Exploring the Impact of AI and Economic Challenges in PR with CIPR Past President, Stephen Waddington

Chris Norton: 0:00

Welcome to socially unacceptable, the only podcast for marketers, PR professionals, entrepreneurs looking to grow their brands that actually celebrates the biggest marketing mistakes, mishaps and misfortunes, and today is no different than that. Today in the studio we've got a man who I've been connected to for probably about 15, 20 years, but he's been in public relations for 29 years. I'll let him know that today, Mr Stephen Waddington. Stephen is an expert in public relations. He's worked for some of the biggest international agencies, including Weber Shandwick and Ketchum, and he's even sold two agencies himself, which he talks about in this piece, which is really, really interesting. So, like if you want to know about what it's like to sell an agency, that's an interesting chat.

Chris Norton: 0:43

Today is the managing partner of Waddington Incorporated. I don't know where he came up with the name, but we'll have to ask him that as well. He runs that with his wife, sarah, and who is also a CBE and, as he describes, a force of nature, she's brilliant on Twitter as well. You want to check her out. Together, they advise agencies from the marketing sphere on how to run much more effectively. So today the chat is much more about communications and how communications is affected by disruptive technology. So hopefully you'll enjoy it. There's a little bit of AI in there as well, if you want. So without further ado, let's get into the episode and let the man speak for himself, here you go.

Stephen Waddington: 1:28

The auto generation stuff is terrifying from the perspective of being weaponized. You don't know anymore what content with Biden is real and what's not, because there's so much, so much false information out there. It's terrifying. I haven't looked at that market.

Will Ockenden: 1:40

What have you learned from running agencies successfully through those kind of challenging periods?

Stephen Waddington: 1:46

I guess there's two things. First thing is sticking to clients and doing exceptional work because they'll stay with you and stay loyal. That's the first thing. Second thing is really strong fiscal management. There's just been some really bad practice around ghosting and the phantom pitch thing would go out to two and a client goes out to six companies or eight companies and I immediately red flagged them.

Chris Norton: 2:14

Yeah, well, god, we've had loads that we've turned down and decent brands as well. I'm just like, how many are you going to? 'Oh, we're going to eight.' We had one that said 13 once.

Will Ockenden: 2:23

And it's a very very well-known brand. They're going to 13 agencies, so what's your view on should agencies be paid to pitch?

Chris Norton: 2:31

Great, that'd be nice, wouldn't it? Because it's hilarious. They've been saying that since I was, since I started.

Vicki Murphy: 2:41

Welcome to socially unacceptable, from f**k ups to fame, the marketing podcast that celebrates the professional mishaps, mistakes and misjudgments, while delivering valuable marketing and life lessons in the time it takes you to eat your lunch.

Chris Norton: 2:59

Today we're lucky enough to be joined by Mr Stephen Waddington, soon to be Dr Stephen Waddington. Well, that's is the perfect show for that mate. So thanks for joining us, Stephen. How are you doing?

Stephen Waddington: 3:12

Yeah, I'm all right. I'm all right. It's good to be in Leeds and to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Chris Norton: 3:17

Yeah, good. So we want to talk to you about disruption then, disruption in communication. So you've been in PR for and I've done the maths on this, 29 years. Yeah, it's 29 years, it's 1994 you started your career.

Chris Norton: 3:38

Aou really committed to it by doing a degree in electronics, didn't you?

Stephen Waddington: 3:41

Yeah, I did yeah.

Stephen Waddington: 3:43

Yeah that was my first f**k up. Did engineering and I didn't like it. Like so many kids, I've got a son, Dan 17, at the moment doing his A-levels, just doesn't know what he wants to do and how are you expected to make choices at that age. I was reasonably competent at both English and Sciences, had a natural aptitude, I guess, for engineering and thought that would be interesting. None of my family had ever gone to university. Found a degree at Salford University which looked really interesting because there's a lot of application in it.

Stephen Waddington: 4:21

It was a time when the microelectronics industry in the UK was really really booming around Cambridge and it seemed to make sense. Did three years and never do a degree in engineering at university. It's one of those degrees where there were the classroom time was five or six hours a day and then you have labs on top of that, so effectively, contact time was full time and that was tough. I did a year out in industry absolutely hated it, working for a consulting engineer called Mot MacDonald on the Dartford River Tunnel doing commissioning, a toll booth system.

Stephen Waddington: 5:09

On nights and it was awful. It was unsociable, reasonable money, but there's more to life isn't there. Went back and did my original, went back and finished it and qualified, but then decided I didn't want to do engineering.

Chris Norton: 5:27

So how did you get your first job then? Because that's a jump, isn't it?

Stephen Waddington: 5:31

Well, yeah, so I got offered onto the training scheme at Mott MacDonald but decided no. I was going to. I started looking around for roles to do technical writing because I'd recognised that all the way actually through university I've been writing for a magazine that Maplin used to publish. You might remember electronics sort of been freelancing. I'd always had a sort of entrepreneurial glint and ability to make money on the side and so I'd done that and you know I had a natural attitude for it and quite enjoyed it. So I became a technical writer and got a job in a PR agency that happened to work for ARM, as it was advanced risk machines. It was literally 12 people in Cambridge in a barn when it first started back in 1995.

