digital-pr
The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Digital PR
Published: 19/03/25 - Updated: 25/03/25
Emerging technologies, and most notably AI, continues to remain front and centre of the technological advancement landscape, and both political leaders and businesses are paying increasing attention to how to integrate it safely into our day-to-day as well as working lives.
With every industry feeling its effects to some extent, Digital Marketing and PR is no exception.
From AI-driven automation and media monitoring to creative support, emerging technologies are transforming the way PR professionals work. As PRs and Digital Marketers, we need to embrace these innovations, not as replacements for human expertise, but to streamline processes and improve results for our clients.
Artificial Intelligence: A Tool, Not a Threat
It’s important to recognise that AI should be seen as a tool to complement, not replace, human expertise. The job market is undoubtedly evolving from its impact and whilst AI may help on the more laborious tasks, it opens up the opportunity for us to focus on more innovative ones.
In the PR space, businesses are increasingly looking at how to automate routine tasks, and this is also happening in the media amongst journalists and across publications. Speaking with writers, we understand that AI tools are being used to streamline workflows and even generate content within editorial and tone of voice guidelines. Publications are also hiring AI-focussed roles, showing the direction the landscape is moving to. But AI isn’t replacing us all, but instead opening up a new wave of job titles and opportunities for us as PRs to improve our offering and increase our creativity.
Whilst the overall media landscape is continuing to adopt AI, we continue to ensure our focus is on human-focussed pitch writing. This is because there is still a want and need for storytelling, relationship-building and creativity needing a human touch. Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has provided immense benefits to millions, supporting a variety of tasks from writing a challenging email to helping with market research. But journalists aren’t looking for ChatGPT content from PRs, and often can detect it. So whilst AI might help you come up with an interesting hook, it cannot in our eyes give you the finished product.
Finding a balance in using the likes of ChatGPT is key to ensure you’re gaining inspiration and insights quickly, whilst ensuring the human touch is there to help craft a great pitch. For example, there are some days where that headline you wrote isn’t hitting, or you can’t quite work the right hook – AI can be the sounding board you need. Our approach is strategic and considered, using AI to support our expertise.
Kaizen’s Approach to Emerging Technologies in Digital PR
We don’t use AI to write press releases or pitch emails, but we do use it to improve efficiency, reduce time spent on laborious tasks, and help spark creativity within our team.
Currently, we’re using AI to do the grunt work that historically has taken us hours to do in the past. Here are some examples:
News summaries and trend diving – understanding each publication’s different audiences will always be key, and with thousands of outlets out there, this is no small task. We use ChatGPT as an additional tool to help summarise key trends in different niches and publications – we still are reading articles and exploring different news sites, but this provides an initial foundation of top level insights for us to look at.
Ideation and Creative support – Ideation is all about inspiration and insights, so ChatGPT has become another avenue of inspiration to get ideas on our audience (their likes, dislikes, hobbies, etc) and on specific markets. We can use ChatGPT to search around audience insights, audience sentiment, top trends in the space, the biggest challenges certain audiences face, something that would take hours of the team’s time if doing it manually. It can provide summaries on social media trends, news articles. Another great way to use it is “question-storming”. We will ask it to generate questions on a specific topic and then we work out the solutions. These insights spark conversations and those conversations lead to newsworthy ideas that we create for our clients.
All our campaigns go through a rigorous creative check list process following this.
Spotting issues ahead of time – using AI to summarise audience sentiment and consensus alongside news stories can help brands spot opportunities and risks before they become an issue. We’ve used this to help plan ahead for potential blockers and opportunities in the media.
Library of prompts – Kaizen is in the process of creating some templated prompts to help the team use ChatGPT safely and responsibly as well as effectively.
AI helps with data insights – data insights help us with our strategy Being able to generate insights at a faster rate allows us, as PRs, to spend more time looking at how we can use this to make a bespoke strategy for our clients. In Digital PR we often are looking to produce insightful and in-depth data stories that generate impactful headlines. Automating laborious data analysis can mean we can look at thousands of data points in a matter of minutes, instead of hours, creating stronger data as a result.
Media monitoring – at the moment we use a number of tools as well as manual searching to monitor the media and coverage, such as google alerts, and Google search. Using AI is helping us make this process even faster, allowing us to focus on more valuable human-focussed tasks, like networking, creativity and strategy.
Organisation – within the agency we are using AI to support day-to-day admin, freeing up everyone’s time to do what they are great at.
Introducing Media Match: Kaizen’s AI-Driven Prospecting Tool
One of the most time consuming aspects of Digital PR is journalist prospecting, especially if your focus is like ours on quality, relevant contacts. Traditionally, this process can take hours of manual research. We also deliver super relevant stories to our journalists, so having this information easily accessible is key for achieving our great results.
To solve this, we developed Media Match, an AI tool that automates journalist prospecting, whilst ensuring relevancy is maintained. By analysing the most relevant stories across publications and cross-referencing them with our journalist database, Media Match compiles tailored outreach lists in minutes rather than hours. These lists are manually checked by our team to ensure accuracy and maintain a high standard of relevancy. We have categories and sub categories to pinpoint exactly what journalists are talking about and if they’d be suitable for the story we are working on.
This technology significantly enhances efficiency, allowing our team to focus on the higher-value tasks such as building relationships with journalists, storytelling, and campaign execution. The next evolution of Media Match will incorporate tone of voice analysis, helping us tailor pitches to individual journalists based on their writing style and preferences, whilst maintaining a human touch in our execution of the release.
Balancing AI with the Human Element
The more we integrate AI into our workflows, the more valuable it will become. As an organisation we remain mindful of the risks, particularly around misinformation and content authenticity. AI-generated content can never replace human judgment, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking.
At Kaizen, we embrace emerging technologies while staying true to the fundamental principles of Digital PR. AI can enhance our capabilities, but it’s our relationships, creativity, and industry expertise that makes our PR team truly impactful. As technology continues to evolve, we’ll continue adapting. We won’t be using AI as a shortcut, but as a tool to drive even greater results for our clients.
Want to see great results from your Digital PR in an effective and efficient way? Speak to our team today
Marina Plummer
Marina has been at Kaizen for over four years now and has nearly a decade of experience in Digital PR. Marina has nurtured and grown some of Kaizen’s longest-standing clients, producing award-winning campaigns across her career. Her experience spans a breadth of industries from automotive, fintech, insurance, e-commerce, health and lifestyle. Her current role at Kaizen focuses on having an eye for what makes a newsworthy campaign as the media landscape continues to evolve, managing a team to deliver the highest standard of work for our clients and reporting on the value of what we do with an SEO hat on.