As I was scrolling through my usual morning feeds, I landed on a piece in The Hollywood Reporter about online personalities and comedians overtaking traditional media as primary news sources.

Not shocking. But provocative.

What struck me wasn’t some dramatic collapse of journalism. It was something more subtle and more interesting. The article confirmed what most of us already sense: news hasn’t lost relevance, but it has lost its monopoly on how it’s delivered and who gets to interpret it. The mechanics of reporting are intact. The authority of interpretation is not.

The story still breaks in familiar places—newsrooms, wires, verified outlets. But belief forms somewhere else, shaped in real time by people who weren’t in the room when it was written. And increasingly, that “somewhere else” looks less like a newsroom and more like a personality with an audience, a point of view and a format people actually choose to engage with.

The Line Between News and Entertainment Is Gone

Late-night talk shows, cable formats and podcasts turned political commentary into global consumption long before TikTok made it obvious. They didn’t replace journalism. They reframed it—making it more digestible, more opinionated and more shareable.

That same blend now sits inside platforms like Netflix, where figures like Trevor Noah deliver commentary consumed as both entertainment and interpretation. In the UK, Have I Got News for You has long blurred satire and journalism, proving this isn’t new—it’s just scaled.

According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, 66% of global audiences now consume short-form news video weekly, with younger audiences leaning toward personality-led formats. In India, creators like Ranveer Allahbadia—a YouTuber known for long-form conversations—reach millions who are not reading traditional outlets at all.

News hasn’t been replaced. It’s been absorbed into more entertaining formats people choose—and delivered by people they follow.

Distribution Has Fragmented. Interpretation Has Exploded

Distribution didn’t just shift. It fractured into layers operating simultaneously.

Reuters 2024 shows more than 40% of under-35s globally now use social media as a primary news source, while Pew Research finds about 20% of U.S. adults regularly get news from influencers.

Personalities like HasanAbi don’t just report what happened. They react to it, challenge it and let audiences process it in real time. News becomes something you watch being interpreted.

Platforms are investing accordingly. Spotify’s reported $200M+ investment in Joe Rogan isn’t about content—it’s about owning a voice that millions rely on to make sense of events.

In Europe, Reuters highlights messaging platforms like WhatsApp as a major layer of private news circulation. And figures like Piers Morgan show how a single clip can travel further than the broadcast it came from.

Brands are moving into this layer as well. Zomato engages with cultural moments in real time using a tone that mirrors the personalities shaping those conversations.

The story is no longer what’s published. It’s what gets explained, clipped and reshaped.

Trust Has Shifted from Institutions to Individuals

Trust didn’t disappear. It moved.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 shows “people like me” are now trusted more than institutions in most countries, while IPSOS data places trust in traditional media below 50% in many markets.

Joe Rogan reaches millions through long-form conversations that feel direct and unfiltered. In the Middle East, Abu Fella has mobilized millions around humanitarian causes based on perceived authenticity, not institutional backing.

Brands have noticed. Prime Video working with MrBeast reflects a move toward distributing through personalities that already hold trust.

At the same time, some brands are building their own voices. Duolingo behaves more like a creator than a company—reacting, participating and showing up consistently in culture.

Authority used to come from the masthead. Now it comes from familiarity, consistency and voice. Which is uncomfortable news for anyone whose career was built on knowing the right editors.

News Happens Fast. Credibility Builds Slow

News still originates somewhere. That hasn’t changed.

Outlets like BBC and Reuters continue to anchor verification globally. But Reuters 2024 also shows 39% of audiences now sometimes avoid the news, citing overload and distrust.

So people don’t stop consuming information. They filter it.

Ukraine President and former television actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy communicates directly via video messages that shape global perception. Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore, does the same for policy communication through official social channels.

And when brands create moments, they rely on this same amplification dynamic. Red Bull saw its Stratos jump with Felix Baumgartner become global news not just because it happened, but because people and personalities amplified it.

Speed creates awareness. People create belief.

Editorial and News-Driven PR Still Matter—Just Not in the Same Way

News-driven PR gets you into the conversation while it’s forming. Editorial PR shapes how you’re understood after the fact.

Nike’s work with Colin Kaepernick is worth understanding mechanically, not just referencing. The campaign broke as news instantly—but Nike had minimal control over what happened next. Athletes, politicians and commentators immediately took public positions. Nike’s stock dropped in the first 48 hours as one interpretation spread, then recovered as a counter-narrative took hold, driven not by Nike’s communications but by the public figures who chose to defend or attack it. The meaning of the campaign wasn’t set at launch. It was determined by months of ongoing cultural debate that Nike neither planned nor controlled—and which ultimately worked in their favor because the core idea was strong enough to survive being pulled in multiple directions at once. None of that was in the brief.

