AI, real-time marketing, and influencer partnerships can be amazing ways to reach customers, but how do you manage the risk they could potentially bring to your brand and reputation—in an instant?
Agility requires a willingness to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer expectations. It also demands the ability to experiment, learn, and iterate on strategies in real-time.
Today, we’re going to talk about navigating the evolving PR landscape and how AI is impacting communications strategies, particularly in the realm of influencer marketing and brand reputation. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jeff Hahn, Principal at Hahn Agency, and author of the book Breaking Bad News: 12 Essential Crisis Communication Tools.
About Jeff Hahn
Jeff Hahn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-d-hahn/
Resources
Hahn Agency: https://hahn.agency/
Get Jeff’s book: Breaking Bad News: 12 Essential Crisis Communication Tools
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
AI, real-time marketing, and influencer partnerships can be amazing ways to reach customers, but how do you manage the risk that they could potentially bring to your brand and your reputation in an instant? Agility requires a willingness to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer expectations. It also demands the ability to experiment, learn, and iterate on strategies in real time. Today, we’re going to talk about navigating the evolving PR landscape and how AI is impacting communication strategies, particularly in the realm of influencer marketing and brand reputation. Tommy discussed this topic. I’d like to welcome Jeff Hahn, principal at Hahn Agency and author of the book Breaking Bad News, 12 Essential Crisis Communication Tools. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Hahn (00:45)
Thanks, Greg. Very good to be with you.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:47)
Yeah,
yeah, great to great to see again. Always always good to talk before we dive in. Why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at honey?
Jeff Hahn (00:55)
Yeah, I’m the principal at Han. We’re about 45 people agency. We really focus on two major categories, energy and power, and then health and nutrition. So we kind of like to talk about ourselves as a heating and eating agency. In both of those cases, there’s this really interesting ribbon that is in common with both sectors. And that’s the thing that I focus on, which is crisis communication.
Because things go wrong in whether it’s the oil patch or the power lines and severe weather events or with food recalls or medical situations, especially litigation. I find myself bouncing between both of these categories on a very frequent basis.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:42)
Yeah, never a dull moment, I would imagine. So yeah, definitely. Well, let’s we’re going to talk about a few things here. I want to start with talking about certainly we talk about AI a lot on this show. We don’t talk as much about PR. And so, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit about that with you. And, you know, a lot of people are concerned about potential downsides of AI and marketing and PR and, you know, rightfully so. But what are some of the
ethical considerations that brands need to be mindful of as they integrate AI into their communication strategies.
Jeff Hahn (02:15)
Well, I think there are three that really orbit around my head on a regular basis. First, we’re all concerned about human mimicking and deception. know, when AI is able to impersonate humans so well, it’s important, even on the PR side, and perhaps especially on the PR side, that we’re transparent and we disclose that we are using AI or AI is a part of the activity that we are.
Working with. So I think that’s a really important first big step in order to set down a platform of trust. And that’s trust is really at the crux of all these. The second one, privacy and data ethics are a real big red flag with these large language models ingesting all kinds of content. I mean, the entire Internet every day. I think we’re going to be talking a lot more about regulating excessive behavioral tracking.
and AI that’s interpreting your inputs without your permission. So that’s another ethical concern. I have a third one that’s kind of a curve ball. If you’re into the energy transition conversation like we are in our firm and you work with the kind of clients that we do, sustainability is a really interesting topic. And of course, we rarely think about the fact that a query into an LLM uses about 10x the
power of a standard query in, a Google platform. And that power demand has actually shifted the entire narrative in the energy industry from climate crisis to power shortage. It’s all AI driven. And these data warehouses that we’re hearing about and data centers are popping up next to nuclear power plants even these days are all part of this really interesting challenge that AI presents.
I’ll put it into this category of ethics because we have to be mindful of the resource uses as a matter of ethical consideration.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:19)
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s great. Yeah. And I, you know, I’ve I’ve heard some things about the, know, about about the last point, but I don’t think it’s being talked about nearly as much as maybe some of the other some of the other concerns. And yeah, that’s there’s a lot there’s a lot to unpack there. And just, know, there’s such a race to adopt a eye by so many organizations. I mean, I know a lot of the organizations I work with, you know, the
the challenges, how do we use AI and use it more quickly and more thoroughly throughout the organization? There’s not a talk about, you know, energy usage or anything like that. So, yeah, definitely.
Jeff Hahn (04:59)
The
whole conservation conversation will be something that happens. I suspect in a couple years, it’ll catch back up. Right now, the leading edge of AI is all about speed and the capability and all the things that Sid Banerjee talked about in your last episode. It’s exciting times. That’s a really interesting challenge that we’re going to face. Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:22)
Yeah, well, then to kind of flip things then, I know you mentioned a couple of things there, but where do you see the greatest opportunity, particularly in PR and for PR professionals to use AI to improve work and better serve clients, things like that.
