A soft middle

If you work in PR and spend any time on LinkedIn, you have probably seen some very excited fellow practitioners share the recent Gartner research into the sector. 

In it, the firm predicted that by 2027, “mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets.”

Inevitably, in-house practitioners and agency consultants alike responded with their eyes popping out of their heads, dollar signs for pupils, Daffy Duck-like. 

Whether CFOs decide to shovel cash into the grateful pockets of their most impoverished function is debatable. What isn’t is the logic behind the prediction. 

LLM use is exploding, and platforms like ChatGPT massively overindex on trusted, often earned sources. According to one study, more than 95% of links cited are non-paid mentions and coverage. 

All this paints a very rosy picture for those with a communications skillset and a P&L, but it does somewhat forget one small, trifling detail - the media.

While money gets poured into AI companies and tentatively inched towards PR practitioners, media funding models continue to crumble. News Corp and ARN Media both reported a significant weakening in the Australian advertising market. They’re far from alone.

The answer to this soft middle is not easy. Policymakers often default to charging technology platforms (e.g. the News Media Bargaining Code) but forcing AI companies to pay media would open the door for anyone to demand payment for their content and expertise, raising costs for access and creating a tiered system for potentially humanity-changing technology. Besides, the genie is so long out of the bottle on payment for content to train AI models, he’s now living in an aged care facility, wishless.

Equally, making brands contribute raises some rather concerning conflict-of-interest scenarios that make poorly labelled advertorials look like the tip of the iceberg. 

So, just how do you fund a common good while ensuring equitable access? Sounds quite a lot like a job for the government.