Chris Norton: 6:24

And now just yesterday, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as the first British export. Wow, that is timely.

Will Ockenden: 6:33

So fast forward a few years into the world of PR. So I now understand your kind of focus on disruption and technology and, arguably, where a lot of that comes from. How did you? Kind of take that leap then from sort of where you started into very senior levels in PR agencies.

Stephen Waddington: 6:57

I reckon, so I always say I've benefited of every aspect of my career from an aspect of change in the market, and you call that frame that as disruption. So initially it's the build up, you know, when microelectronics became a thing in the mid 90s, then the internet, the end of the 90s, then the application layer, the plumbing, and then the application layer that was built out onto the internet, and then you know the shift from PC to mobile and the shift to social media, and so at every juncture I've sort of tried to be ahead or tried to be on the wave and ride that wave and, you know, managed to do it. And here we are again. We've got AI happening right. Right at the moment it's happening again. So there's that. And then there's just, you know, as you say, 29 years. You're around in the industry for 29 years. You know you go through the cycles of the economic cycles and you know, recognize the patterns, and so I guess those two things, the confluence of those two things, is, you know, where I built my career.

Chris Norton: 8:07

So you worked for Weber Shandwick, right? That was your second job. So your first job was an agency, small agency called MMC, and then you moved up to Weber Shandwick.

Stephen Waddington: 8:16

It was called Weber at the time. Run by a guy called Larry Weber, incredible man, sort of 6. 5ft, 6. 6ft, huge, huge personality who built out this I guess influencer agency way before we called agencies influencer agencies but was right at the Vanguard of the application layer being built on the internet. He did the merger with Shamwick, became Weber Shandwick.

Chris Norton: 8:45

Oh right, well interesting. So then, from there you went. Is that when you set up Rainier?

Stephen Waddington: 8:49

Yeah, then Steve Earl and I set up Rainier. We wanted to, but this was the time, the late 90s, incredible time, where everybody was building a business out on the back of the internet. All our mates were doing startups. And so you know, with the cockiness of youth, we believed that we could run an agency better than our bosses could run an agency.

Chris Norton: 9:12

And how did you find that? With the show being about fuckups?

Stephen Waddington: 9:18

No, that is how, that literally is how every agency starts that you know a bunch of creative people get together and think, you know, the culture here is a bit shit, or we could do this better than ourselves, or you know we're earning a load of money here for when we aren't seeing the value that we think we're worth. And, yes, how every agency starts.

Chris Norton: 9:41

So, at rainier, how many did you get to? How long did you go?

Stephen Waddington: 9:44

Rainier, got to 28 people. You've probably got the data in front of you. Got to 28 people, billing two and a half million. Grew really fast on the back of the build out of the internet and, you know, fortuitous, and then we sold it into.

Chris Norton: 10:03

What year was that you sold it?

Stephen Waddington: 10:06

You tell me 2005, 2006.

Chris Norton: 10:08

Yeah, I was going to say because I started in 2000 in PR and I joined on the dot com, right on the wave of the dot com boom, just as you talked about there, and then I was also right on the way. Then, a year later, the dot com crash happened. So that would have been three or four years after that. So you didn't sell on the peak of it, you sold just after. Did that affect it, or were you not that plugged into it?

Stephen Waddington: 10:32

Effectively massively. Because you're seeing, I mean we're going through an economic downturn at the moment and you see, you know the private equity market, the catches are cold. You know early stage companies don't get reinvested. Everything gets really, really tight and challenging and, yeah, we had two or three years of that before it then recovered.

Chris Norton: 10:53

Yeah, cool. So then you finished Rainier, yeah, and then what did you do then? Because what interested me here, like having done my research, is you closed the agency? You sold the agency in February and then March you sell up again, another one. How did you manage to do that?

Stephen Waddington: 11:10

So we sold. Well, this is positioning, fuck up, call it what you will, it's probably a fuck up. I'm going to frame it as a fuck up. Because we sold the agency into a company called Lowey Group. Lowey Group is very typical of marketing services groups, or was, in that an entrepreneur raises some capital and uses that capital to buy and grow a group by basically leveraging it's like you know, rental properties, using the profits from one to buy another, which is great when a market's on the upturn. When a market goes on the downturn, like 2008, then it's really challenging. You know, in preparing for today, you'd ask me to talk about my greatest fuck up and exiting agencies and so forth, and I think selling Rainier too early was a.

Chris Norton: 12:09

You should have held it longer?

Stephen Waddington: 12:10

Well, so what we did. We did a deal where we took Rainier into Lowey and then there were three agencies within Lowey, three PR agencies in Lowey, and Steve and I brought them all together under a modern proposition called Speed, which is why, you see, there was this switch.

