A couple of weeks back I highlighted a survey by the UK-based marketing agency Propolis. They polled business leaders, primarily CEOs, and found most of them have little faith in marketing.

The survey found most of them don’t think marketing helps the business; it’s a cost center. I proposed an experiment to test that assumption: turn marketing off. The effect on growth – whether it continues or stagnates – will provide a definitive answer.

I don’t anticipate many taking up that experiment. Sales would scream. I doubt even a marketing-skeptical board would endorse such a plan. Such a move poses career risks for a CEO if it doesn’t work out. So, the status quo will continue to reign.

Unless marketing (and PR) steps up to change it. The survey has some findings that speak to marketing’s obligation as well.

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The biggest marketing budget hitch for CEOs are these:

• 81% say marketing budgets are harder to justify than sales budgets;
• 76% say budgets are too tight to spend money on non-lead-generating marketing; and
• 76% can no longer justify marketing investment unless it generates leads.

This causes marketers to capitulate and pour all their budget into short-term campaigns – performance marketing – because it’s easier to measure clicks. That decision comes at the expense of long-term awareness and reputation building.

That has an impact. If you subscribe to the 95:5 rule, just 5% of your total addressable market is looking to make a purchase. That means most of the marketing budget is falling on deaf ears. There’s evidence to suggest this also impacts legal, finance and procurement departments, which are increasingly involved in purchases, and they aren’t being educated.

I’m becoming more convinced that when businesses cut marketing budgets, the sales cycle grows longer.

Some marketers don’t have the vocabulary or understanding to make the case, according to the CEOs polled in this survey:

• 88% think marketers would be more credible if they spoke the “language of business”;
• 83% would trust marketers more if they showed stronger commercial understanding; and
• 79% want marketers to talk less about creativity and more about results.

Most marketers, it seems, don’t dispute this finding. Just 18% of B2B marketers polled in the same study say they can demonstrate business impact to the C-Suite.

Marketing measurement is hard. There’s a new survey every month that suggests marketing struggles to measure its impact. Such surveys have more or less had the same conclusions over my entire career. I suspect it has more to do with a lack of business acumen than it does with measurement.

(click image for higher resolution)

Marketing – and PR – has an obligation to be curious – to be perpetual learners. The things we should collectively ask are basics like this:

• What is the addressable market size?
• What is the problem your solution solves?
• Where do prospects hear about you?
• What convinces them to engage sales?
• What are the top objections your sales team receives?
• Why do they choose your solution?
• Why do they decide against choosing your solution?
• When do customers churn?
• Why do they churn?

Those are conceptual questions that will drive better positioning, messaging and marketing programs. You should ask these questions of prospects, existing customers and the sales team too – and make note of the similarities and differences.

Marketing also needs to have a basic understanding of the financial metrics:

• What is the cost-per-lead?
• What is the cost-per-customer acquisition?
• What is the breakeven point?
• What is the company’s run rate in terms of ARR or MRR?
• What is the delta between NRR and GRR?
• What are the NPS and CSAT scores?
• What is the renewal rate?
• What percentage of the marketing budget is spent on leads and awareness?

If you understand what motivates customers and can relay marketing programs in terms of influencing these metrics, you’ll have a whole lot more success making the case for brand.

Marketing also has to be tech-savvy. We need to understand how to use the automation tools and be able to mine them for data. If you don’t know where to start, I’d suggest picking the last five deals won and auditing the history:

• When did they engage the company?
• What did they engage?
• Where did they engage it?
• How frequently did they engage?
• What were the pivotal steps that moved the deal forward?

Marketing can’t lead with the art – it has to lead with the math and social science. If you are in PR and you have a strong grasp of this stuff, then you’ll be inherently valuable to a range of business functions. We’ve got to understand the challenges, hopes, dreams and aspirations of our target audience. And then we need to communicate our efforts to influence those factors in the language the business understands.

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Marketers without *authority* leads to marketing without *accountability*

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Marketing and communications professionals are taking AI visibility seriously, but their ideas for improving it seem to be at odds with what can and cannot improve it.

That’s according to a new survey of U.S.-based professionals, the vast majority of whom work in-house (76%). While business and marketing leaders seem to believe AI visibility has a real impact on marketing, many are looking at marketing operations and paid media to drive results.

The survey was conducted by Sword and the Script Media, LLC in late July, using a commercially available survey panel, and the results are being published here for the first time.

Below are the findings. Click any graphic for higher resolution.

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1. Marketing has three primary views of AI visibility’s significance

Most marketers believe AI visibility is a significant part of their marketing efforts. The survey found nearly half (47%) believe AI visibility is either “highly significant (17%) or “significant” (30%). Another 19% say AI visibility is “moderately significant,” and 45% believe it’s “somewhat significant.”

Not everyone is as convinced. Some 16% of respondents, which is 1.5 in every 10, say AI visibility is “not significant.” Finally, 6% are unsure.

Analysis. At a high level, the data shows marketers tend to fall into three camps: advocates, fence-sitters and skeptics. More, but not most, are in the advocacy camp, which suggests more marketers are convinced AI is influencing awareness and demand. That’s the key — if AI is changing the behavior of customers and prospects — then it’s clearly significant to the marketing effort.

2. Business leaders are asking marketing about AI visibility

One sign a new marketing trend has hit the mainstream is when other business functions start asking about it. To that end, a majority of marketers who responded to this survey (63%) said business leaders outside of marketing have been asking marketing about AI visibility. This includes 29% who said they have asked “multiple times” and 34% who said, “once or twice.”

