Like countless other industries, the PR world has lagged behind other areas of technological innovation, but are still trying. Certainly, building bigger lists of semi-relevant journalists to blast to, faster, really isn’t the place we should be focusing.

Every day, journalists are bombarded with pitches that bear little if any relevance to their previous work. Without sufficient data about their pitch recipients, PR professionals continue to waste precious time sending pitches to the wrong people. Then there’s the tedious task of writing out each pitch, which wouldn’t be an issue if human beings weren’t vulnerable to pesky inconveniences like fatigue or burnout.

Fortunately, significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) can not only help PR agencies determine where to send their pitches, but also which topics to pitch in the first place. By embracing the many AI tools available today, PR professionals can drive more leads while simultaneously making significant strides in daily efficiency.

Why PR Needs AI

In the past, figuring out which topics to pitch to journalists required extensive research. PR professionals would spend hours combing through numerous publications and social media platforms to see which topics were attracting the most coverage. Based on these findings, the individual would then have to make an informed guess as to which topics were most likely to gain the press’s attention in the near future.

As if this process wasn’t time-consuming enough, PR professionals must additionally develop a sizable list of journalists to target. Instead of spending even more time reading articles to determine a journalist’s relevance, many PR professionals choose to enter a few keywords into a platform like Muck Rack before sending their pitches to the first 50 journalists that appear on the results page. This is often a certain fail. You target a journalist based on a superficial topic like “technology” – which most of the time leads to a response like “if you’ve read any of my articles, you’d know this is completely irrelevant to my coverage”.

How AI Simplifies the Pitch Ideation Process

Artificial intelligence tools like OnePitch take the guesswork out of journalist targeting. After entering a potential topic or series of keywords, the user instantly receives a list of relevant journalists along with each journalist’s statistical probability of covering the desired topic. The user can also view the primary topics each journalist typically covers, the reach and traction of different articles, and the journalist’s general activity level at that moment.

Armed with this knowledge, PR professionals can now generate personalized pitches that directly align with specific areas of interest. When you understand a journalist’s interests, you understand which topics that journalist finds valuable. The more value a pitch contains, the more likely the recipient is to say “yes.” And that “yes” becomes infinitely more rewarding considering how little time it took to generate the story idea at hand.

AI allows PR professionals to gauge the appeal of a proposed topic and develop relevant story ideas in a matter of minutes. As a result, the user can send more high quality pitches to more appropriate recipients in a reduced time frame.

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The Power of Intelligent Media Monitoring

Another time-saving aspect of AI is its media monitoring function. AI can analyze tens of thousands of newly published articles each day and create a list of the most relevant stories to the user’s chosen topic. Through a process known as “clustering,” the AI categorizes the aforementioned articles into different sections based on semantic similarity, sub-topics, or other distinguishing features. This enables users to quickly discover which articles contain the most salient stories per a particular area of interest., as opposed to articles covering events that are fairly mundane.

For example, it’s not unusual to see a news story about a data breach, and most get only modest attention. What is unusual, on the other hand, is finding out that a data breach has occurred at a major tech corporation like Microsoft and that the story is getting significant mainstream attention.. In this situation, the AI would be able to look at coverage of the story and essentially say to itself, “Hey, that’s unusual,” before separating the Microsoft article from other stories and bringing it to the user’s attention. The user could then incorporate this story into a pitch for like-minded journalists looking to capitalize on the most newsworthy developments.

Yes, AI Has Finally Learned How to Write

Even the most experienced PR professionals sometimes struggle to put their thoughts into words. This natural frustration becomes even more burdensome when you’re trying to compose a new pitch as quickly as possible. What if you had an assistant who could instantly help you find the words to effectively express your thoughts? And what if that assistant was available at any time?

Well, AI has finally evolved to the point where it can produce written content that does not obviously sound like it was created by a soulless robot. Tools like CopyAI or more advanced models like GPT-3 require modest training (e.g. the purpose, structure, and desired tone of your pitch) to compose multiple versions of the entire email, complete with an eye-catching subject line. These tools even understand how the style of a pitch email differs from that of a social media advertisement or blog post, and know how to grab the recipient’s attention from the first sentence.

In addition to significantly increasing a PR professional’s pitch output, copywriting AI can prevent inevitable factors like exhaustion or stress from affecting the quality of the writing in each pitch. Humans are still required to proofread/fact check what AI comes up with. I’d be loath to let anything AI-written go out of my agency without someone proofreading it first. But proofreading is considerably less time-consuming than generating pitches from scratch.

AI is Your Partner, Not Your Replacement

There’s a common misconception that AI is poised to “replace” workers, including PR professionals. But as you can see, AI is still far from all-powerful. It can’t yet run the gamut – developing ideas for pitches, building a list of email recipients, or composing pitches on its own, and that’s probably a good thing. Each process is a highly collaborative effort between human beings and AI.

The reality is, the modern PR landscape demands levels of productivity and efficiency that are higher than ever before. Attempting to meet these standards without the assistance of AI is not only impractical, but also a recipe for burnout. For this reason, PR professionals would be wise to incorporate AI into their daily routines to stay competitive without making their lives unnecessarily stressful.

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