In this episode, Brandon Watts joins host Jason Mudd to discuss how to prioritize audience and authenticity in media-first PR during the AI era.

Tune in to learn more!

Meet Our Guest:

Our episode guest is Brandon Watts, director of PR and communications at Storyblok. With 20-plus years in shaping narratives for startups and enterprise tech, Brandon brings insights from both the media and PR sides. He’s also contributed to Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Adweek.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. How to adopt a media-first approach in PR during the AI era

2. Why quality matters more than quantity when pitching stories

3. How to put the audience before your PR agenda

4. The power of exclusives and timings

5. Tips for pitching original, AI-proof stories

Quotables

“The biggest challenge here is when we think of what we're trying to tell, the story we're trying to tell, it's usually always framed through our lens. What do we have to say? What benefit do we get from it? That's a lot of we, me — a lot of self-service focus. So we have to reframe this. If it's media first, it means that it's really media first.” — Brandon Watts

“Communication with your pitch is so critical because that's really what helps you to sell it, to make it more broad in terms of who's going to want to listen to that and why.” — Brandon Watts

“You have to create the stories that AI can't. And all of that is due to your personal experience, what your company's experiencing, what your team is experiencing, and your customers' lived experiences that cannot be hallucinated, that cannot be made up. That's authenticity.” — Brandon Watts

“We use AI just in the right way to help you get more power out of your content creation. So you just have to take that extra bit of time to understand that you can't just prompt and run. You've got to give it context and tweak.” — Brandon Watts

“Garbage in, garbage out. If you put bad input into a generative AI app, you're going to get bad output from it.” — Jason Mudd

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Guest’s contact info and resources:

Brandon Watts on LinkedIn

Storyblok website

How to stay ahead of AI in communication and marketing

Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR with Jason Mudd podcast.

Find out more about Axia Public Relations.

Additional Resources:

Axia’s AI Service

AI in PR: Transforming communication strategies

AI is transforming PR: What are the risks and benefits?

What strong media relations actually look like

How to pitch and earn media without breaking news

Pitching exclusives by the numbers

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