Public Relations Stories and Strategies

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Who actually makes up the rules for public relations? Who decided what counts as good measurement, how you're supposed to structure a comms team, what you tell an executive when they ask "why does this function even exist"? Your local or national association has a voice in that, but the actual standards, the ones you're governed by and quoted to and inspired by, came out of delegate rooms in Madrid, Melbourne, and Stockholm. The US sends delegates to those rooms. 

You don't get a personal say in what t...

For decades, PR professionals have tried to influence what people think or how they think it. 

AI may be changing something even more fundamental: whether people do much of that thinking themselves. 

Researchers call it “Cognitive Surrender.” The tendency to accept an AI-generated answer without really scrutinizing it. And if AI increasingly sits between your message and your audience, or starts doing the thinking for communicators themselves, the implications for trust, persuasion and professional judgment could be enormous.

Listen For

4:30 What Is Cognitive Surrender and How Did Researc...

Every PR person knows the moment: you're holding a coffee or a glass of wine at a networking event, the small talk has dried up, and the person standing next to you outranks you by a lot. Shawn Spitaleri has spent years collecting the kind of beverage trivia that fixes exactly that problem, real, verifiable stories about why your coffee tastes the way it does, why tea sparked a geopolitical crisis, and why every champagne bottle opens with the same number of twists no matter who made it.

This episode is a toolkit, not a lecture. Shawn...

Most people don’t experience a country… they experience its reputation. 

Long before a flight is booked or a business deal is considered, a story has already landed in your mind. A headline. A search result. A clip that went viral. A warning someone repeated with total confidence. And once that story sticks, it starts to feel like the place itself.

So, let’s test it. When you picture Egypt, what shows up first? Pyramids. Pharaohs. Ancient tombs. Maybe a biblical story, or maybe a recent news headline? Egypt is one of the most famous places...

Most of us are waiting for mentorship to look a certain way. A senior person who takes us under their wing. A scheduled coffee every two weeks. A defined relationship with a clear beginning and a clear end. 

And while we are waiting for that version of mentorship to show up, the real thing is happening all around us and we’re missing it entirely. But the way mentorship actually works in the public relations profession is different to almost everything you would naturally believe. 

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3:35 What Are the F...

As a communications professional you’ve used ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot in the last 30 days. 

Probably in the last week. 

Probably earlier today. 

And at some point you’ve had the same experience: you put in a prompt, you get back something that’s technically competent and completely generic. You spend the next 20 minutes re-prompting, editing, wrestling it into something that actually sounds like your organization, your voice, your situation. 

A Workday study found that 40% of the time saved by using generative AI tools is immediately lost reworking the outputs. You traded one...

In Canada, women make up roughly two thirds of the public relations profession. They are the majority in the classrooms, the majority in the entry level roles, and the majority climbing through the middle ranks. And then somewhere around the senior level, the numbers flip. The leadership tables in PR firms and communications departments across the country look nothing like the profession they are supposed to represent. This is not a new observation. The data has been there for years.

Here’s what’s new. Two researchers decided to stop describing the problem and start asking a hard...

Most women don't lose their voice all at once. It happens slowly, quietly, and with the best of intentions. They soften their tone here. They hold back an opinion there. They make themselves a little smaller, a little easier, a little less. Until one day they can't quite remember what they actually sound like.

This episode is about that. Where the muting comes from, what it costs, and what it takes to find your voice at midlife.

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3:30 What Does It Really Mean to Find Your Voice at Midlife?

There’s a booming business in divisiveness. And PR is caught right in the thick of it.

Recorded at the June 2026 IABC conference in Toronto, Doug Downs speaks with Fred Cook about A Quiet Shift, a report exploring how polarization is reshaping public relations. Cook explains why division is damaging society, mental health, and business while making thoughtful communications counsel more valuable. 

They examine echo chambers, outrage as a political and media strategy, the possibility that AI reinforces existing beliefs, and the disappearance of productive dialogue. Cook also outlines how PR education must evolve, emphasizing cri...

Generic messaging fails for a simple reason. It speaks to everyone, which means it actually speaks to no one. The messages that stick, the ones people repeat, forward, and act on, are never written for "employees" or "stakeholders" or "our valued customers." They are written for one person, with one specific frustration, in one specific moment. 

That’s not a nice idea about storytelling. It’s a framework, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it in every all-staff email that gets ignored and every campaign that gets remembered. 