Chris Norton: 12:31

Ah right, that makes sense.

Stephen Waddington: 12:32

On a turn, and so there were Mantra, BMA and Rainier that came together to become Speed. Speed around a modern proposition of, as you say. We had traditional media, social media, the internet, websites and apps, and that PESO model was started to be talked about as an integrated proposition and Steve and I developed a business around that. Yeah, I guess you know I learned from that. That there are lots. I actually learned this from Sarah and my wife as well. There are lots of ways to extract value from a business. At the time, you know, in early 30s, the seeming natural way to do it was you built scale very quickly and then sold and collected your money and moved on to the next one. Actually, there's lots of ways to do it.

Will Ockenden: 13:27

Yeah, so taking a step back then, you've obviously run and managed agencies through fairly serious economic downturns. What have you learned from running agencies successfully through those kind of challenging periods?

Stephen Waddington: 14:43

I guess there's two things. First thing is sticking to clients and doing exceptional work because they'll stay with you and stay loyal through whatever you have to. You know, whatever the circumstances and relationships that have you know, people become friends and that I continue to work with. That's the first. And second thing is really strong fiscal management. So get a good financial director or financial manager who's across all the numbers and is able to give you the data. Stick on collections, make sure you've got good terms. It's basic, basic stuff, but so many people don't do well.

Will Ockenden: 15:27

Yeah, suppose we from our own experience. Covid was that first major shock to the system, wasn't it?

Chris Norton: 15:36

And we've had control growth every year, for 10 years, and we lost I think it was 85% of revenue in 24 hours and it was just yeah. I mean, that's not just us, that's everybody. Everybody out there, every business owner out there, like I say, I give them like you, you have been through the shit

Chris Norton: 15:56

Because being in a service industry, you had to be open for some clients and not for others, which was and it was like a bloody balancing act. And then you were getting people being upset that they were being furloughed and people that weren't being furloughed

Will Ockenden: 16:10

It was a difficult situation, so I'm kind of bringing it up to speed. Then, covid, what happened to the kind of the role of the PR advisor or the PR consultant in corporations then. Presumably, we suddenly became front and center?

Stephen Waddington: 16:25

Well so, there was whiplash. There was the situation Chris just described, where you like, in the immediate aftermath. There was the weekend in March 2020 where we're all packed up our laptops, went home and, you know, probably ignored email, because every single email that came in was like sorry, we're going to have to cut, sorry, we're going to have to cut. And there was a period of hiatus for about six weeks where it was just dreadful. I was managing business, a digital agency, at the time and, yeah, it was just. It was really, really challenging and you know the furlough scheme came in place, but that added a level of jeopardy because, as you say, you've got the cultural issues within an organization about. You know how do you operate within the scheme and treat everybody equitably. The only way you can do that is a really open and candid conversation. That's incredibly hard in a remote environment.

Chris Norton: 17:24

Back to back as well. It was like literally one after the other. If you've got a number of staff, was that Metia?

Stephen Waddington: 17:33

But there was then this moment when we sort of began to get our heads around. You know the issue. Organizations retooled and reorganized themselves and, in doing that, went through a huge amount of complex disruption. Where they needed to, you know they needed communications or public relations just to help deal with that situation, so reorganizing their supply chains, reorganizing and reconfiguring teams. So we had a very front and center role in that. And then anybody that was working in public relations, within the public sector, around safety, around health, you know, was front and center as part of the response to it. And that continued right the way through, you know, the 18 months of the COVID crisis.

Will Ockenden: 18:22

So where are we at now, then? Has that kind of, has that remained that kind of?

Stephen Waddington: 18:29

So, I did, I did two.

Stephen Waddington: 18:30

So Wads Inc. is a product of COVID because you know, sarah and I was stuck at home thinking so many things changed for everybody during that time and I just recognized the opportunity to sort of do what I'd been thinking about doing for really four or five years but I didn't have the bravery to do it and that was go out alone and start a professional advisory firm, and so it created the opportunity and space to do that and reorganize. We did a couple of projects very early on one for the government communication service, looking at the role of professional communications and the impact of COVID on that. You're right, we saw this elevation. And then we did another for the NHS, created a community from basically through the north of England, through 13 NHS trusts, and brought together the commons directors, really for therapy as much as anything and to share best practice. And there every single individual was part of Gold Command and you know the highest management group within the organization, right at the front and center. And yeah, you're right, it's reverted in almost all organizations how all is reverting.

Will Ockenden: 19:49

Back to the level we were at before?

Stephen Waddington: 19:51

Back to the level we were at before, that's disheartening, isn't it?

Will Ockenden: 19:53

So what do we need to do to build?

