Hey besties,
Yesterday I had a full hour-long conversation about comms and AI never came up once. It's possible. But apparently not for this newsletter.
Let's group chat 👇
📬 Reporter’s &*#@$ inbox: What's the best pitch subject line? The one that actually gets a journalist to open your email. Pitching Al Jazeera's Andrew Hirschfeld? Profanity works. For everyone else, there's this gem from proud parent Carly Martinetti.
Group Chat evidence and this week’s A/B test 😉.
🧵 People think they can do your job: Nothing new. But AI is making it worse. Three things that caught my eye this week:
Profound’s cofounder claimed marketers can build "agents that monitor media coverage, flag sentiment shifts, and draft journalist outreach before your PR team even knows there's a story." 👀
The growth lead at ElevenLabs* wrote (in a post about handing off the PR duties to a new fulltime hire): “Getting PR isn't complicated. Do something newsworthy, then tell the press about it.” And a breath later: “PR does not drive sales” (hard disagree).
CCO Heather Grabaund lamented about comms stuck in the never-ending and cyclical Claude review cycle. 👇
So comms besties… what are you doing to show your real value when everyone who already thought they could do your job now has a tool cheering them on?
*Side note: yesterday, I used ElevenLabs to create a deepfake of a high school principal (with his consent) for a presentation to local students called "AI Can Fake Everything. Now What?" You only need 9 seconds of someone's voice to clone it. So… methinks hiring a FT comms person was a very good call.
🤖 Your newest employee: Do you own your company's strategic narrative? The messaging house? Tone guidelines? Don't forget you also need to train your most important new employee: your company's AI systems. Whether that's through corporate wikis like Notion or architecture-level code, put this in your Q3 plan. (No link, just something on my mind. Is anyone already doing this?)
Are you training corporate AI on comms messaging?
🧠 The coolest net-new information I've heard in months: Engineers are building biological computers by taking brain cells and smearing them on chips to run energy-efficient programs. The energy footprint of robotics that currently requires football fields of data centers could shrink to the size of a candy bar.
Chat soon,
Gab Ferree
Founder & Your Comms BFF, Off the Record
PS: Last week’s most-clicked was Christine Nguyen’s Chief of Staff builder.
PPS: For golf Gab story followers… yes, I'm a Rory stan. Yes, that's me in an Etsy-printed shirt from his first Masters win, cheesing after he miraculously won again. Also pictured: my son, who very nearly shared a name with my favorite golfer.
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