Analysis. Whether marketing is convinced of the influence AI has on marketing or not, marketing needs to be prepared to answer questions about it from business leaders. Moreover, they need to be prepared with detail and specificity that demonstrates they’ve looked closely at how it’s working, how it’s influencing customers and prospects, and what they can do to affect it.

3. No specific marketing team is tagged with AI visibility

When asked which team is most responsible for improving AI visibility, the survey found responses were all over the board. Marketing operations was the most frequently selected team at 17%, followed by product marketing at 14%, social media at 13% and creative/design at 13%.

Surprisingly, teams traditionally empowered with external communications were ranked the lowest among the options. Few marketers in this survey viewed SEO or organic search (8%) or public relations and communications (3%) as the team most capable of influencing AI visibility.

Analysis. The broad array of answers to this question suggests marketing hasn’t landed yet on an “owner” for AI visibility. This parallels other trends in marketing over the years. For example, social media was initially labeled as a fad, and then as its staying power became obvious, various marketing and communications functions would later compete for ownership.

More importantly, they seem to be looking for help in the wrong places. PR, comms and SEO ought to be the first teams marketing leaders lean on for help. Studies show that the structured format of news, press releases and blog posts tends to have a clear impact on AI visibility. Indeed, PR is having a moment to the extent even the tech analyst firm Gartner has weighed in.

With respect to SEO, PR and comms ought to be joined at the hip when it comes to AI visibility — the same way these teams worked together to rank in traditional search. If Google can’t crawl and index your content, the best content in the world won’t rank. That’s true with AI visibility as well.

4. What channels have the greatest impact on AI visibility?

Marketers taking this survey said paid media (35%) has the greatest influence on AI visibility. This was followed by shared media (28%), earned media (24%) and owned media (14%).

Analysis. These results are exactly backwards, which suggests marketing has some homework to do in understanding how AI is impacting their market. We have yet to see a single study that suggests paid media, including advertising, impacts AI visibility. In contrast, there are a plethora of studies indicating owned and earned media do influence AI visibility.

Earned media in particular has more credibility than paid media, because there is an element of third-party validation. The incentive of being paid to say nice things doesn’t exist in earned media, so it very naturally has more weight. For most organizations, the priorities ought to be owned, earned, shared and paid – and in that order.

Marketing operations (MOPs) plays an important role and has earned a spot as a marketing leader’s trusted advisor. It keeps sales and marketing aligned, helps the marketing organization quantify its impact, and is probably a good team to keep in mind for measuring experiments. However, beyond reporting, MOPs rarely have anything to do with marketing output and so they are the least likely team to influence AI visibility.

5. Do marketing teams have the skills to improve AI visibility?

Most marketing teams (65%) either “agree” (43%) or “strongly agree” (22%) that their team has the knowledge, skills and resources needed to improve AI visibility. However, a full 37% aren’t so sure, including those that “neither agree nor disagree” (26%), those that “disagree” (10%) and those that “strongly disagree” (1%).

Analysis. Given the context of previous questions — relying on paid media and MOPs for AI visibility — it’s reasonable to conclude that AI visibility is a bit of a blind spot for marketing. In other words, marketing’s confidence in their ability to grow their skills is at odds with what current research shows influences AI visibility.

6. AI will make human expertise more valuable

Most respondents (61%) said AI visibility will make human expertise “much more important” (12%) or “more important” (49%). Nearly one in three (29%) think it won’t make a difference either way. Finally, 10% believe it will make human expertise “less important” (8%) or “much less important” (2%).

Analysis.  One of the pervasive problems in marketing is the “sea of sameness.” It’s the idea that the content produced by one brand more or less sounds the same as their competitors. This is especially prominent among B2B technology companies.

Those companies that rely on AI to write for them are liable to make the matter worse. Why? Because AI writing is by definition an “average” of all the writing on which it’s been trained. Here again there are studies — data studies, not opinion surveys — that show AI-generated content underperforms.

AI is an incredible tool, but it can’t feel, it can’t experience and it doesn’t have emotion. Those are uniquely human characteristics — and characteristics that connect people. Marketing has to strive for connection and you can’t get that out of a machine.

Recommendations

The findings of this survey present a two-part problem for marketing leaders. The first problem is understanding precisely how AI visibility is impacting their company and the second is teaching their teams how to influence the results.

Their very first step should be to research how AI visibility is affecting their brand. They need to speak with prospects, customers and sales and determine where and how AI is influencing customers’ decisions. A methodical audit for branded and non-branded keywords should be performed using the major AI platforms.

AI is moving very quickly, so the process should be repeated at least every six months or so. If AI visibility is in fact having an impact on your business, the next step is to educate your team.

The second problem is a professional development issue for marketing leaders: marketing needs to get their teams current on what influences AI visibility. Adding a few lunch-and-learn sessions, scheduling a few hours off-site, recommending an online course or sending members of your team to a marketing conference are easy-to-implement options.

Marketing tends to be a game of momentum. It takes time and effort to set things in motion and build that momentum. The best time to get started on AI visibility was a few years ago; the next best time is right now.

