Will Reese, Chief Innovation Officer at Inizio Evoke, and Theresa Dolge, Chief Media Relations Officer at Inizio Evoke, join Doug Simon, CEO of D S Simon Media, to discuss how GEO is reshaping the earned media landscape. They explore the important role local media plays in building trust and fostering community engagement. Theresa and Will also share strategies for strengthening brand reputation and visibility in AI-driven search results.
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Podcast Host, Doug Simon is CEO at D S Simon Media. D S Simon Media is a recognized innovator in broadcast public relations and the creator of the industry’s first AI-Powered Broadcast Media Tour™. Clients include top brands in healthcare, technology, travel, financial services, food and beverage, consumer goods, entertainment, retail, and non-profits. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the firm has won more than 100 industry awards.
Contact Doug at dougs@dssimonmedia.com.
TRANSCRIPT:
DOUG: Theresa, let’s start with you. What’s one significant shift that you’ve been seeing in the earned media landscape lately?
THERESA: I have been noticing that there’s a lot of money being funneled into media outlets at an unprecedented rate. We’re seeing it twofold. On the one side, we’re seeing investors like Warren Buffett invest $350 million in The New York Times. And then on the other side, you’re seeing a lot of the media outlets negotiating with the LLMs for access to their content.
DOUG: Yeah, so that’s a significant change. And that ties into Will what you’ve been talking about with your focus on healthcare. Why is local media become even more important in the pharma and health space?
WILL: I think when you think about healthcare, so much of the healthcare decisions are local and very personal, tied to your community. And when you think about the source of information at a community level, it is that local news and the LLMs are tapping into pools of community and contacts. So, that’s really what they’re drawing from to drive a lot of that discoverability.
DOUG: Yeah. And one of the things we share is our survey. We did nationwide survey of what media people trust. Republicans and Democrats actually were within a half a percentage point 85% to 15%. They trusted local TV news more than social media. Theresa, let’s go back to you, because we’re talking about the funding and we can sort of separate the political aspect of that for a moment, because that clearly plays a role, but can that benefit journalists and PR professionals?
THERESA: Absolutely. I think for a long time in PR, we were strong advocates of doing local market outreach. That kind of changed over time, people wanted to be more national. And now that we’ve kind of gone back to this kind of viewpoint of the trust being more at the local level, I do think there are opportunities not just for PR professionals to be creating and suggesting and recommending local market campaigns, but also for journalists who are locally based. There’s going to be more job opportunities, especially when you have something like Axios, who’s forging, you know, relationships and bartering with the LLMs to create local market newsrooms because they’re hungry for content.
DOUG: Yeah, and that aligns with what we’re seeing, where there’s actually much more local news content that’s out there. For a period, there’s been fewer people to do that. I sort of view good PR professionals now as a staff extension of the TV newsroom, because they’re more reliant on us than there ever been. And, Will, I know there’s a lot of talk about zero click behavior. I sort of call it way fewer click, because the data I’ve seen from Jonny Bentwood is now 23% of Google searches get a click compared to what used to be close to 100%, because that was the reason you went on to find stuff to click on it. And that’s happened probably over 18 months, but given that the clicks are declining significantly from search, what are some of the metrics that you’re looking at as being important?
WILL: Yeah, I think, you know, visibility and discoverability are important. And I think many brands are not as visible as they should be or as visible for the breadth of questions that are coming in. The other big piece is quality of the citations and quality of the language. This is where really the communication comes in. What do you want to be known for as a brand where the most innovative, we’re the smartest, we’re the fastest. Those adjectives matter and your reputation around that matters. That quality is where you want to be. You might show up in the list, but if you’re third or fourth or, you know, your attribution isn’t strong, that weakens that initial impression that you’re making through that LLM.
DOUG: Interesting. I think it’s also been critical just showing up. Increasingly, people are starting to list the attribution or these LLMs when it wasn’t even there for a while. So, I’d have to read it and who knows what the source was. Now, that that is being added into it, it is much more important. Love this conversation and really love the fact that this earned media pendulum has swung back to us, which is making sort of the traditional PR a publicity of getting people out there with coherent projects. One of the things we see and we’re hearing it from stations is they want more optimized content so their content gets more discoverable because they’re putting it online. Looking ahead, what are some of the things you’re seeing? Theresa, let’s start with you. What’s your crystal ball looking like?
