Public relations giant Edelman is doubling down on its investment in generative artificial intelligence.
The PR firm, which has approximately 6,000 employees, builds unique technology structures to better serve major brands such as Dove, Taco Bell, and eBay.
To do so, Edelman recently promoted Brian Buchwald to global chair of products and AI to oversee the company’s AI investments. Mr. Buchwald joined Edelman in 2023 and previously served as the company’s global head of products, trust data and technology. He previously also worked at Talkwaker and Weber Shandwick.
Edelman plans to increase its investments in data and technology by more than 100% during the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Buchwald said the company’s centralized AI team will grow six times over the same period. He declined to say how much Edelman is spending on data and technology or the size of its current AI team.
At the core of Edelman’s AI investments is a product called Trust Stream. The product uses machine learning algorithms to process data for PR clients to determine metrics such as how much consumers trust a brand compared to competitors and the credibility of news and social media content. Track. The tool also has a predictive component that estimates a company’s future reliability. Previously, the tool used small-scale language models, but now it uses generative AI and large-scale language models, Buchwald said. He said the addition of generative AI has improved Trust Stream’s accuracy so far. According to him, using generative AI has improved the tool’s ability to predict future reliability with an accuracy of 97%.
The technology can also analyze how specific media articles affect a company. For example, a New York Times article can have a greater impact on reputation for a pharmaceutical brand compared to social media or his one-time post on Glassdoor.
Edelman also wants to incorporate generative AI into the first-party data tools it provides to brands and third-party licensing agreements with data companies. Using third-party data from major technology platforms such as OpenAI, Google, and Adobe is especially important as technology companies are investing heavily in AI. Edelman’s data science team can then train these models to suit Edelman’s needs, he said. For example, Edelman can use data to analyze someone’s purchasing preferences based on Instagram comments.
In addition to the data itself, Edelman is incorporating generative AI into the tools brands use to manage data, such as data lakes and cloud computing.
“We are investing in expensive processing power to be able to churn through all this data, define insights and drive the next best action for our customers,” Buchwald said. Ta.
Buchwald said Edelman benefits from not being owned by a large advertising holding group. Competitors such as Interpublic Group Inc.’s Weber Shadwick and Omnicom Inc.’s FleischmanHillard often struggle to win money from other agencies within the holding company, he said.
Jay Pattisall, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, offered a different perspective, citing PR as one of the key growth areas for holding companies. For example, his Golin, an IPG company, reported double-digit internal growth in the first quarter of 2024, while growth for his IPG specialty digital agencies such as R/GA and Huge was below. .
“They’ve driven some of the profitability that’s valuable to them,” he says. “Their growth rates are in the single digits, so any growth is significant growth for the holding company.”
More broadly, the holding company is investing heavily in generative AI for content creation that competes with Edelman. For example, WPP is investing $318 million annually in AI, and Publicis plans to invest $300 million in AI over the next three years.