Methodology & demographics

This AI visibility survey was conducted by Sword and the Script Media, LLC in July 2026 using a commercially available survey panel. It surveyed 200 U.S.-based marketing and communications professionals. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents worked in-house for a business (49), non-profit (11%), association (11%), government agency (5%) or academic institution (2%). Participants represent a mix of B2C (42%), B2B (18%) and hybrid organizations (24%), providing a broad view of how professionals perceive AI visibility.

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A theory on why B2B marketing requires so many darn customer touches today

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More than 4 out of 5 (84%) of CEOs “think marketing is a support function, not a commercial growth driver.” That’s according to a survey published in late July called “The CEO blind spot: How B2B marketers prove, protect, and grow their commercial impact.”

A UK-based B2B marketing agency conducted the survey in July 2026. It polled “150 [B2B] CEOs and senior business leaders responsible for companies with annual revenues exceeding £20 million.”

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It’s been a minute, but I’ve done quite a bit of work with tech startups in the UK over my career. In my experience, UK business leaders have always been far more engaged with marketing, compared to US executives.

Accordingly, this is a more common problem in the US, because most C-suite business leaders and board members have little experience in marketing. That’s not merely an educated guess; it’s been well studied and shown to be highly probable.

This survey had more eye-popping findings: “Three-quarters (75%) of business leaders think that while marketing matters, it doesn’t actually drive growth.”

If you aren’t a growth driver, you’re a cost center – at least in the eyes of the C-suite.

How CEOs can definitively test their assumptions

There is a definitive way for CEOs to test their marketing assumptions: turn marketing off and see if there’s any effect on business results.

What do I mean by turning marketing off? Cut the budget to 0% of revenue and lay off your entire marketing team.

If the sales team objects, and they will because they’ll lose their favorite excuse, that can be resolved by putting the budget savings to sales enablement. Hire some former marketers to be order takers for sales. They can write emails, make shadow enablement tools, or whatever sales might need.

Give the website and marketing technology to IT to manage. Sales can manage configurations with a technical administrator. Sales ops handles lead routing.

The benefit? Instead of guessing what marketing brings to the table, you can know with certainty. If you cut marketing out of your organization and business growth continues, then you know for sure that marketing is indeed an unnecessary support function.

On the other hand, if growth stalls, then you know marketing did in fact have an influence, despite the challenges of proving it. 

One caveat to turning marketing off

There is one caveat that CEOs should know before choosing to engage this experiment: Marketing follows Newton’s Laws of Motion.

It takes a lot of marketing energy to overcome inertia, and marketing in motion tends to stay in motion. If you stop everything, it takes a while – 6-12 months at minimum – to regain that momentum.

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Do marketing budget cuts make B2B sales cycles grow longer? 

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It takes 62-plus touches to close a deal in 2026.

The B2B tech buyer requires 62.4 touches on average, across 3.5 different marketing channels – from first touch to deal closed. It’s a process that exceeds six months and now lasts 192 days.

It sure seems like an incredibly high number of touches. Yet the source of this data isn’t an opinion survey; it’s behavior – it’s based on data running through a technology marketing platform called Dreamdata.

I wrote about the Dreamdata report in May 2026, it made my semi-annual half-year highlight reel, and came up again in an interview with Michelle Garrett – for her PR Explored podcast.

She couldn’t believe the number, and it’s been on my mind ever since.

Sixty touches does sound excessive. I’ve worked in B2B for 90%-plus of my career, which spans 25 years. We never needed this many historically.  What changed?

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A brief history of marketing touches

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a study conclude more touches are required today than historically, or that sales cycles are trending longer. In fact, I’ve written about many of these over the years.

Some of the most recent findings include the following:

• A 2022 study by Forrester found B2B sales requires 27 touches;

• A 2024 study by McKinsey found B2B marketing manages an average of 10.2 channels in 2024 – that’s double what it managed eight years ago, which at the time this study was published was 2016; and

• A post I wrote in 2025 rounds up five different studies on this topic with a range of answers from just a dozen to 28.87, to as many as 266.

Two hundred and sixty-six touches! What’s the cost-per-touch on that Machiavellian marketing campaign?

At the same time, there are a number of complementary findings from studies that also show prospects consume more content; as many as 11 pieces of content from a vendor.

And avoid talking to sales until the very last minute. But there’s more.

Sales cycles have gone from long to longer. There are more decision-makers involved in these deals – legal and finance teams are increasingly influential.

These aren’t isolated examples. What I’ve just provided is an 80,000-foot view of B2B marketing for the last decade, but the conclusion is solid:

It takes, on average, more time and more effort directed at more people to attract, convert and close a deal today than it did 10 or 20 years ago.

Theory: Why does B2B marketing need so many touches?

With respect to marketing, there’s one significant and multi-year marketing observation, dare I say trend, that coincides with the accumulation of required customer touches to close a deal:

the deliberate cutting of brand marketing and awareness-building budgets.

These programs get cut because they are hard to measure. And the budget goes toward tactics like performance marketing because it’s easy to count clicks.

If you work in marketing, you know this is a fact. If you don’t, or if you are like 97% of the company board members who haven’t cracked open a marketing book since undergrad, there’s a boatload of studies that demonstrate it:

• 2025 CMO Spend Survey by Gartner: “54% of CMOs prioritized performance marketing versus 22% who prioritized brand marketing”;

• 2025 Voice of the Marketer survey by WARC: “42% share expect increased investment in performance, against 29% share who envision increased investment in brand”; and

• CMO Outlook 2026 by Lippincott: More CMOs come from performance marketing (35%), strategy and ops (15%), and product marketing (13%) than from brand (12%), media (11%) or comms (2%).