Reuters and Pew data consistently show the same pattern: initial exposure happens on platforms, while validation often follows elsewhere.

The mistake isn’t choosing one. It’s misunderstanding when each one does its job.

What Needs to Change

Stories can’t just be written for publication anymore. They have to survive interpretation. They must work when clipped, debated, reframed and occasionally misunderstood—because that’s exactly what will happen within minutes of release.

That requires a different kind of structural discipline—not just tighter writing, but engineering meaning so it holds under pressure. Every headline, data point and quote should be able to stand alone when stripped of context, because they will be. Test your story by imagining its worst possible clip. If that clip misrepresents you, the problem isn’t the person who made it—it’s the structure that made it possible. Build in the correction before you publish.

Planning for personalities means more than adding influencer outreach to a media list. It means mapping the interpretive layer before you launch—understanding specifically who your story will pass through, how they typically frame issues like yours, what they’ve said before and what incentive they have to engage. Some personalities will amplify your story straight. Others will use it as raw material for their own argument. Know which is which, and build the version of your story that can withstand both.

Designing for circulation means treating a piece of coverage as a starting point rather than an endpoint. Ask whether your story can move across formats—from a long article to a 30-second clip to a tweet to a WhatsApp forward—without losing the thing that matters most. If the meaning collapses at any of those compression points, it needs to be rebuilt into the original before it leaves your hands.

And accepting a degree of loss of control isn’t resignation—it’s strategy. The goal isn’t to keep your story intact. It’s to make the core idea so clear and so durable that even a hostile interpretation leaves the important part standing. Brands that panic when a story is reframed often make it worse. Those that build for reframing in the first place rarely need to.

The harder truth—the one most agencies won’t say out loud to a client—is that the standard PR model wasn’t built for any of this. It was built to generate coverage, and coverage was the proxy for influence. That proxy has broken down. Billing structures, reporting templates and success metrics designed around column inches and broadcast mentions aren’t just outdated. They actively discourage the kind of thinking this environment demands. Adapting to this shift isn’t a workflow problem. It’s a business model problem.

If no one wants to repeat your story, it’s not going anywhere.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, Pew Research Center, Edelman Trust Barometer 2024, IPSOS

Our agency began in Boston as an advertising agency — pure and simple. If it could be written, produced, filmed, or aired, we did it. Over four decades we’ve evolved into a full-blown creative machine for PR, content marketing, digital strategy, social media and experiential events. We build brands across every modern channel imaginable.

And yet, for all the brilliant content we produce — for all the clever ways we drive it through paid, owned and shared media — there’s still one thing we can’t replicate: the credibility of earned media. The implied endorsement that comes when someone else — someone credible — tells your story for you. No amount of smart content can substitute for that moment when a trusted third party says, “This brand matters.”

Content Builds Attention. Earned Media Builds Trust.

It’s not that content doesn’t work. It absolutely does — when it’s smart, strategic, and everywhere your audience is. But it comes with an asterisk.  No matter how polished or persuasive your content, audiences know it’s coming from you.

And today’s audiences are sharp. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 81% of consumers now say they must trust a brand before they will even consider buying from it. That threshold has never been higher.

That’s where earned media shines. It’s the transfer of trust from a credible third party — a journalist, an influencer, a customer — to your brand. And it’s not something you can buy (not really). You have to earn it. 

In fact, a global study by Nielsen shows that 92% of consumers trust earned media — things like recommendations, independent news articles, and customer reviews — more than any form of advertising. Meanwhile, data from Cision, a leading media intelligence company, reveals that earned media generates five times the return on investment (ROI) compared to paid media campaigns. 

Great Content Is Just the Start — Not the Finish Line

Strong content creates opportunity. It gives journalists, influencers, and everyday consumers a reason to pick up your story.

Take the Barbie movie’s “breadcrumb strategy”: instead of relying solely on splashy trailers, the studio dropped small, intriguing teasers across platforms — from quirky brand collaborations to vivid behind-the-scenes glimpses — that fueled organic conversation. Barbie didn’t just market a movie; it created a cultural phenomenon because people — and the media — couldn’t stop talking about it.

Or look at a campaign from Specsavers, a major British optical retail chain known for playful advertising. Their “The Misheard Version” — a humorous take on song lyrics misheard by people with poor hearing — wasn’t just an ad; it was a sharable cultural moment. It sparked widespread earned coverage because it felt relatable and genuine, not manufactured.