Jeff Hahn (05:40)
All of those are true. But since I’m a crisis guy, I think what I’ll home in on is that crisis prediction and simulation are going to be the really amazing ventures that we find ourselves in in a short amount of time. I think the big opportunity for brands is a switch from rapid response to anticipating potential crises and then burning that risk down.
through the built scenarios and simulations. So that’s a really interesting capability that in our crisis toolkits, we’re using best guesses and analog kinds of measures to try to predict the difference between possibility and probability. AI is gonna close that gap in a really interesting way and allow for immersion scenarios that’ll.
They’ll make you cry. They’re so realistic. Yeah. We’re just months and months away from that.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:36)
Yeah,
I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s fascinating because I mean, you know, just dipping my toes into like synthetic research and personas and stuff like that’s one facet of this. But a lot, a lot of these things that you’re mentioning, you know, there’s, there’s geopolitical, there’s environment, you know, there’s all kinds of aspects to this. So the, the idea that you could simulate multiple scenarios and then predict the likelihood of those happening and be ready, right? Cause I mean, you’ve all, you’ve always
I assume there’s always like a playbook for like, what if these few scenarios happen and you you map out as many as you can, but like the depth and breadth and accuracy, right, is is is pretty intriguing.
Jeff Hahn (07:24)
Yeah, it’s a, you’re exactly right. We do have playbooks and we created for our clients all the time. I think what the interesting implications for AI are is that those playing books are going to come to life and they’ll be turned over from the comms team to the risk management team. And risk managers are going to take those scenarios and say, Hey, we’ve got a flank that’s open to particular challenges. Let’s burn those down and then move on to the next one in priority order.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:54)
Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, that’s a that’s a we’ll have to have you back and let’s talk about that in a year or something and see what you see how that’s evolved. That’s great.
Jeff Hahn (08:04)
It’s good news for the PR craft because oftentimes we feel like we’re not at the the grownups table. Right. A great example where PR can harness AI and take its place.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:17)
Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating. I also want to talk about influencer marketing. One of the things I mentioned at the top of the show. So, you know, it’s certainly it’s been it’s been around for a while, but it’s it’s become incredibly complex and beyond just things like follower accounts and things like that. What are the key metrics that brands should be looking at when evaluating potential influencer partnerships?
Jeff Hahn (08:43)
Yeah. You’re right, Greg, on the follower accounts and you can put engagement rates and growth trends. All those are good. I’m thinking in my head though, about your question and reminded that it was more than 20 years ago that a guy named Al Reese wrote a book called the fall of advertising and rise of PR. Yeah. And in that book out says, Hey, don’t buy ads, make news. This is where I think the idea of influencers come in and
You begin to measure things like earned media crossover. The questions behind that idea think crossover as the metric are these did the influencer help the brand make news and did the influencer help the brand build trust? Now you’re measuring outcomes instead of outputs. And I think that idea of earned crossover could be one of those things that helps us again, redefine the metrics that make a difference. The other thing about this influencer game that I’m actually very intrigued by, we’re living in a low trust era right now. That means brands with messages are often viewed quite skeptically. But if you shift that power from message over to the messengers with influencers,
I do believe you’ve got yourself the right play for this era that we find ourselves in because you’re borrowing from that influencers trust reservoir. Yeah. And it’s a very smart play, I think, for brands. Watch for that idea of earned crossover, though. It’s my thought. I don’t know if anybody else is going to pick up on it, but it feels to me like it’s a new kind of metric, very layered in its nuances. But
Our data science team can put those things together into nifty little dashboards and algorithms that give you real time updates. We’ll see. We’ll see if it takes.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:41)
Yeah, sounds like, yeah, you need a you need a good acronym for it. That’s that’s my only advice. But yeah, so anyway, I’ll leave that to the to the branding folks. But yeah.
Jeff Hahn (10:53)
Your listeners will have a good time with that. They can send in their ideas.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:56)
So yeah, and definitely definitely agree about the you know, influencers can help with some of the lack of trust or just you know, build building building greater trust. And yet, you know, the caveat here is, you know, we have seen some high profile influencer campaigns backfire and some a little bit or or what and some, know, spectacularly, let’s just say, what advice would you have to brands to mitigate risks?
Because it’s not like it always backfired. Like it often, it most often works. It’s just, it’s those other times, right? So how do you mitigate those risks?