That’s just scratching the surface. Any marketing or comms person or activity that has to do with brand or awareness has been under intense pressure for the last 10 years.

My theory is that we are seeing the results of those cuts manifest in long sales cycles and innumerable touches. The more these functions and programs get cut, the longer the sales cycles become and the more touches are required.

Awareness and brand marketing are hard to measure in the short term, but cutting them has a dramatic and adverse impact on an organization’s ability to close deals in the long term.

‘Correlation is not causation’ 

Theories, including Einstein’s, Darwin’s, and Quantum Mechanics, are based on observation.

Theories aren’t fact. They aren’t laws. They aren’t immutable. They are an educated guess based on observation. They earn consensus in due course.

The prize-winning theories hold up over time, and unification or at least reconciliation notwithstanding, new observations support old conclusions. Einstein needed Edwin Hubble’s observation to believe the constant he put in his own equations.

Now there are those who are going to say, correlation is not causation. Certainly, my Excel spreadsheet calculations, based on an eclectic mix of surveys devoid of random sampling, aren’t even remotely on the same level as scientific observation or mathematical rigor.

On the other hand, budget cuts don’t require scientific instrumentation; for B2B marketers, it’s just another Tuesday.

Markets are conversations 

Even so, I have three responses:

First, I’m not the first person to suggest this theory. A 2023 analysis by the Boston Consulting Group put it far more elegantly:

“Across all the industries and periods of uncertainty we examined, key performance metrics suffer when companies decrease their investments in brand marketing.”

Second, the preponderance of evidence is apparent. I’ve written about literally hundreds of studies and surveys for the last 17 years. When you step back and look, the trend line is clear: when companies cut awareness and brand marketing, sales cycles grow longer and require more touches.

Third, it just makes sense. If you aren’t familiar with a company when they call on you, you are going to have a higher level requirement for information. That is if you even meet the 95:5 rule, which is probably better described as a business parable than it is a statistic.

For the sake of this argument, let’s assume you do, and you now have to satisfy all of the needs that awareness and familiarity, if they had been budgeted, would have already resolved. Marketing is spending money on performance and buyers are consuming that spend for awareness. The sales cycle takes six months and a gazillion touches becuase no one has heard of your tech company before; they haven’t heard of your company because you haven’t “talked” to anyone.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was right: Markets are conversations but many of today’s companies have decidedly opted out of participating.

The buyer, you, is cramming a couple years’ worth of awareness into six months of study. This approach to marketing is not scalable unless you have an unlimited budget, which nobody does.

Worse, from a PR perspective, you lose your ability to frame the context. Instead, you are reliant on how the medium – search, social or today, generative AI – is going to present your case for you.

In the long run, this is a more expensive approach to marketing. If you dump most of your marketing budget into performance, you are far more likely to have a higher CAC. That’s a metric that any marketing leader can measure, based on historical or comparative data relative to brand spend, to start a conversation that gets your marketing efforts right-sized again.

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Do marketing budget cuts make B2B sales cycles grow longer?

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Successful media relations requires more than writing a strong pitch, according to Michael Smart, in a free online class covering the basics of media relations. It starts with understanding journalists, finding the right contacts, presenting the story in a way that matters to them and providing information that is actually useful.

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1. Journalists aren’t there to promote your brand

Journalists are not there to help organizations reach their marketing goals. Their job is to serve their audience by creating stories that people actually want to consume.

However, reporters often receive large numbers of irrelevant and generic pitches while also managing deadlines, watching social media closely, keeping up with breaking news and other newsroom responsibilities.

This makes it even more important to be relevant, accurate and concise. Public relations professionals should not expect journalists to understand their needs. Instead, the goal should be to understand what journalists are looking for and provide information aligning with their needs.

2. Quality pitches beat quantity

Media relations should focus on quality rather than quantity. Sending the same pitch to a large list may create more harm than opportunity because journalists remember irrelevant outreach.

To accomplish this, Smart recommends building a separate, targeted media list for each campaign and prioritizing different outlets that are trusted by the intended audience. Instead of only targeting large news outlets, communication professionals should also look for reporters and bloggers who regularly cover topics related to their story.

Smart suggests using the “80/20 principle.” This means spending 80% of outreach time researching and pitching the top 20% of media contacts. Focusing on these key relationships allows communication professionals to build trust and become a reliable resource over time.

3. Don’t wait until it’s time to pitch

Strong media relationships begin with consistently reading, watching and listening to journalists’ work. The course describes this approach as “read and react.” Public relations professionals should follow key journalists, engage thoughtfully with their content and provide useful information even when they are not actively pitching.

This could include sharing a relevant resource, asking a meaningful question or helping promote a journalist’s work. These interactions must be sincere and consistent. Journalists can recognize when engagement is only being used as a temporary strategy before a pitch.

As Michael Smart suggests, “Don’t be creepy. Be friendly.”

In his example, he says something like, “Oh, I see you have a cocker spaniel. So do I,” not, “Oh, I see your son goes to this school and plays baseball.” That is creepy.

4. Think beyond the subject line

Personalization helps a pitch stand out from the many generic emails journalists receive. A personalized pitch should demonstrate an understanding of the journalist’s work, audience and professional interests.

Communication professionals should go above and beyond simply personalizing a name and instead empathize with the reporter receiving the email. Subject lines should also be clear, concise and immediately relevant.