Stephen Waddington: 19:56

It's not disheartening, it happens. And it's partly why I'm in Leeds that out of that work, I spotted that moment and I thought, blimey, there is something that has happened here to public relations. And finally we've been banging on about it being recognized strategically and by management being paid properly, you know, along with other professional services. This is our moment, and so I start this relationship with Leeds Business School, at Beckett, looking at these issues, and that's turned out into a doctoral project, and one of the things we found as part of that work is there are these situations where, you know, leaders of an organization the CEO will call an expert advice when they're in a media firestorm, when they've got issues with leadership within the leadership team for relationship issues, when there is, you know, a crisis situation and COVID was one of those situations but it reverts as soon as the crisis passes.

Chris Norton: 20:56

So do you actually do it? So you advise now but you help businesses, agency owners and stuff like that mentoring type stuff, is that right? Do you actually do any public relations? When was the last press release you sent out?

Stephen Waddington: 21:11

That's a really good question, actually. We wrote a paper actually on AI in PR.

Chris Norton: 21:16

Yeah, we've read it.

Stephen Waddington: 21:16

Back in March. Yeah, so I wrote the press release about that, actually.

Will Ockenden: 21:20

I edited the press release.

Stephen Waddington: 21:21

I edited the press release with GPT.

Chris Norton: 21:23

The GPT wrote?

Stephen Waddington: 21:24

The GPT wrote yeah. But yeah, so sorry, do I still practice no.

Will Ockenden: 21:32

Well, that leads us quite nicely on to AI then, doesn't it? So we're really interested in kind of disruption and those kind of disruptive technologies or happenings in the world of PR that people have to get on board with. Is it fair to say AI is the disruptive technology of our times, or is there other things we need to be concerned about as well and aware of?

Stephen Waddington: 21:47

So AI is one of those technologies been around for, you know, since the 1950s.

Stephen Waddington: 21:52

What we've got at the moment though is a confluence of computing power, large language models and the ability to interact with a natural language.

Stephen Waddington: 22:03

You know, and for good or bad, open AI and we can debate whether it was ethically sound released its large language model in November on the world, and suddenly, everybody you know AI went from being talked about in research and product development teams to suddenly it's part of every border and conversation and, from a risk perspective. In public relations, though you can see, you know, at every level there is a potential for it to be disruptive, or you know, and that disruption could make us work smarter, could make us work more effectively, and it might help us start to help save cost and particularly around labor, and you know so there are a whole range of issues there. I mean, you know, embedded within your workflow already. I have no doubt you're probably transcribing this podcast using Otter AI, right? Brilliant piece of technology that will then, you know, start to extract from that, you know, key themes. You know it will start to write contact reports if you've, you know, everyone's favourite job.

Stephen Waddington: 23:16

Well, yeah, but then you know.

Chris Norton: 23:18

Let's be honest, we hate the admin, it's like a half a day job.

Stephen Waddington: 23:21

So you know, if you can get a first draft out of Otter, then away you go is much better. We're using loads and you know. Anywhere where you've got a stakeholder in your interview and you want to capture the response, then you know you might as well record it. In fact you pop to the meeting, record it and you know and capture it. I think what's really interesting is then where you. Then, when it starts to analyse the data, it gets back and tell you. You know the sentiment of the different speakers in the room. Chris, you really should cheer up.

Chris Norton: 23:53

Yeah, you really should cheer up and chip in more. You haven't said enough in the meeting.

Stephen Waddington: 23:57

Share a voice in the meeting. You know, you've been a bit quiet, speak up.

Chris Norton: 24:02

So we I mean we did a webinar a few hundred marketers the other day on this and I did a couple of live demos, one with Bard and it's hilarious because I asked it to write live while I was doing this video webinar. I asked it to write a biography on William Ockendon of Prohibition PR and interestingly I'd already done it on me to see what it pulled out and it wrote a biography of Will and it said that he liked to play golf and he's never played golf in his

Chris Norton: 24:31

And this leads me to the next question is right, because the problem with AI is it's the average of averages. So, just like all these SEO, surfer and all these other tools, you're averaging the average of the average and also it makes shit up, it does AI hallucinations and it's creating content that's not real. So we're in th we could be in the area now of communications, with disinformation I think, and COVID is a good example of that. There was loads of disinformation with COVID.

Stephen Waddington: 25:00

So there's two aspects to this and I think I'm really concerned. Sorry, let's just back up and think about 2010, 2008, 2009, 2010. hen Steve Earl and I wrote a book called 'Brand AnarcKey ey and then 'Brand Vandals' Bundl so basically sales books for the agency that were running, and we looked at the potential for social media to damage reputations and what organizations can do with it. At no point when we wrote those books did we envisage people actually going and weaponizing social media and seeing some of the corruption that you see and what happens on X, witter, tiktok, so forth. You think about now if you use generative AI, hat, gpt, claude, you know, or Bard to create content that you then push out on social media, with, you know, elections coming up, as we know, in the next 12 months in the US and in the UK.

Chris Norton: 26:08

Y he elections, things really frightening.

Stephen Waddington: 26:11

It is terrifying. I'm sure because there's just no regulation. I mean, these systems have been public, have been, you know, pen. Ai made this technology available back in November last year without any guardrails whatsoever, and it's sort of been retrofitting.