Jeff Hahn (11:33)
It’s a really interesting question. And today we actually get the opportunity to ask, well, is a backfire a bad thing? I mean, think about this. If you’re American Eagle today and people are giving a grief about Sydney Sweeney, are you mad or unhappy? She wisdom stock price to the roof as we’re
Greg Kihlstrom (11:53)
When’s the last time anyone talked about American Eagle?
Jeff Hahn (11:56)
So this is one of those kind of questions or moments when you say, is all PR good PR? Right. So the definition of a backfire is changing. Now, just another example, a couple of years back, the brand Solo Stove, which is a wood running stove for your patio, they hired Snoop Dogg as their their influencer. Snoop was going to go smokeless, which, course, is
Antithetical to his personal brand. So it was catchy. Well, three months after that campaign ran, the chairman of solo stove, the CEO all fired because sales didn’t increase. So it is a really interesting metric for us to ask ourselves at the outset of engaging with an influencer. What are our expectations? You go back to some of the classics. Is it just reach or awareness?
If you expect sales to move, then you’re putting a very different marker on that influencer and you need to think about what kind of backfire you might be up against by the measures that you adopt. Yeah. It’s a challenging time, not just to know, you know, FTC or advertising standards, authority stuff, good contracts, all that’s true. But knowing what success means is the first best defense against.
something going really wrong because you’ve just misaligned the influencer with the metric.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:26)
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, people get so caught up in the campaign or, whatever you want to call it that they forget. Yeah, they forget what the conversation was that preceded the thing launching and all that. And then, yeah, you kind of make up what the goals are as you go if you’re not intentional about that from the beginning. So, yeah, definitely.
Jeff Hahn (13:46)
Yeah, intentional is a great word. That’s the that’s the whole idea. Get that alignment in and typically we’ll have a lower risk of backfire.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:57)
So let’s talk a little more about crisis communications and not just with influencer campaigns, but in other things as well. We’re living in news travels fast, a crisis can erupt and spread globally in minutes. Given where we are today and the tools that we have today, what are some of the essential first steps that a brand should take when facing one of these sudden crises?
Jeff Hahn (14:21)
The thing that most brands get wrong in any response is speed. They’re just not fast. And that’s the challenge you have to comprehend these days because the news does travel instantaneously. The old saying is a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. So that was that was a saying from the 1700s. So imagine today.
But the speed of response is probably the number one challenge. within that, believe it or not, the assembly, the gathering of a rapid response team to actually assess an issue and make a response is the underlying reason that brands are too slow. They don’t have their team defined. The team doesn’t know their roles. If they’re together for the first time, they don’t know how to act and
These are the things that you never see out in front of the curtain, but they’re the things that are slowing down a brand from doing what it needs to do. Now, we do have some good examples lately, and I’m going to take the fantastic case of the kiss cam and astronomer, right? Astronomer comes out. It wasn’t right away, but it was pretty quick that they hired Gwyneth Paltrow.
The ex-wife of Chris Martin from Gold Play, who exposed the kiss scam scandal. Just fantastic. And she’s talking about technical matters in that bit that she did. She has no clue what she’s saying, but it was a brilliant little maneuver. And I was struck by how quickly they were able to put that creative idea into place. you do find brands who can move quick and make news with the choices that they have in front of them.
This is a good example.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:17)
Yeah. And so I want to talk about your book a little bit as well. And so your book is called Breaking Bad News. What’s the key takeaway that you’d like listeners to have from it?
Jeff Hahn (16:29)
Well, we know in any type of situation, it’s impossible for a brand to know when or what’s going to break bad and when it’s typically at the worst possible time. Well, the essence of the book is that it is possible for brands and especially a rapid response teams to know what their options are when it comes to responding. And when I say that, I think down now through the book and the models that I created there that are simply
option sets There are four big ones holding statements. There’s four options for a good holding statement Messaging what’s our message going to be in the middle of all this spaghetti hitting the fan? Well, there’s 16 options Messenger who’s going to be the spokesperson? There are seven options and Then how are we going to get the word out? There are 12 options. So Options are much better than answers because good judgment has to lead the way when the pressure’s on I just love the idea of being able to present my clients and walk them through their options in the middle of The fog that they get put in and they can quickly pick I want that one that one that one good. We’ve got our plan go. Yeah Options are better than answers. That’s the essence of the book
Greg Kihlstrom (17:46)
Nice, nice. Well, yeah, we’ll put a link to the book in the show notes and definitely recommend people check it out. ⁓ yeah. As we wrap up here, just a couple of things I want to talk about and talk, you know, future future facing. And it’s hard to look five to 10 years out. So let’s maybe, you know, say couple two to three years out. You know, what are some of the trends that you see shaping the future of PR and communications?