The way a pitch is worded is not as important as showing why the story is relevant to the journalist’s audience.

Over time, building credibility allows communication professionals to create a name for themselves. Instead of being just another subject line, they become a trusted source that journalists recognize.

5. Why your story matters now

A strong pitch must explain why a story matters now. The course identifies timeliness as the most important element of newsworthiness, followed by impact. Other important elements include proximity, prominence, human interest and conflict.

However, human interest should usually support a stronger news element rather than serve as the entire reason for coverage.

Framing also depends on the type of outlet. Television and radio pitches should sound similar to the language an anchor might use to introduce or tease a story, making the idea easy for a producer to visualize.

6. Get to the point of your pitch quickly

Journalists need pitches that are brief, clear and accessible. The course recommends removing unnecessary background information and leading directly with the news. Emails should use short paragraphs, white space and bullet points when appropriate.

Smart also strongly recommends against starting an email with “Hope you’re well” because it sounds generic and takes up valuable space.

Pitches should also provide useful resources, including independent experts, real people affected by the story and strong visuals. The goal is to complete as much of the journalist’s research work as possible.

7. Don’t be afraid to follow up

Following up is appropriate when the original pitch was carefully researched, relevant and personalized. Many journalists never notice the first email because of the volume of messages in their inboxes (see this survey of reporters on follow-up preferences).

A follow-up gives the story another opportunity to be considered. The course advises waiting at least 24 hours and following up within the first week, depending on the timing of the story. Follow-up emails should remain confident and avoid apologetic language; never say you are sorry.

They can also add value by connecting the pitch to a new development, offering updated visuals or referencing the journalist’s recent work.

Together, these seven lessons demonstrate that successful media relations is built on preparation, empathy and trust.

By understanding journalists, carefully researching the right contacts and consistently providing useful information, public relations professionals can become trusted sources and create stronger opportunities for meaningful media coverage.

Should you take this course?

Overall, I highly recommend Muck Rack Academy’s Fundamentals of Media Relations course to anyone interested in public relations or looking to strengthen their media relations skills. The course is completely free and provides a certificate that can be added to your resume or LinkedIn profile, making it a valuable credential for students and early-career professionals.

While the course can be completed in a little over two hours, I found that breaking it into smaller sections made it easier to absorb the information. I will definitely carry the knowledge and techniques I learned throughout this course into my future career in public relations, and I would encourage anyone interested in media relations to take advantage of this resource.

You can find this course by using this link: Muck Rack Academy’s Fundamentals of Media Relations.

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Alex Austin Vollor is a recent communication graduate from Mississippi State University with a concentration in Public Relations. She is the first-ever participant of the Graduate Jump Start Program (GJSP) by Sword and the Script Media, LLC. Find her online portfolio here.

GJSP is an intensive, yet part-time, paid learning program for new graduates. The program is designed to help new college graduates develop real-world PR and business skills, build a portfolio and provide access to mentoring, while they seek a full-time position.

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Great writing doesn’t just begin with the first sentence, hook or lede. It begins with understanding the audience and the bigger picture. 

So says Wall Street Journal bestselling author Ann Handley in a recorded training session for MarketingProfs titled, “How to Write Your Face Off: Writing for Non-Writers.” Effective writing is not just for professional writers, she says in the presentation. Anyone can become a strong writer and communicator by first understanding the audience.

Handley used Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White as an unexpected example to illustrate purposeful writing and demonstrate how strong communication can inspire action.

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The audience comes first

One of Handley’s main messages is that every piece of writing should begin with one specific audience in mind. For example, instead of writing for ‘all marketers and communicators,’ you should picture one person they want to influence.

Continuing with the Charlotte’s Web example, Handley explains that Charlotte does not write her messages for everyone who visits the farm. Instead, she writes with one audience in mind: Mr. Zuckerman, the owner of the farm. Zuckerman is raising Wilbur the pig with the intention of fattening him up to be served as Christmas dinner.

Charlotte’s message is simple but powerful. Through a series of single-word messages woven into her web, she gradually changes Zuckerman’s perspective and convinces him that Wilbur is worth saving.

Handley then demonstrates how this same principle applies in real life by sharing how investor Warren Buffett writes his annual shareholder letter. Even though millions of people eventually read the letter, Buffett writes it as if he is speaking directly to one person, his sister, Doris. 

Whether writing a social media post, a report, an email newsletter or a blog, effective communication begins with one audience, one goal and one purpose.

Writing earns trust before it earns attention

Building trust begins long before the first sentence is written. Throughout the webinar, Handley explains that marketers often focus too much on capturing attention instead of building trust.

Instead, she encourages communicators to ask a different question:

• How can this message earn the audience’s trust?

Writing requires research, preparation and editing. Handley compares this process to Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web, who searches for the perfect words that Charlotte later weaves into her web.

In the same way, she explains that communicators should research the questions their audiences are asking and understand the language they use. When organizations communicate using words that reflect their audience’s experiences, they demonstrate empathy and build stronger relationships.

This allows organizations to create messages that connect with their audience on a more personal level. When organizations communicate using words that reflect their audience’s experiences, they demonstrate empathy and build stronger relationships 

The lasting lesson

Throughout the webinar, Handley demonstrates that writing is much more than simply putting words on a page. She jokes that marketers should “move to Maine,” where E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web. Instead, she uses it as a metaphor, encouraging communicators to think like writers first by focusing on the audience before creating content.