In this episode we get the...

Reputation isn’t your shadow anymore. It’s your operating system. 

It’s no longer something you manage. It has already been decided, by AI, based on patterns inside your organization you may not even know exist. Most leaders still think about reputation the old way: crisis plans, issue management, damage control after the fact. But AI now reads every signal a company puts out and connects them across every location and every stakeholder, drawing its own conclusion about who you really are. A bad manager in one city used to stay local. Now it can become your gl...

What happens when a conference has no keynote, no formal agenda, and no single expert at the front of the room?  

The new IABC International Chair calls this an “unconference” model. And it’s one glimpse of how professional associations can evolve: by creating space for communicators to learn directly from one another. 

Also in this episode – why community, credibility, and connection matter more than ever in a profession being reshaped by AI, shrinking budgets, and rising expectation, the changing role of communicators in the age of AI, and why earned media, credible third-party sources, FAQs, and...

As a communications professional you’re operating in the most complex information environment in history. Misinformation. Disinformation. AI generated deepfakes of executives saying things they never said. Audiences who have stopped trusting what organizations tell them. Employees who can't tell what's real. And somewhere in the middle of all of that noise you’re still expected to move people. To make them understand something, feel something, and do something. With the same frameworks you have always used.

Dianne Chase has written a book that argues the profession needs a North Star more than it needs another tactical play...

Communications has always been built around a sender mentality. We decide what people need to know, we package it, we push it out. That model came from journalism and broadcasting, three networks, eleven o'clock news, one message for everyone. It made sense then. 

The infrastructure has changed completely since. Audiences have become producers. People choose what they consume, when they consume it, and they unsubscribe from what no longer serves them.

That transformation happened entirely in the outside world. Inside organizations, almost nothing changed. And the question this episode keeps coming back to is a s...

Every communications campaign you have ever built had a choice architecture inside it. The order you sequenced your calls to action. The option you listed first in a petition. The default you set in an employee survey. The way you structured a crisis response. 

You made all of those decisions. Some of them deliberately. Most of them by instinct, habit, or convention. And the difference between those two things, between deliberate design and accidental design, is the difference between a campaign that moves people and one that wonders why nobody moved. 

This episode was recorded li...

Recognized as the most listened-to PR podcast in the World by Podchaser, Goodpods, and data from Rephonic.

Also recognized as one of best Independent Interview podcasts by the Ear Worthy Newsletter

https://storiesandstrategies.ca/podcast/

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“Journalism is dead.” 

You've heard it. You've probably said it. 

And honestly, the evidence seems pretty hard to argue with. 

Newsrooms gutted, trust in tatters, cable news turned into a gladiator sport.  

But what if that story, the one we keep telling about journalism, is itself bad journalism? 

Neil Brown thinks so. He’s a 40-year editor and president of the Poynter Institute, and he is, by his own admission, an optimist about the media. When he tells you why, it might genuinely change how you think about where good inform...

Every PR professional has sat in a meeting where leaders ask you to “show up in AI”

Here’s the problem. The AEO/GEO industry has built an entire measurement apparatus around citations… the moment an AI visibly names your brand. But the research shows that moment is essentially an echo of a decision that was already made, upstream, in conversations that left no trace. 

Brands have been optimizing for the receipt, when the purchase decision happened days ago.

The deeper irony is that the work which does move the needle in those invisible...

There is a prayer that crisis communicators have been quoting for decades. 

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It sounds right. It feels grounding. 

But maybe it’s been pointing us in the wrong direction the whole time. 

The problem is the concept of CONTROL. Because control, in a crisis, is a myth. And every strategy built on the assumption that you can control the outcome of a crisis is a strategy...

This episode first published in April, 2021

We haven't always seen color the same way.

Pink used to be for men. Blue for women.

People HATED colorful outfits when they first emerged. One aristocrat complained of "loud, swearing colors," because the new bright fabrics distracted him from his reading.

In this episode Carolyn Purnell takes us on a magical journey through the history of color.

Guest Carolyn Purnell, Ph.D.
https://www.carolynpurnell.com/contact

Doug

Substack | Website | LinkedIn

 Are you a...

This episode first published in July 2024.

Those big networking events. Many of us enjoy those but the repetitive small talk can be exhausting and challenging especially when conversations are frequently interrupted. In this episode we look at strategies for engaging storytelling in brief interactions, making meaningful connections, and ensuring your conversations stand out.  