Jeff Hahn (18:10)
I think about this stat that’s it’s rattling around in my head on all the time in the year 2000, there were about 50 independent major media companies today. That’s number six. That the implication of that. See change is that syndication is running rampant. And one of the most important aspects of a PR practitioners life is going to be able to.
keep up with the effect that syndication has on a news story, just mushrooms out through a thousand different websites in seconds. So real time analytics, they now become a critical skill that a PR practitioner has to have. We used to be able to wait for those, but the days of a weekly report, monthly report, quarterly report, forget it. We’ve got to move into a real time analytics environment and ecosystem and
Quite frankly, clients have to as well. We see this effect too, by the way, on the decentralized media standpoint with the growth of podcasts. That’s another really interesting, you know, two to three years from now. I still think podcasts have legs. I in my own fragmented media ecosystem, what I allow in to my world and to my head, it’s podcasts and print only.
I have my five that I listen to religiously. You’re going to continue to find this fragmentation as podcasts find their smaller niches and, really grow their tribes in that respect. So now a PR practitioner isn’t pitching a reporter. They’re pitching over into an audience, into a podcaster like you.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:52)
Yeah, yeah. And I can attest to the fact that I am pitched multiple times a day. and I also share. do hope that podcasts are around in two to three years as well, because I’ve you know, I’m having fun on the show. I want to, you know, make it to year 10 at least, you know. Yeah. But yeah, no, I agree. It’s like it’s and I can empathize. I’ve never been a PR practitioner, but like I can empathize with how fragmented that must be that, you know, I’ve got.
people reaching out to me. Most of them are good fits, some of them not even close, but you know, I guess they’re casting a wide net, right? So.
Jeff Hahn (20:29)
Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s that’s is another implication for AI. Hey, if I want to get on Greg Kielstrom’s podcast, what do I need to say to him? You can actually practice that pitch with AI now and you can get some feedback. Yeah. AI knows enough about you, Greg, where it will say he would never go for that.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:49)
Yeah, yeah, I believe it. Well, and so along those lines too, you know, there’s certainly a lot of talk about people coming into the job market and, you know, just how things have changed. mean, you know, I always use the anecdote for with myself. mean, my first job out of college, I was a webmaster, which was a job that didn’t exist when I left high school, you know, so it’s like.
I look at this as I think AI is having an even bigger change on some things than even the internet. But certainly it’s one of those big change times where I think there’s jobs that are going to exist five, six years from now that we don’t even know what they are right now. But what advice would you give to young professionals that are just starting their careers out and things are under such massive change?
Jeff Hahn (21:38)
Yeah, AI as the starting point to the conversation today is a proper starting point for the wrap up because it’s really destroying the bottom rung of the career ladder. That’s a, we’ve got a social issue coming our way as a result that we’re to have to reckon with in a thousand different ways. think that’s a PR as a career is no exception. And so my advice, again, a little biased because I’m a crisis guy.
But I’ll tell you a quick story. I was a junior in high school with that was several years back. It’s a friend of mine said, just say more than 10. And ⁓ I wanted to be on the baseball team. Well, the only position on the baseball team was one that no one else wanted to play. It was the catcher. I was really a small guy in high school. was none of the equipment fit me, but I raised my hand and I got to play.
Greg Kihlstrom (22:15)
Right, right.
Jeff Hahn (22:34)
That’s my advice to young practitioners today, or new out of college, raise your hand, find ways to put yourself in the most difficult situations that no one else wants to be in. No one wants to play catcher. And you get two benefits from that. Good experience and you build resiliency. You then come out of those hand raising experiences, kind of beat up and bruise.
But boy, are you differentiated. And those are the kinds of gritty young professionals I look for when I think about how do we want to expand? What’s the kind of value system to the new practitioners, to our space? Do I want to see in them? That’s it.
Greg Kihlstrom (23:15)
I love that advice. That’s great. Well, Jeff, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you before we wrap up. I ask to everybody here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Jeff Hahn (23:28)
I have another counterintuitive response. I don’t watch the news unless it’s absolutely necessary. Instead, I read and read and read and read probably to almost three hours a day. I’m reading the news. It helps me stay agile because I can discover narratives that I can’t get from, you know, sound bite television or even online news stations in reading, I’m able to ⁓ really digest a lot more information and then find a pattern. So it really helps me stay nimble and agile that things in this space are changing. I’m just seeing it. Last week, we were saying this. This week, we’re saying that. OK, so it’s different than most people would probably sign up for. But call me Warren Buffett acolytes.
Just sit down and read for half a day and then make decisions after that.