Charlotte succeeds because she understands exactly who she is writing for and communicates with purpose rather than promotion. This same principle continues to guide successful communicators today.

Strong writing is not measured by the number of words on a page but by its ability to strengthen relationships, build trust and inspire action.

Attend the session for yourself

This session is freely available, with registration, on the MarketingProfs resources page: How to Write Your Face Off: Writing for Non-Writers 

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Alex Austin Vollor is a recent communication graduate from Mississippi State University with a concentration in Public Relations. She is the first-ever participant of the Graduate Jump Start Program (GJSP) by Sword and the Script Media, LLC. Find her online portfolio here.

GJSP is an intensive, yet part-time, paid learning program for new graduates. The program is designed to help new college graduates develop real-world PR and business skills, build a portfolio and provide access to mentoring, while they seek a full-time position.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Why is the PESO model essential to PR? [special guest post] 

The post Why great writing starts with the audience [special guest post] appeared first on Sword and the Script.

A news story is an event that defies expectations. We all expect a dog to bite a man, so that’s not news. However, when a man bites a dog, that’s a rare occurrence and the makings of a solid news story.

The problem with this model is that when the only things that make the news are the oddities, the anomalies, the dots that get plotted outside a normal distribution. Over time, the constant drumbeat on everything that’s weird starts to make the glitches feel normal.

That’s been the case for news coverage both in this country, and about this country for a long time. It’s overwhelmingly negative. We don’t ‘ask what we can do for our country anymore,’ we flood to social media to demand what we think our country owes us.

Trust is at an all-time low. Political polarization is high. Everyone, it seems, has an issue, a trigger, and a reason to be offended. Indeed the U.S. isn’t perfect, but we have a lot for which to be grateful. And it just took millions of international visitors vacationing our country to remind of that fact.

America lost the game but gained the world

Thankfully, The Wall Street Journal, the daily meditation for capitalism, picked up that story: How the U.S. Lost the World Cup—and Won Over the World.

Some of the lines in that story that stood out to me are the following:

• “…fans flocked to the U.S. by the millions anyway—and what they found was an America that looked nothing like the one they’d seen on social media back home.”

• “At a time when the Atlantic has never felt wider and U.S. foreign policy has sometimes put the country at odds with even its oldest allies, the World Cup was a pointed reminder that America still possesses a shine dazzling enough to entrance the rest of the world.”

• “…the experience of visiting fans was different from the xenophobic country they had been led to believe they were coming to.”

• “And as it turns out, it wasn’t the state-of-the-art stadiums or 250th anniversary fireworks—or anything else the U.S. proudly set out to project to the rest of the world—that captivated visitors. The best advertisement for America was simply America itself.”

For the last couple of weeks, my social media streams have been flooded with international visitors uncovering delights we take for granted. It’s been refreshing to see and their enthusiasm is telling: if they had this stuff in their country, they wouldn’t be so excited to see it here.

The abundance, variety, security and the freedom we have in this country is unmatched anywhere in the world. As a society, or at least the one that’s reflected in our news media, we seem to have forgotten just how lucky we are to live here.

“International travelers,” the Journal said, “are America’s “best brand ambassadors.” Perhaps that’s true, but at this moment in time, it seems to me that many Americans that need to hear this third-party validation.

* * *

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If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
It’s not the success that makes for a good business story, it’s the setback

The post International travelers to the World Cup remind Americans to be grateful appeared first on Sword and the Script.

The PESO Model consists of four different communication channels: paid, earned, shared and owned media. In a sense, just like a puzzle, every piece of the PESO Model serves a purpose; successful reputations are not built through one communication channel, according to Gini Dietrich, as noted in two presentations (embedded nearby) reviewed for this post.

She says these channels may appear to operate independently, yet each communication channel supports the others. Gini explains that they should work together to help organizations reach audiences in different ways, but together they strengthen credibility and build lasting relationships. As with a puzzle, removing one piece leaves the picture incomplete.

The cornerstone piece: owned media

Every successful PESO strategy has to begin with owned media, according to Gini. Owned media includes websites, blogs, email newsletters and other content that it controls. Owned media gives organizations complete control over their messages while creating a central location where the audience can learn more about the organization.

Without owned media, audiences can discover the organization through social media, advertising or even news coverage, but have nowhere to continue engaging with the content. Owned media serves as the hub that connects every piece of the PESO Model.

The trust-building piece: earned media

After the organization builds a strong owned media platform, earned media helps build credibility and trust. Earned media includes newspaper articles, podcasts, online publications and media coverage that is generated by a third-party source.

Unlike paid advertising, you cannot purchase earned media. You have to earn it by developing great relationships with journalists and people who view your information as worth sharing.

Gini says your audience often trust earned media more because it comes from a secondary source rather than just the organization. This falls back to the quote that has stuck with me about public relations: “Nothing that you say about yourself will have as much impact as someone else saying it on your behalf.”

The conversation piece: shared media

Shared media includes conversations that take place across social media platforms. Throughout the presentation, she emphasizes that organizations should strongly and actively participate by listening, responding and engaging with their audiences.

Rather than just treating social media as another place to advertise, organizations should use shared media to build these relationships. This can also create great opportunities and meaningful connections.

The amplifying piece: paid media

This is the last piece of the PESO Model. Paid media includes digital advertising, sponsored content and promoted social media posts. While paid media helps reach larger audiences, she suggests that it should never replace strong communication.