Chris Norton: 26:25

Yeah, and you've got people like Mo Garda and all those a lot leaving Google because it's not being fire.

Stephen Waddington: 26:31

Yeah well, not being fired, sorry not being fired, but yeah, they've walked out because they don't trust it.

Chris Norton: 26:36

They don't trust it. And if they don't trust it and they've made it. oly shit, what does that mean for the rest of us? It's a concern.

Chris Norton: 26:45

Ir challenge you though.

Stephen Waddington: 26:46

I challenge you though econd point I challenge you, though, on so you're talking about generative AI. I challenge you on yeah and all the excitement's on that, because apparently it's like you know, it is like magic. I do think there's something weird happened in our psyche as well, where we're describing human characteristics on to know what is effectively a machine. Suddenly we're saying please and thank you, and you know it's, it's now. I don't know. I've done that. We've always done that with things like Siri or Alexa, Right, because you're in front of your kids and it's. You know we should be polite, but all of a sudden we're. We're describing like those human characteristics to t command line prompts on a browser interface.

Chris Norton: 27:22

What you've just said there is. The reason why I bought Alexa, however many years ago, when it was new, is because I thought it was going to be what ChatGPT is. It doesn't seem to have got any cleverer, Alexa. The body doesn't seem to have got any smarter, even after all these years.

Will Ockenden: 27:38

I think I use it for setting an egg timer, and that's about it.

Chris Norton: 27:41

Well, Chat GPT is intelligent as Einstein and in the next five months. I've done it, I've banged on the table. In the next five months, it's going to be 10 times more intelligent than that and more intelligent than we can comprehend. Really, Alexa, isn't?

Stephen Waddington: 27:54

I think you're focused on the generative technology. That's one aspect of it and you're right. We've all seen the hallucinations and you know. Ask it to write a biography of yourself, and you're right, it will get the nearest, you know, nearest middle-aged white man it can find, and you know you'll end up playing golf. But reductive AI is, I think, really interesting and you know the application of Lake Otter where you're getting it to do transcript. You're getting machine to do transcription. That's an example of reductive AI. If you're asking it to look at large documents and interrogate those documents from a certain perspective, that's you know, incredibly useful. Because suddenly you know you're extending the capability of your own, you know what you can do with your own physical, human being.

Chris Norton: 28:44

Yeah, I loved your example of like upload your. You do a live demo in your AI chat, where you upload your white paper and then ask it to ask the application to write you a press release, and it is the beginning. It's the beginning of content and it's a good enough to go as an exec, but it's not the finished. It's not something you'd be proud of and it's still got a lot of Americanisms in it as well hasn't it?

Stephen Waddington: 29:06

It's the first draft. It's the first draft. The real power I've found if you're uploading a transcript or you're uploading, you know a complex document, you know research papers and so forth, and you're asking it to extract key themes, key arguments and so forth. That's incredibly useful. So creating more shit content. The internet's got enough, stop.

Chris Norton: 29:28

Yeah, the internets full. When I first met Will right, we met the agency that was doing content marketing for the Sock Shop. Do you remember that? And this guy was working in content and he was writing was it 50 blogs a week on socks? I was like fuck me, no one can pay me that much.

Will Ockenden: 29:47

So okay, taking a step back. I feel like the bigger PR agencies, the more innovative PR agencies, get AI and they're starting to learn about AI, but we're in a bit of a bubble. So what about these agencies that aren't terribly sophisticated, or kind of comms people or marketing people at brands, you know, mid-sized brands that aren't particularly techy? What advice would you give to them regarding AI? Should they upskill immediately? Do they need to know about it? Can they sit in the wings for a little while?

Stephen Waddington: 30:13

I think you need to know about it from the risk perspective and you know Chris has done a good job at winding us all up about that. Definitely, if not least, because you know what's out there in the public sphere, what's your agency providing to you and how's it generating that, or people you work with. So you need to be aware of it from a risk perspective. I think there's a lot of hype. You know we're right at the peak of the Gartner Cove. There's a lot of hype around and lots of shiny new toys and every single day there's another 10, you know another 10 tools that are going to do you know this and the other. So there's an awful lot of hype around it. But I think, yeah, you need a group of people within your organization who are looking at this and figuring you know, deconstructing workflow and figuring out where you could use it within your workflow and then running some tests and experiments.

Chris Norton: 31:13

Are you using it every day in your workflow? I am as well.

Stephen Waddington: 31:17

Every single day. Every single day.

Will Ockenden: 31:21

And then from a tools perspective, I noticed you've written that you've kind of shared an article about the or written an article about the top AI tools people should be concerned with now. Have you got any recommendations where people can start? We've all heard about, you know, Chat GPT, but what else so?

Stephen Waddington: 31:34

So, Chat GPT is great. There's a large language model called Claude, created by a startup called Anthropic. We've been using that a lot.

Will Ockenden: 31:44

What does that do?