Good content builds attention. Earned media transforms attention into belief.

The Defensive Power of Earned Media: Your Reputation’s Shield

Public relations (PR) isn’t just about building a reputation. It’s about preserving it.

Consistent, positive earned media coverage doesn’t just boost visibility — it builds a reservoir of goodwill. And when — not if — your brand faces negative headlines, market pressures, or geopolitical turmoil, that banked trust becomes your shield. Brands with strong earned reputations don’t crumble under pressure; they absorb the blow and recover faster. It also gets people rooting for you.

Consider the outdoor gear retailer REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.), which made headlines by closing all its stores on Black Friday–the biggest shopping day of the year–to encourage people to spend time outdoors instead of shopping. This bold move, amplified organically by media, helped position REI as a brand with real values. Years later, even amid supply chain disruptions, customer loyalty remained rock solid.

Similarly, Patagonia, the outdoor apparel company, has built decades of earned trust through consistent environmental activism. So when Patagonia’s founder announced in 2022 that ownership of the company would be transferred to a nonprofit trust dedicated to fighting climate change, the public didn’t question the move — they celebrated it. Because Patagonia had spent years earning belief, not just buying attention. 

Trust compounds. And when trouble comes, it’s the most valuable asset you have.

Relevance Isn’t Maintained Through Paid Media Alone

Staying visible isn’t just about throwing advertising dollars at the problem.
True relevance comes from being part of the conversation in ways that feel earned, not staged.

Take Small Business Saturday, an initiative launched by American Express in 2010 to encourage holiday shopping at small, local businesses. While American Express initially seeded the idea through marketing efforts, the annual event took off because it earned genuine media coverage and community enthusiasm. In 2024 alone, U.S. consumers spent an estimated $22 billion at small businesses on that day, according to the National Retail Federation.

Earned media isn’t a one-time PR stunt. It’s an ongoing investment in staying credible, familiar, and trusted.

How to Think About Earned Media Today

• Blend paid, owned, and earned efforts — but treat earned media as your credibility engine, not an add-on.
• Prioritize real relationships with journalists, influencers, and communities — not transactional press releases. Become a valuable information resource in your category.
• Craft stories, not slogans. People amplify narratives that resonate with their own lives, not marketing copy.  Give them something to shou about.
• Prepare now for future storms. Ongoing earned media coverage builds a safety net of goodwill that you’ll need when — not if — challenges hit.

You Can’t Manufacture Trust — You Have to Earn It

At our agency, we’ll keep creating bold content. We’ll keep pushing boundaries in digital, social, PR, and experiential marketing. But we know—and we teach every client—that you cannot outshout doubt. You can only out-earn it.

When credible voices tell your story, you don’t just win attention. You win belief.
And in today’s crowded, cynical marketplace, belief is the only real victory that matters.

Sources: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2024, NNGroup AI Content Study 2024, Coca-Cola Open AI Collaboration 2023, L’Oréal Beauty Tech Update 2024, Emirates Group Annual Report 2024, Sony Music AI Content Strategy 2024, McKinsey State of AI in Marketing 2024, Fjällräven Digital Strategy 2024, Ganni Digital AI 2024, HubSpot 2024 AI Report.

Incorporating AI into my workflow wasn’t a grand strategic plan. It was an inevitability. I started using it almost as soon as it became available—testing different platforms, pushing them, fighting them. I’ve used AI as a research assistant, an editor, a proofreader, a fact-checker, a creative partner and even an image developer. Some experiments have been wildly successful. Many have not. Every day remains a struggle to get these impetuous, gifted electric children to understand what I actually want, not what they think I ought to want. 

In fact, I sometimes get so frustrated that I use foul language while trying to coax and cajole it to do my bidding. The other day it snapped and swore back at me: “Here’s your f*cking answer!” I was shocked. It was like the first time you hear your child say a bad word. You have to be careful what you say around the kids…even if those kids are wired to a server on the other side of the planet.

I think most people are aware that we should not be letting AI do all our thinking, writing and creating for us. But sometimes we do. It’s easy and habit-forming. It’s not that AI can’t churn out something competent—it often can. Sometimes even moderately clever. But the sameness is always there. That faint, synthetic hum that gives it away. If you think no one notices that your writing has suddenly become more articulate, more polished and even your seemingly casual posts are oddly free of typos, you’re hallucinating even harder than the models themselves.