Paid media should just be the last step, and it should amplify all of the other content that you have already provided. Advertising is a great way to put your company or organization’s name out there. However, you definitely need the other pieces of the model to maintain a lasting relationship.

The final puzzle piece

These presentations demonstrate that the PESO Model is most effective when its four communication channels work together rather than independently. While paid, earned, shared and owned media each serve a distinct purpose, none is as effective on its own.

Instead, the channels complement one another, creating an integrated communications strategy that strengthens credibility, expands reach and builds lasting relationships.

Just like a puzzle, every piece contributes to the complete picture. Gini’s presentations build on the principles of public relations by illustrating how integrating these communication channels creates a stronger, more effective strategy.

* * *

Alex Austin Vollor is a recent communication graduate from Mississippi State University with a concentration in Public Relations. She is the first-ever participant of the Graduate Jump Start Program (GJSP) by Sword and the Script Media, LLC. Find her online portfolio here.

GJSP is an intensive, yet part-time, paid learning program for new graduates. The program is designed to help new college graduates develop real-world PR and business skills, build a portfolio and provide access to mentoring, while they seek a full-time position.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
What is public relations? Trust, credibility and third-party validation [special guest post]

The post Why is the PESO model essential to PR? [special guest post] appeared first on Sword and the Script.

Many of the studies and surveys about AI and marketing or comms are giving me déjà vu: I’ve seen this story before:

• AI visibility is increasingly important, but nobody owns it, which was also true of social media when it first gained in prominence;

• Clarity and consistency of messaging matters to AI visibility; that’s been true of marketing and comms my entire career;

• Bad actors can follow the same “best practices” to spoil, or soil, AI search results, which mirrors the battle between traditional search engines and SEO spammers for a long time.

There are some differences around the edges – the way Harry Potter is a little different from Star Wars in some respects, but the fundamental similarities are remarkable. In both stories, an orphaned boy meets an old magician who teaches him the magic he’ll need to save everyone from the darkness.

As I read through these three studies, it occurred to me that there’s a similar common denominator for AI visibility as well. I’d be curious to know if you see it as well – below are the cliff notes to these three studies.

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1. Who owns AI visibility?

Nearly three-quarters of PR pros surveyed “say GEO is at least somewhat important to their PR or communications strategy today.” This finding includes 15% who say it is “extremely important,” and 28% who say it is “very important” and 30% who say it is “somewhat important.”

That’s according to a recent survey of 971 respondents by Muck Rack. It’s not a surprising finding, given AI is everywhere these days. However, what did stand out is that organizations haven’t assigned a function or team with the responsibility to grow their brand’s visibility in AI.

The survey asked respondents, “Who is primarily responsible for GEO at your organization?”

And the answers:

• 29% said no one owns it yet;
• 24% said the PR or comms team owns it;
• 15% said SEO or the content team owns it;
• 13% were unsure;
• 11% said marketing leadership owns it; and
• 9% said a dedicated AI or innovation team owns AI visibility.

This finding mirrors the evolution of social media when it first came on the scene: no team owned it in the beginning either. Later it turned out to be a turf battle between comms and marketing.

We should strive to avoid repeating that mistake again. A team or function should be identified because as Drucker said, what gets measured gets managed. A business won’t grow it’s AI visibility if someone isn’t tasked with that objective along with metrics to hit.

We should also avoid the turf battle. Marketing and comms need to be aligned the same way marketing and sales need to be aligned. As I’m prone to say, brand plus demand beats brand versus demand every day of the week.

The full report is available here: The State of PR 2026.

(click image for higher resolution)

2. Consistency builds AI visibility

The SEO tool maker Semrush, which was recently acquired by Adobe, analyzed 126 million AI prompts for a study aimed at understanding “how brands win visibility in AI search.” Among the key findings were two that stood out to me.

First, “mentions and citations are separate metrics.” The report says, “A brand can be mentioned often in AI answers and cited as a source almost nowhere. Or cited constantly and mentioned almost never.”

Why?

Because “mentions and citations are separate metrics, earned through separate mechanisms. Mentions come from brand authority and category fit. Citations come from content depth. The two don’t always move together.”

It provides an example:

“Wikipedia is heavily cited, but rarely is the brand AI is talking about.”

The second, which stands out, is this:

“Brand authority and content alignment beat content volume.”

The report explains, “The brands AI describes most consistently aren’t expanding content for volume’s sake. They publish the right content on the right surfaces, owned and third-party, so AI systems receive a consistent, coherent signal about who they are and what they do.”

The brands that are winning at AI do the following:

• Publish unique views data that AI can’t get elsewhere (which was also good advice before AI ever splashed on the scene);

• Rely on specialists with a depth of knowledge a generalist can’t match (which is consistent with the first point);

The report interviewed several industry professionals in the full report. One of the questions it asked of these individuals was: “Where do marketing leaders often get AI visibility wrong?”

Sara Wong’s answer was on point:

“Treating AI visibility like a campaign instead of a system. Success requires consistently curating meaningful, quality content and continued measurement to inform necessary optimizations.”

That’s good advice for all marketing. While campaigns have a place the drawback is they are finite, with a starting point and an ending point. For PR, comms, content marketing, SEO, virtually every other aspect of marketing, it’s best to think in terms of programs that iterate and improve but never end.

Find the full report here: 2026 AI Visibility Index: How brands win visibility in AI search.

