometimes does

Chris Norton: 58:40

and it sometimes

Will Ockenden: 58:40

doesn't. No pressure.

Chris Norton: 58:43

Yeah, I think that's it. If you don't subscribe to the show, please subscribe to the show because we're available on all podcast platforms. So Embracing Marketing Mistakes, just go to our website. You can subscribe on all the podcast platforms. We'd love you to take a listen. We've done tons of stuff in lots of different areas on the show. We haven't talked about many mistakes. today, mainly just me screwing things up. But that's what we usually talk about. I just want to say thank you to Stuart for joining us and for Will. And thank you to you guys for joining us too.