Stephen Waddington: 31:45

Well. So it works exactly like Chat GPT, but I've just found the results are better from it in terms of the reductive capabilities. So you can upload a document or series of documents, start asking it questions around those documents incredibly useful. So, for example, you know you create in a briefing book you've got, you know you put someone forward for an interview, you ask it, you know you basically put it into the role of a journalist and ask what are the hardest questions a journalist would ask if they wanted to challenge someone around a particular topic and it will start, you know, providing those materials for you.

Will Ockenden: 32:23

Any other tools you want to talk about? I mean, I've noticed an awful lot of video tools and image generating tools.

Chris Norton: 32:29

Oh, God, that Gordon Ramsay video that we shared on the webinar. Yeah, everyone looks like a waxwork.

Chris Norton: 32:38

His face kept like melting. But it was Gordan Ramsay's voice. It was all auto generated.

Stephen Waddington: 32:40

Yeah, the auto generation stuff is terrifying from the perspective of being weaponized. You don't know anymore what you know content with the Biden is real and what's not, because there's so much, so much false information out there. It's terrifying. I haven't looked at that market at all, or audio-generation stuff.

Chris Norton: 33:01

I'll be honest with you, the video is shit. It's shit at the moment. From what we've seen the tools that are out there, the video generation is not great yet, but it's going to get better.

Will Ockenden: 33:11

It's getting better every month, yeah.

Chris Norton: 33:13

So, but the voice stuff is amazing, the fact that you can transcribe it in from a single word from one word or yeah, like from a podcast, we can generate a whole interview with you even though you're not even there. It's mad.

Will Ockenden: 33:26

So, ethically then, what should we be aware of and what are the main concerns?

Stephen Waddington: 33:30

So this is a real issue in that there's no regulatory environment around this, and you know the same happened with social media. You cannot put, you can't create law and have it waiting on the shelf for technologies to be invented. It's always reactive, but there's nothing and there's no sign. You know, if you think about what's happening in the UK at the moment, it's hard. I can't imagine they'll find any time within the next parliamentary term, before the election in 2024. I mean, it could happen January 2025. More likely to happen towards the end of next year. There's no time to get any sort of regulation through, although the issues are being well discussed within the Lords and the parliamentary group, within the Westminster, within the Commons. Same in the US the one market, the one area where there does seem to be some good, progressive conversations, particularly from a citizen perspective, around creating guardrails around this technologies in the European Union. So what do you think about that?

Will Ockenden: 34:42

So what are the implications of that? So it's the Wild West.

Stephen Waddington: 34:45

It is the Wild West, and Chris described that. You know, the ethics teams, the ethics teams. There's obviously been a tension within the tech vendors and between the product teams and the ethics teams, to the point that the ethics teams have all walked. So yeah, there's no guardrails, there's no guardrails. So you know.

Chris Norton: 35:05

And the regulation teams are getting smaller and smaller.

Stephen Waddington: 35:07

We should be concerned. We should absolutely be concerned, because we're coming to a moment with these, with the elections, where absolute damage could be caused.

Will Ockenden: 35:17

So, outside of AI, big issue we could talk about that all day. What other disruption are we seeing in the PR industry, or is everything kind of focused on AI at the moment?

Stephen Waddington: 35:27

There's a lot of discourse on AI. There's you know, the friendly conversation that's focused on my research around management, the conversation with the management. There's the economy, and you know the issues that's causing for everybody. That's driving us, I think, to focus on, you know, on effectiveness, which is good. It's got to be good. And that's been a conversation, you know, for the 29 years I've been working in the industry. We do finally seem to be making progress there, though. So yeah, so the economy, measurement, management.

Chris Norton: 36:06

You published stuff quite a lot on the economy and how the sector is doing. What is the economy just not doing very well, from what I can tell?

Stephen Waddington: 36:16

No, and I don't see. Well, I think actually we say that there was this. We did some publishing analysis back in April which was, you know, talking about the impact of the economy on the agency landscape and it's you know there's phantom pitches, pitches being pushed out, you know ghosting really bad behavior amongst the client community. You know the impact on workday work day-to-day There's a lot of short-termism, a lot of budgets being pulled and throttled back. I think that sort of played out now and it feels that we're sort of learning to live within the constraints and the operating environment that we're working in. So everyone's, you know, yes, they're focused on value, but you know we're out spending. I mean, here we are in the centre of Leeds, right, we're at Friday lunchtime and all the pubs and bars are busy.

Chris Norton: 37:20

Yeah, people still got time to go out and get drunk or have a few drinks on a Friday afternoon.

Stephen Waddington: 37:33

Sports events, busy. Arenas, Taylor Swift, busy, packed out, sold out. So there's like two speeds.

Will Ockenden: 37:41

You mentioned there, I mean we don't need to dig into this too much about the ghosting with pitches or phantom pitches and things like that. It's an endless debate Chris and I have, and I'm sure other agency owners listening to this will have. How do you decide when to go for a pitch? You know sometimes you have a list of criteria you have to tick before you're willing to go for it, but sometimes the budgets or the brand justify going for something.

