With Colab founders Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris
Earned media has long been the holy grail of public relations.
For decades, getting your client's message in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal has been the gold standard by which PR agencies are judged.
But as we march further into this age of new media, those public opinion gatekeepers in the traditional media are losing their dominance of the American attention span.
And as evidenced by this year's presidential campaign strategy, that means that PR tactics are shifting as well.
Donald Trump's interview on the Joe Rogan podcast is seen as a pivotal moment in the campaign that cemented his electoral victory.
And Kamala Harris's appearance with Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast reached millions of voting age women who were viewed as critical to the Democrat's campaign strategy.
So in this episode of Lead Balloon, we're joined by Colab co-founders Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris for a post-mortem on the 2024 election in a public relations context.
They discuss why traditional media's influence is waning, how campaigns leveraged podcasts and social media in the run up to the election, and how PR professionals should adapt their strategies.
And they'll touch on the importance of building genuine relationships with members of the new media, navigating influencer marketing, and the challenges of media training in a rapidly changing environment.
Transcript:
Dusty Weis
Earned media: the holy grail of public relations… or at least it used to be.
Getting your client's message in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, NBC, CNN. For decades, that's been the gold standard by which PR agencies are judged. The ultimate put up or shut up. Fodder for multi-million dollar retainers and a coveted designation as agency of record.
But as we march further into this age of new media, those public opinion gatekeepers in the traditional media are losing their dominance of the American attention span.
And as evidenced by this year's presidential campaign strategy, that means that PR tactics are shifting as well.
Ashley Mann
We definitely saw a divergence away from mainstream media as the sole source of communicating. I think it's fair to say that this was the election of the podcast… taking to sort of alternative media to spread their awareness and their message.
Dusty Weis
In this episode, Ashley Mann, along with her co-founder and partner at the Colab, Lizzy Harris, join us to talk about the lessons we can pull from the 2024 presidential election about the shifting dynamics of the PR mediascape.
I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about important stories from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding, told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.
Thank you for tuning in. Make sure you're following Lead Balloon in your favorite podcast app and make sure to check out Podcamp Media on YouTube where you can find video versions of this and some of our other episodes.
We're joined today by Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris, co-founders and partners at the Colab, the “anti-agency” for B2B and B2C tech companies.
You're both seasoned PR pros with about 15 years of experience in agency and in-house roles.
Ashley, you are local to the Spokane, Washington area and Lizzy, Colorado, specifically Breckenridge. Right time of year to be in Breckenridge there.
So thank you both for joining us here on Lead Balloon.
Ashley Mann
Thanks for having us.
Lizzy Harris
Happy to be here.
Dusty Weis
It has been an unprecedented election year in a lot of ways. I think we learned a lot about the American mediascape, the American public and their media consumption habits. This is kind of the part in any election year where I tend to spend a lot of time being introspective, looking back at it and trying to parse the lessons that I can learn from it.
And by the sound of it, you folks have been doing a lot of the same thing, certainly in the political realm, but beyond in B2B and B2C as well. What surprised you about the way that PR media strategy was executed during the run up to the November election?
Ashley Mann
Well, I don't know that we would say it surprised us, but I think we definitely saw a divergence away from mainstream media as the sole source of communicating. We had noticed in previous election years, obviously an emphasis on social media, but I think it's fair to say that this was the election of the podcast in that we saw a lot of our candidates and their running mates taking to sort of alternative media to spread their awareness and their message.
So often what we see is our political candidates start to move toward ways of communicating that are then echoed in the business atmosphere as well. So I think we can anticipate 2025 being the year in which we see a lot of our leaders across different verticals moving toward substacks and podcasts and having more transparent conversations and maybe shrinking away a little bit from traditional broadcast news or media sources.
Lizzy Harris
Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Obviously both candidates took to new mediums in order to get their message across, but you have to know how to talk to that specific medium's audience, which I think could be refined in upcoming election cycles.
Dusty Weis
So I want to come back to that in a little bit because I think that there are some huge lessons to take away from that. But first, let's sort of start with the case study thing of this. Both political campaigns had some big new media wins in this election cycle. What would you say were some of the biggest eyebrow raisers?
Ashley Mann
I mean, I think you can't have this conversation without talking about Donald Trump's interview on Joe Rogan. Obviously over 50 million views on YouTube, and we don't have the Spotify data to see how many streams it got, but I think it's fair to say it was a lot. And at the same time, you had Kamala Harris going on Call Her Daddy, which was sort of an unprecedented move for a political candidate to go on what we would consider an alternate podcast that maybe has a little bit different viewership than then really the polished package that we normally see from our politicians.