THERESA: How to optimize the content. I think one of the things that we’ve known for a very long time in earned media is the credibility of, you know, certain outlets and also things like advocacy partners and also leading key opinion leaders from academic institutions. So, I think what we’re going to see is we need the message that we’re putting out there to be spread across all of those things in different places in order to be optimized in the rankings when we go in there and the people are doing their searches. It’s going to rate the credibility based on things that we and our media have always known were credible. And now LLMs are basically validating. It’s a beautiful moment in time, actually.
DOUG: Yeah. And I think the key is also that they’ve got to be out there consistently because you can see is an additional factor. So, you might do one on media campaign. It’s like okay great. Now we’re good. Now we can go back to doing whatever it was we’re doing.
THERESA: Will and I were just talking about that. Will calls it, the freshness. It’s good to be fresh and out there, but what’s better is you can’t sleep on it. You have to be out there consistently because otherwise somebody else is going to come out and be fresher, and then their content is going to rise higher.
DOUG: Yeah, well, we love to be fresh on this podcast. So, I think that’s a perfect segue to you Will.
WILL: Yeah. I mean, to me, the freshness, the people coming in, the nuance, if I ask a question and I say, hey, what’s the hottest thing now or what’s the best treatment today? Little word choices require a fresher answer. I could be a smaller brand, but because somebody put now or today, I show up higher, even over a bigger brand, because my content is fresher and to the LLM it looks like, wow, this, this brand’s got something going on. So, you could be a smaller property and co-op that search. So, the freshness and the always on reputation management plus the event and make it an experience, but make it an experience that has ripples because the LLMs looking at a much larger universe and is connecting the pattern. Oh wow, this thing is relevant because I’m seeing all of these signals come together. That’s a different kind of world than traditional search was.
DOUG: Yeah. And one of the things that we’ve seen, and that’s part of the platform that we’re using when we do AI-Powered Broadcast Media Tours, is really trying to identify what are the questions people are actually asking. I think it’s such an important point that you make about are they asking about recency and in healthcare? Certainly, that’s even more important than a lot of other things. For technology. it’s important they want the latest, but you know, in healthcare you don’t want to know what was the best treatment for years ago. You want to know what it is now. How is that playing a role?
WILL: It’s 100% the standard of care. ASCO was just this past weekend, massive ripple effect out there. That dramatically changes a ton of buzz around a pancreatic cancer drug. You know, true terrific survival benefit. That’s a huge cascade. So, if you’re looking now, you’re looking for a trial or what’s best in class, that’s going to have an impact right away. And I think more and more people are using the AI tools, especially for healthcare, but using it to guide their decision making. And that is less is a reference. Like I want to factor an answer and more as a decision support tool, which changes some of those inbound questions.
DOUG: I look forward to decision support tool just being known as DST, because why wouldn’t it be? Theresa, any final thoughts you want to throw in there?
THERESA: We do need to think about how we program for discoverability on these LLMs. It’s very different than probably we were building our campaigns and going about creating programs and public relations for all those years. This is a different a different beast. And I think we need to think about how we’re creating programs that will rank us higher. And I think it’s the freshness. I think, yes, we need to go out there at like really important moments, but we need to consistently sustain that over time as well in the background. So, it’s kind of two layers.
DOUG: Thanks so much to the two of you for such an informative discussion about a red hot topic that’s on everyone’s minds today. I really appreciate it.
THERESA: We appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about this. I think as we move forward, we’re going to see a lot of things happening in this space, and maybe we can come back on and talk about those things when they happen too.
WILL: Thank you for a great conversation. I love talking about this. We love chatting together. And I think one of the things you see is humans still have a ton of value. So, I’m making that pitch as well. Quality communication and authenticity matters in the AI world, so it is the mastery of both.