Stephen Waddington: 38:11

You've got to determine your own and it's going to be so situational, but you've got to determine your own guardrails and you know you want visibility, I would suggest, of the budget holder. You want clear sight of objectives, you want clear time scales and so forth. But you know you'll always find reasons to compromise around those situations, depending on the brand and the situation you're in. I mean, from a brand perspective, from a client perspective, there's always going to be reasons why stuff's delayed or it doesn't happen. But there's just been some really bad practice around ghosting and the phantom pitch thing where you know you go out to and a client goes out, six companies or eight companies, you know immediately red flag, jump the ship.

Chris Norton: 39:04

Yeah, oh God, we've had loads that we've turned down and decent brands as well. How many are you going to? Oh, we're going to eight. We had one that said 13 once.

Will Ockenden: 39:14

Yeah, and it's a very well-known brand and they were going to 13 agencies. So what's your view on should agencies be paid to pitch? I mean that'd be nice, wouldn't it.

Chris Norton: 39:25

They've been fucking saying that since I started.

Will Ockenden: 39:28

I think I've been paid to pitch once, I think in 20 years.

Chris Norton: 39:31

Yeah maybe once or twice, it's not going to happen. No, they just go to someone else, wouldn't they?

Stephen Waddington: 39:36

Yeah, there is always somebody, and that's the problem with agencies is that they're as bad as the worst clients. That there's always somebody who will make the compromise and take the hit that you wouldn't be prepared to take, and they will have a line lower than yours.

Will Ockenden: 39:52

Unless we can get every agency in the country to agree.

Stephen Waddington: 39:58

Yeah, it won't happen. There's been various conversations about a shit list of clients that take the piss and practice.

Chris Norton: 40:12

So what does Stephen Waddington do when he's not writing content. What does he do for fun?

Stephen Waddington: 40:14

I'm always working.

Chris Norton: 40:16

I know you are. You're a work bloody holic, from what I can say. Not only that. You then go and marry somebody else who's also a workaholic in public relations.

Stephen Waddington: 40:22

She's a workaholic yeah, so we've got five kids between us, sarah and I, so that keeps you pretty busy. You know, two of the boys are keen sportsmen. One plays football, one plays rugby. That keeps us busy. You know the older girls are both away and making their own lives, but you know we're active and involved in them, with them. So you know we've got a busy family life around us.

Chris Norton: 40:52

Yeah, five kids is enough to keep you busy, and you've just done a half marathon as well.

Stephen Waddington: 40:55

Just ran a marathon? Yeah, keeping fit, trying to keep fit.

Will Ockenden: 40:58

Great North Run.

Stephen Waddington: 40:59

Extend my life. Yeah, that was a great North Run. Yeah, it's great.

Will Ockenden: 41:03

Was that last weekend was it?

Chris Norton: 41:05

Will's training for a marathon, though.

Will Ockenden: 41:07

Yeah, I drunkenly signed up to a marathon.

Stephen Waddington: 41:10

No, couldn't do a marathon. I get to the end of 30 miles and just like no.

Chris Norton: 41:15

Will's got OCD with running. He went on holiday to Majorca for two weeks and got up every day at 6am to go running in 37 degree heat.

Stephen Waddington: 41:23

Yeah, because it's too hot in the middle of the day. Yeah, I get that. It's different. I did exactly the same. We did a conference in Dubai and was out at 6 o'clock in the morning, just because you can't get it in otherwise.

Will Ockenden: 41:39

I know as soon as it gets to 9 o'clock. It's crazy, isn't it?

Chris Norton: 41:41

I was going to ask you like. I've got a question here what's the biggest PR disaster you've seen? What's the worst PR crisis you've seen?

Will Ockenden: 41:47

Or been involved with. If you can say that?

Chris Norton: 41:48

Oh, that's a good one yeah.

Stephen Waddington: 41:50

I don't know. So you asked me for the fuck up and selling an agency too early was my fuck up. The biggest crisis I've seen? I don't know. I need to think about that.

Chris Norton: 42:01

Or you've been involved in. Yeah, it's difficult, because the problem with PR crisis work is you get involved and you sign a DA and you can't say anything about all the stuff that you do. I just wondered if you had one.

Stephen Waddington: 42:13

Sorry. No, I rail against the shit ideas. Boats being floated down the Thames.

Chris Norton: 42:22

That's what they always talk about.

Will Ockenden: 42:25

Do we still do that? I think we do that. It's the new giant check shot, isn't it? Do you remember that?

Stephen Waddington: 42:35

Yeah, or the gorilla van driving with the poster.

Chris Norton: 42:42

What do you call it? The mob? What do you call it, a flash mob? A flash mob, yeah. The last one I saw floated down the Thames was for the Borat movie. The new one wasn't it for Amazon? Yeah, they floated that down the Thames. And guess what? It gets in all the national newspapers.