Listen For
5:06 The Power of Listening
9:13 When You’re an Introvert
13:30 Finding Your Wedge into Group Conversations
20:14 Tailoring Your Stories 

Guest: Robert Kennedy III

Website | You Tube 

Connect with...

This episode first published in January 2025.

Communication is the most important weapon a Navy SEAL can carry. More vital than physical strength, endurance, or even firepower.

I was in Salt Lake City recently at a conference and saw former Navy SEAL William Branum speak. He served for 26 years with the US Navy and 23 of those years was a Navy SEAL. In his presentation he talked about how clear, concise, and often nonverbal communication plays a critical role in high-stress, life-or-death situations—whether underwater, in a firefight, or clearing a house. He broke down the lessons SE...

This episode was first published in May 2021.

Nudge Theory burst onto the scene in 2008 when Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published their book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” The simplest models of economics take preferences as given, but nudge ideas suggest we can be moved, steered, and in some cases manipulated. 

Nudge has influenced politicians around the World. There are “Nudge Units” in government in the UK, US, Germany, Japan, and even Canada. The World Bank, United Nations, and European Commission have “Nudge” teams.

Guest Rory Sutherland, Vice chairman Ogil...

You’ve been in that room. Maybe you are in it right now. The table is full, the voices are loud, and somewhere between the agenda and the first agenda item, you go quiet. Not because you don't know what to say. Because something in the room tells you it isn't your turn. You leave and you call it imposter syndrome. You make it about yourself. You wonder what's wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. The room did that.

Confidence is not something you’re both with. It’s not the absence of nerves. And it’s n...

Your client is wrong. You know it. They know it, somewhere underneath the certainty. 

And you have two choices. You can tell them they're wrong, which will end the conversation and cost you the relationship. Or you can find the thing they want more than being right and take them there instead.

This is something most communications professionals learn the hard way and never quite put into words. Every difficult client, every resistant leader, every person digging into a position that will hurt them, they are not just wrong. They are running two competing motivations a...

50 percent. That's how much of the global population now trusts generative AI when searching for information about companies and brands. 

More than Instagram. More than Facebook. More than social media in general. 

And that number climbed 7 points in a single year. 

The data comes from the Page Society's annual Harris Poll study. 14 countries, more than 15,000 people surveyed in December 2025. Consumers aren't just using AI more. They're believing it more. And most of them aren't clicking through to the source. They're reading the AI answer and moving on. 

For communicators, this changes the...

Your Organisation says it's aligned. It probably isn't.

And the problem starts at the top.

Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland have spent 7 years studying the gap between what leadership teams say they're doing and what's actually happening inside organizations. And their findings are uncomfortable. 

In their latest global study, drawing on interviews with 55 CEOs and senior executives across five continents, they found that leaders routinely leave strategy meetings carrying completely different understandings of the direction they just agreed on. 

Nobody admits it. And communications professionals get handed the impossible job of al...

Every comms professional knows the playbook. A crisis hits, you move fast. Holding statement, talking points, media plan, stakeholder map. You do it well because you've trained for it. You bring the plan to the CEO expecting alignment and instead you get a polite nod and silence. Not pushback. Not disagreement. Just silence. 

And that silence is worse than any argument because it means the CEO has already stopped listening. Not because your plan was bad, but because it was solving a problem they weren't thinking about.

This is the gap that quietly erodes the c...

Every PR firm knows the drill. Client says here's my budget. Firm divides by twelve. Monthly retainer, same amount, January through December, whether the work demands it or not. 

Need a press release? Flat rate. Need ten? Multiply. 

Need an editor or a videographer? That's by the hour, and one minute is one hour. 

The pricing isn't creative. It isn't strategic. It's arithmetic dressed up as a business model.

And it worked fine, until AI started doing the arithmetic faster. Suddenly teams are twice as productive in half the time, and if...

Most communicators assume that if people reject a message, they must not understand it. Lord David Evans argues the opposite. Backlash often isn’t confusion. It’s threat. When people feel insecure, unheard, or looked down on, they don’t lean in. They shut down. And in that moment, facts don’t persuade, values don’t inspire, and “better messaging” can make things worse.

In this episode Lord David Evans breaks down what political campaigning can teach PR professionals about trust, psychological safety, and why populist narratives spread so quickly. This isn’t about copying tactics. It’s about understand...