Dusty Weis
I was going to say, let's expound on that a little bit. Alex Cooper is the host of Call Her Daddy. It's been around since 2018. It's billed as one of the most listened-to podcasts for women. But unlike Joe Rogan, which is just sort of everything and the kitchen sink, the general thrust seems to be what?
Ashley Mann
Well, I mean, she really made a name for herself talking about her sexual exploits on her Call Her Daddy podcast. And I think we've seen a shift in her content strategy over the last several years. We're moving more away from her personal stories and she's trying to shift into a different audience. I think one that is maybe a little more educated, a little more interested in what is going on above and beyond Alex's personal life.
So this was really her first step into the political sphere. And I think we can confidently say there were some mixed results and how that landed with the target audience.
But I really feel like there is a desire as voters, as listeners, as consumers of media to have a more transparent conversation with our leadership, especially when it comes to the people that we are voting in to run the country. It's extremely hard to have a long form conversation on a platform like a podcast and stay entirely polished and formal the entire time.
So a lot of the reasons that these get such large listenership numbers is that people want to feel connected to who they're voting for. And I think that method of being transparent can really resonate if done the right way.
Lizzy Harris
I think the idea was there, right? Like we were just talking about, I think tapping into a new audience, acknowledging new voters, younger voters that maybe don't have as many legacy thoughts around the issues and really care about newer topics that maybe older voters don't care about.
But this has really been a long time coming. You know, Donald Trump, almost a decade ago was talking about the mainstream media and how it's not able to be trusted. And that was the beginning of all of this, right? That was like the first domino to fall. And I think if you go on a podcast called Call Me Daddy, who's historically not known for being involved in the political sphere, really anything, anything goes.
Dusty Weis
Podcasting in particular seemed to be a big emphasis for the campaigns this year. And again, the numbers that were racked up between the Call Her Daddy, the Joe Rogan Show, some of the other big podcast interviews, The Breakfast Club and Charlemagne the God, I know was another one that made big waves. But were there some less podcasty, more social media style influencer tactics that were leveraged as well by the campaigns that you think are of note?
Ashley Mann
I think we saw a real emphasis on using social media as a way to gain attention. And the interesting thing about this campaign, particularly, was that things would go viral on social media and that virality would get picked up by the mainstream media. So we would see something go wild on Instagram and then all of a sudden it was on MSNBC later that night.
So the tables had kind of turned a little bit in which lever was controlling the conversation. So a couple that come to my mind were obviously the Donald Trump McDonald's drive through window experience.
I think that his team was very savvy in the way that they leveraged that. I think we saw a lot of TikTok meme music engagement with Kamala Harris. She had her coconut tree song that went quite viral and drove a lot of attention and her campaign leaned into that, which was you know, a really interesting tactic and probably pretty smart on their side.
And then we had missteps too, you know, that's the thing about doing, having these conversations on different media platforms. You don't have the same guide rails that you would have with a very structured broadcast media interview. So for good and for bad, we see, you know, these kind of Instagram-worthy moments pop up, but both campaigns seemed to really push the gas pedal on engaging in that way.
Dusty Weis
What about YouTube and social media advertising? I know that the social media and the PR aspect of things is your sweet spot at Colab, but I swear this was for me, this was the election of the pervasive YouTube ad that particularly when I was watching YouTube with my kids, I could not shut those things off fast enough because they were everywhere and some of them were really beyond the pale in terms of just being the kind of content that you don't typically expect to see in a YouTube ad.
So what do we take away from the YouTube and social media advertising lessons from this past campaign?
Ashley Mann
Well, what we took away from it is that money follows efficiency. So obviously something was working for the campaigns and they were seeing the numbers rise based on their engagements on those platforms. So they don't pour money into things that do not drive votes at the end of the day, right? So we know the engagement on these platforms is incredibly high. They're trying to reach a subsection of the voter pool that had been undecided so far, especially towards the end of the campaign.
So, their emphasis on throwing money into the advertising component just shows me that they saw that their other more organic tactics on those platforms were probably working.
Dusty Weis
Well, and it seems like they really chose to reach down the well to target some topics and issues that were probably taboo to talk about a while ago and try to engage with people in a really visceral way as well.
Ashley Mann
Yeah, I mean, I think we've learned from years of dealing in the media that things that are controversial, that draw emotion, are the things that get the most attention. And so I think we saw the campaigns really doubling down on that, both in the imagery that they used, but also in the language that they used. There was a lot of attacking going on, and I think we saw that quite clearly in their methods of advertising.
Dusty Weis
It's certainly not a pattern that I hope to see repeated in future elections, but we almost certainly will see repeated as well. So while the past year's political campaign has been a lot of things, certainly a laboratory for learning how PR professionals need to be approaching their jobs in this era, coming up after the break here, I want to talk about what the new PR playbook looks like in 2025 and beyond.