Stephen Waddington: 42:55

Yeah, it does. Yeah, because it makes a great. It's a photo story, it's become a cultural event. Now hasn't it, floating something down the Thames?

Chris Norton: 43:03

But it's not the creative. It's like if anyone says all the PR industry is not very creative. All they do is float stuff down the Thames, you're like, he's got a point there.

Stephen Waddington: 43:12

Yeah, can't argue with that. You've got to arrange it. You've got to. Again right, practice is so diverse. It goes from people that will stick something on a boat and sail it down the Thames for a photo stunt and it will make the national papers because it's a cultural moment, right the way through to people operating at the highest levels of government and organizations like the NHS doing really important life-saving stuff. We are a very broad discipline.

Chris Norton: 43:42

And then Paddy Power just moving the obligatory moving van outside when the Prime Minister is getting sacked, which happens every single time.

Will Ockenden: 43:51

One question we sometimes ask our guests who else do you think we should interview? Who do you think our listeners would find interesting? Is there anyone that springs to mind?

Stephen Waddington: 43:59

You should get Sarah on just because she's an absolute force of nature and a CBE.

Chris Norton: 44:11

I mean, she's got that over anything. It's like bloody Top Trumps.

Stephen Waddington: 44:20

No, I've given up on that, totally given up on that. Any idea of an honour. Because you just couldn't. No, but you know, in all seriousness, we do. No, we've got this brilliant working relationship, but she has a totally different perspective to me. She'd be good. Alex Myers, I think. I mean, we've been taking the piss out of Consumer PR, but Alex Myers, I think is one of the smartest minds from a strategy point of view, understanding, you know, publics and consumers in the biggest sense. Andrew Bruce Smith, you've already spoken to.

Chris Norton: 44:56

So thanks for coming on, Stephen. This will be out in a couple of weeks, so thanks for joining us.

Will Ockenden: 45:01

Thank you. Thanks for coming in.

Chris Norton: 45:06

Okay, so that chat with Stephen was different to normal. I think we went into it a bit differently than normal. This was a lot more about public relations today, because Stephen is an expert in communication and PR, and we talked a lot about disruption. It was quite interesting what he said about the two companies that he had as well, and the biggest fuck-up that he had was the fact that he'd sold his company too early. So the fact that you and I are hanging on for dear life and never wanting to sell to anyone, well, that's probably a good thing, right?

Will Ockenden: 45:38

I think leading several agencies, he's been in this game long enough to have led agencies through various kind of economic crises, including the dot-com crash, and also involved in agencies during COVID. So I think some of the insight he gave us there about PR's role on the top table I suppose during those occurrences was really interesting.

Will Ockenden: 46:00

Also, I feel like this episode is a nice partner episode to the Andrew Bruce Smith episode on AI, and we obviously touched on AI, particularly the ethics side of it, and it's quite. I think for all the kind of hype surrounding AI, people are worried that it's going to be terminator 2 all over again. I don't think that's the concern. The real concern is that it's a wild west when it comes to regulation and there's no legislation around it, and nor is there likely to be in the next two or three years.

Chris Norton: 46:29

No, basically, is legislation ever as fast as any sort of emerging technology? And the fact that this technology is like getting 10 times more intelligent every six months is the real worry. It's the real worry. I know I laid it on a little bit thick, but I do think that I don't think judgment day is here, but the day of misinformation, as Stephen highlighted, next year in the elections whether that's in the UK elections or in the US elections. Disinformation we might have our good friend Vladimir, might be getting in touch with controlling what happens in the elections, and we know that if Donald's involved, Mr J Trump, he's going to complain. If he doesn't win, he's going to hit you. You know what I mean. So are we in the era of disinformation, is what I'm saying?

Will Ockenden: 47:10

There's actually a very good guide that Stephen wrote with Andrew Smith, a CIPR guide to ethics in AI, available on their website. So I think if anyone else is interested in that, that's the central reading.

Chris Norton: 47:20

Yeah. So yeah, if you're going to check out. Make sure you check out the episode with Andrew Bruce Smith, because that is really interesting. If you want to deep dive into AI, we're also running a webinar right at the moment. So if you want to come onto a webinar where we go into a lot more detail and Will and I do demos, be sure to check that out. Thanks everybody for listening to Socially Unacceptable. Please do subscribe, if you like today's episode. Yeah, I know it's been a bit, a little bit different. If you do like today's episode, then subscribe where you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Then you get to see Will in, well kind of 3D, and you get to see whether he's changed his shirt in the next episode. Until then, keep fucking up.

Vicki Murphy: 48:02

Thank you for listening to Socially Unacceptable. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a five-star review. Don't forget to follow us on social media on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn at ProhibitionPR, and Twitter at SociallyUA, we would love to hear some of your career fuckups so we can share them on the show. For more information on the show, search ProhibitionPR in your search engine and click on podcasts. Until next time, please keep pushing the boundaries and embracing the socially unacceptable.