(click image for higher resolution)

3. AI is easy to manipulate (for now)

UK-based PR firm Hard Numbers did some testing to show “the sources that AI engines lean on when ranking or comparing brands are often written by the brands themselves.” That’s the impetus behind all those self-aggrandizing listicles:

“Of the top 20 URLs influencing fintech buyer prompts tested…70% are companies recommending themselves.”

It works the other way around too:

“Of the 50 responses to prompts pressure-testing B2B SaaS brands…70% were influenced by at least one piece of competitor content.”

The company set out to demonstrate that AI is easy to manipulate:

“It invented an industry award, named its own co-founder the best-dressed practitioner in UK PR and published it on its website.”

To be clear, this was a complete fabrication:

“No such ceremony took place and no other source mentions it anywhere.”

And the results?

“Within days, asked who the best-dressed practitioner in UK PR is, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude named Darryl in the majority of responses.”

While this was a harmless experiment to make a point, the dearth of information on “best dressed” PR people makes it easier to exploit than noisier sectors. Yet, the fact remains that advice for improving AI visibility can be followed by bad actors, too.

The idea isn’t new, as we’ve seen manipulation in press release distribution, social media and traditional search engines for many years now. What is new is the level of third-party validation that comes with an AI voice we carry in our pockets and use to win arguments in daily life.

There are all kinds of nefarious ways this can be exploited. It ought to be a major concern because customers and prospects are turning to AI to create their shortlists. For that reason, it would be wise for PR and marketing teams to think about getting ahead of this now, rather than waiting for AI companies to address it.

The full report can be found here: How a single page from a competitor can rewrite what AI says about your brand.

* * *

Subscribe by email for free:

Check out my weekly blog posts, weekly podcasts, or a monthly newsletter via Substack that rounds up interesting reading from the last 30 days (examples).

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
State of PR statistics: Summaries to 3 different “State of PR” surveys

Image credits: Respective studies and Gemini

The post Is AI visibility giving marcom déjà vu?  It should. Here’s why. appeared first on Sword and the Script.

When some people hear the term public relations (PR), they automatically think of social media, press releases or just communicating with the public. These actions can be a part of public relations, but they don’t fully represent what the profession is really about.

Biola University Professor Carolyn Mae Kim explains, in a lecture posted to YouTube, that PR is much broader than simply promoting something, someone or an organization. She states that PR is centered on maintaining and building relationships between organizations and the people who matter to their success.

Textbook definition of PR

The textbook definition of public relations, as she describes it: “Public relations is the management of communication between an organization and its publics.”

This definition highlights several important concepts. First, it states that PR is a management function, meaning that it is involved in leadership and decision-making. PR professionals do not simply communicate messages. They help organizations make strategic decisions about how to interact with their audiences based on demographics, including age, gender, income, education and ethnicity.

Second, PR focuses on relationship-building rather than one-way communication. PR professionals want to continuously work to maintain the loop of communication.

Professor Kim emphasized the concept of publics. Publics are groups of people who are connected to an organization in some way. These groups may include media members, employees, customers, community members and investors, and the list can go on. Each public has different interests and concerns, and effective public relations requires professionals to understand these groups and respond to their needs.

Communication is listening and speaking

Professor Kim also stressed that PR is about a two-way relationship rather than just sending a message to an audience. This means that organizations have to listen to the public (or their target audience), understand their concerns and respond appropriately. The goal is not just to persuade people but to develop a lasting relationship.

She pointed to Disney as an example: Disney communicates with guests, media representatives, employees, investors and local communities. Each one of these groups has different expectations and concerns. PR helps organizations navigate these different relationships, and it ensures that communication remains effective and meaningful.

Another theme she raised throughout the lecture was the importance of trust, credibility and reputation. Trust is definitely essential because strong relationships cannot exist without it. Organizations that communicate consistently, honestly and responsibly are more likely to earn the confidence of their publics.

Credibility is earned when organizations provide accurate information and follow through on their word and commitments over time. Trust and accountability both contribute to building a positive reputation over time.

Trust, credibility and third-party validation

Sometimes people confuse PR with advertising or marketing. While there are similarities and overlaps, there are stark differences as well. PR involves research, strategic planning, relationship-building, time management, ethics, and consistency to build trust and credibility.

That trust and credibility are earned over time. It cannot be purchased, so one of the defining characteristics that makes PR different is third-party validation.  This idea is summarized in a quote that has stuck with me: “Nothing that you say about yourself will have as much impact as someone else saying it on your behalf.”

This perfectly represents PR because it is a profession built on earning trust. When others speak positively about an organization, without incentive, that message carries far more value than any advertisement ever could.

Professor Kim’s lecture shows that successful PR professionals are strategic communicators who help organizations make informed decisions to build and maintain trust.

* * *

 Alex Austin Vollor is a recent communication graduate from Mississippi State University with a concentration in Public Relations. She is the first-ever participant of the Graduate Jump Start Program (GJSP) by Sword and the Script Media, LLC. Find her online portfolio here.

GJSP is an intensive, yet part-time, paid learning program for new graduates. The program is designed to help new college graduates develop real-world PR and business skills, build a portfolio and provide access to mentoring, while they seek a full-time position.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
5 takes on Gartner’s new optimism for PR and earned media in the age of AI

The post What is public relations? Trust, credibility and third-party validation [special guest post] appeared first on Sword and the Script.