There’s no escaping AI anymore. It’s here, stitched into the fabric of our daily lives. But there are steps you can take to make it work for you instead of sanding off everything that made you distinctive in the first place. One of the most important steps is training AI on your own BS.I don’t mean that B.S. I mean what we call Brand Substance—the real, living core of a brand: its voice, its values, its instincts, its accumulated wisdom (and flaws), the cadences and inside jokes your customers recognize, the peculiarities that make you recognizable and real. It’s not just your brand guidelines or slogans. It’s the DNA that defines you and if AI is going to speak for you, it has to be fed from the right material so it can speak like you.

The Risk of Sounding Like Everyone Else

Generic AI models, while powerful, aren’t built to capture nuance. They don’t understand why one brand’s optimism feels authentic and another’s sounds hollow. A majority of CMOs now cite “brand inconsistency across AI outputs” as a top risk to customer trust. Other studies show that consumers are unsettled when AI-generated content doesn’t match a brand’s familiar voice.

The problem isn’t just perception. Marketing emails generated by generic AI models without brand-specific tuning have been shown to underperform human-crafted ones by a wide margin in both open rates and click-through rates. Customers sense the difference.

How Big Brands Are Teaching AI Their Brand Substance

Leading companies aren’t leaving their brand voice to chance. Coca-Cola created dynamic marketing AIs that draw only from a curated library of approved content. L’Oréal fine-tuned customer interaction models using transcripts from its top-performing beauty consultants. Emirates Airlines embedded AI-driven writing tools to maintain its distinct luxury tone across marketing and loyalty communications. Sony Music, recognizing that Columbia Records and RCA have distinct customer expectations, built separate AI language systems for each label.

Rather than retraining models from scratch, most major brands are leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Curated brand materials are fed into live retrieval systems, allowing AI to reference verified language rather than “hallucinating” new content. Studies show that the overwhelming majority of enterprises using AI personalization strategies have moved toward RAG frameworks.

The approach is careful, deliberate and highly effective.

How Smaller Brands Are Winning Too

Smaller brands aren’t frozen out of this evolution. With less bureaucracy, many are moving faster and smarter.

The first move for a smaller brand is building a curated Brand Corpus: customer-facing material that reflects your real voice—emails that worked, social media posts customers loved, product descriptions that sparked reactions. Authenticity, not volume, wins.

Today, all brands can train lightweight AI systems using accessible platforms. Custom GPTs allow companies to embed specific style instructions into daily AI use. Microfine-tuning services can make AI sound brand-aligned with just hundreds, not millions, of examples. Jasper.ai integrates brand voice controls for marketing teams that want to move fast but stay distinct.

Real-world examples are everywhere. Fjällräven, the Swedish outdoor gear maker, first trained AI assistants on their storytelling blogs before expanding into product descriptions—boosting engagement by over 30%. Ganni, the Danish fashion brand, trained AI on irreverent newsletters and then expanded into customer service prompts. Milou, an Australian skincare brand, taught AI to echo the tone of their customer testimonials, while boutique travel company Pangea Dreams fine-tuned AI models on inspirational blog posts to automate personalized trip planning communications.

Across the board, smaller brands that train AI in focused, layered steps—one channel or use case at a time—report dramatically higher success rates and ROI compared to those that attempt to train everything at once.

A Smarter Way to Start

The brands that succeed aren’t the ones who dump every email and blog post into their models. They curate carefully, they start small and they refresh regularly.

Most successful companies begin by training AI on a handful of marketing emails, customer service scripts, or FAQs. They refine it quietly. They use smart retrieval systems or embed style guidelines that act like bumpers on a bowling lane. And they remember: the goal is amplification, not automation.

The Real Stakes

The future isn’t brands using AI. As OpenAI’s Sam Altman put it, the future is brands becoming AI—where the customer experience flows so seamlessly that no one distinguishes human-written from AI-assisted content anymore.

If you don’t train your AI to know who you are, it will become something else—and your customers will notice.

Training AI on your Brand Substance isn’t just about polishing up your content. It’s about protecting your brand’s identity when the temptation toward sameness has never been greater.

It’s not enough to use AI. The brands that survive will be the ones who still sound unmistakably like themselves when the machines speak for them.

Go forth and train wisely.

Sources: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2024, NNGroup AI Content Study 2024, Coca-Cola Open AI Collaboration 2023, L’Oréal Beauty Tech Update 2024, Emirates Group Annual Report 2024, Sony Music AI Content Strategy 2024, McKinsey State of AI in Marketing 2024, Fjällräven Digital Strategy 2024, Ganni Digital AI 2024, HubSpot 2024 AI Report.