Public relations used to be seen as the function that shaped the message after the decisions were made. That is not enough anymore. In a world shaped by geopolitical shocks, cultural division, AI disruption, and rising reputational risk, communications leaders are being pulled closer to the centre of power. They are no longer just storytellers or spokespersons. They are becoming strategic sensemakers: the people expected to read the moment, interpret the pressure, and help leadership decide what to say, what to do, and sometimes whether to say anything at all. 

Our job is evolving to help brands s...

Communications is often described as a female-led profession, but that label can hide a harder truth. Women may make up much of the industry, yet the balance often shifts when it comes to senior leadership, influence, and decision-making.

So, what’s still standing in the way, and why has progress been slower than it should be? 

Natasha Plowman argues gender equity cannot remain a women-only conversation, yet many men still hold back because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing, unsure how to contribute, or feel the issue is not theirs to address. 

In...

You know that feeling when you look at your own brand and it somehow doesn’t feel like you anymore? The logo is the same, the words are mostly right, and the message is still “on brand”… but the visuals have started to wander. 

A new template here. A new font there. Someone’s “quick” Canva edit. A LinkedIn graphic that looks like it came from a different company. 

None of it is a big mistake. It’s just… a hundred small ones. 

And in PR, you can’t afford that moment when a stakeholder sees your...

What if the best market research started by IGNORING what people say?

What if, instead, you started modeling them based on proven behaviour?

Right down to the regional level?

And what if political polling was done this way too 

A new term is showing up in research and strategy circles with major implications for communicators: synthetic populations. This is not a cheap AI focus group. It is a data-built population model that reflects how people are distributed and behave at scale using high-quality inputs like official statistics, mobility patterns, and registration d...

In today’s world, PR leaders need to build and protect their brand’s reputation in an AI-shaped, polarized world, where owned media matters more than ever. 

Reputation is no longer a soft metric but an economic multiplier and an insurance policy. From the difference between brand and reputation to the growing tension between character and competence, this episode explains what actually moves corporate standing up or down in today’s environment.

We also share why owned media now plays a disproportionate role in shaping not just earned coverage, but AI-generated search results and stakeholder percept...

Trust used to flow upward. To experts, institutions, and authority. 

Then it shifted to “people like me.” 

Now even that circle is tightening. 

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals a growing insularity: smaller tribes, hardened perspectives, and a widening mass-class divide driven by whether people believe the system works for them. 

Persuasion is shifting to trust brokerage, and what communicators, leaders, and businesses can do when trust itself has become the battleground.

Listen For

3:10 Skip the opening story and go right to the interview with Tim Weber

Can a joke really sell a brand? Or save it from sameness?

Most campaigns sound the same because they’re afraid to sound wrong. Safe language, serious faces, purpose-heavy messages that all blur together. 

And yet one of the most successful creative agencies in North America has built its reputation by doing the opposite. Zulu Alpha Kilo lives by a simple motto… Fight Sameness… and they do it with humor, sarcasm, and a willingness to say the quiet part out loud.

Why does that work? Why does making people laugh end up being the fas...

You can be the same person across every channel. 

Your social media accounts. Your YouTube. Your newsletter. Your blog. The same principles. The same voice. Often even the same message. 

And many of the people following you on LinkedIn are the same people who see you on Instagram, hear you on a podcast, or read your newsletter. Yet those same people can understand you, trust you, and remember you very differently simply because they encounter you in a different place.

Not because you changed.

Because they did.

They arrive wi...

In an age where opinions form faster than facts and headlines spark outrage before understanding, how do brands, leaders, and storytellers stay credible? 

Is your opinion truly yours? Or just an echo of your tribe?

In this episode, Suhel Seth unpacks the transformation of communication in the era of attention deficit — from the collapse of nuance to the rise of instant outrage, and why the art of thoughtful messaging might just be the most urgent skill of our time.

Listen For

3:07 The Cult of Immediacy: A Communication Crisis

7...

Every Friday at 5 pm UK and noon Eastern we scan the globe and pick the stories that actually shaped the week then apply a public relations lens. This first live edition explains the format, brings the chat into the room, and sets a simple goal: turn a firehose of posts into practical takeaways for communicators. 

We start with breaking UK politics and what a resignation and reshuffle signal about timing, narrative control, and public affairs workload. Then we track a viral rumor about a US president to show how influence and incentives push disinformation. Finally we hit W...