We're going to be back with Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris from the Colab coming up in a moment here on Lead Balloon.
Dusty Weis
This is Lead Balloon, I'm Dusty Weis, and we're talking with Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris, co-founders and partners at the CoLab. And Lizzy and Ashley, after everything that we've seen over the past year, everybody is sort of going into the end of the year here, Q4 into Q1 of ‘25. And if they're smart, I would say they are re-examining their standard operating procedures and trying to decide how we go forward helping our clients or our organizations get their message out. So how should we be changing our approach?
Ashley Mann
I think the main thing that we're emphasizing with the CEOs that we work with especially is that it takes a very layered approach moving forward, especially as we start to see journalists moving off on their own, creating their own platforms.
A lot of the people that we've worked with in the past have started substacks or newsletters that are being distributed versus working for more of a traditional media entity.
So having a strategy around how you're going to engage those players in addition to hitting the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, those big logos that everybody wants. You need to have a way of figuring out how you're going to be targeting the new audiences that are coming up too, because having one siloed approach is sort of leaving a lot on the shelf when it comes to gaining attention for your company.
So really we're emphasizing sort of a mixed approach to dealing with all of the journalists that we work with on a daily basis.
Dusty Weis
If it looks like my heart is sinking as you speak, Ashley, it's because what you just said seems to be a really nice way of putting it that as PR practitioners, we're just going to have a lot more work. We're going to need to have a bigger Rolodex. We're going to need to spend more time doing outreach. Like that sounds like a nightmare.
Ashley Mann
Hahaha!
Lizzy Harris
Yeah
Ashley Mann
A different type of outreach too. It's not going to be your traditional PR motion of coming up with an angle and reaching out to a list of reporters and hoping that somebody bites. A lot of these journalists that are engaging in these different types of platforms or podcasts, for example, you really have to cultivate relationships.
It comes down to bandwidth a lot of times and if you're a single reporter working on a substack, even if you have 700,000 people that are reading your newsletter every day, you might not have the same amount of resources as a traditional media outlet. So I think it's important for PR practitioners to be very aware of how they're communicating with these new types of reporters and making sure your messaging is succinct and right on point and really developing relationships over just trying to shill a product.
Lizzy Harris
Yeah. And I think to Ashley's point, it's not an either/or, it's an and. I think it's really important to understand all of your different audiences and all of the different mediums on which they consume information. And the way that you're going to write something is obviously going to be different than how you're going to say it.
But when you're talking about these mainstream media opportunities, Bloomberg, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, and then you're talking about things like podcasts or newsletters, you need to make sure that the core of what you're saying is still the same, but how you say it really needs to cater to that specific audience.
You know, I think it used to be where there was sort of this code of conduct, right, that we all abide by on interviews and have for decades. I think that's really starting to change as people are really craving this genuine perspective and not this canned messaging and they're willing to call you out on it. And there are so many platforms on which they can do that. And so I think that the core of your messaging needs to be there, but you also have to be able to talk in sound bites and you have to understand how those sound bites will sound taken out of context.
That's something that we're, that we're seeing too, you know, everyone's now an expert at cutting these audio clips and these video clips.
We're also dealing with AI and deep fakes and it's really to the spokesperson's benefit to do absolutely everything they can to control the message while being completely relatable, genuine, consistent. It's a big ask, but it's going to be what's required.
Dusty Weis
I mean, what you just described, Lizzy, sounds like a minefield to me. If I'm a CEO and I'm coming and talking to Lizzy and Ashley at the Colab for my PR strategy. And I'm saying, wait, wait, wait, you want me to go on this podcast with this person who is a wild card, who might ask me about my sex life or my drug use when I was 20 years old.
Lizzy Harris
Maybe!
Dusty Weis
What is in this for me? Like is, how do you train for that?
Media training has changed completely in this era because there's no such thing as a no-go anymore. How do you build a media training protocol for executives in this modern era now?
Lizzy Harris
Yeah, I think you're right in that it's a minefield, but it's also a one-way road, right? There's no way around it. If you're going to have a comprehensive media strategy and you're going to try to reach all of your audiences in the way that is most meaningful to them, this is something that you're gonna have to level up to do. think PR people have to be more intentional than ever about who they select as spokespeople.
In the past, some companies may say, okay, we have a roster of six to eight people that could go on media. And now if you're talking about these new mediums and they're relevant to that client, you're probably looking at maybe one to two people.
Dusty Weis
So is it, it sounds like a really important trait here is for someone who is unflappable, someone who's good on their feet, someone who can adapt, someone who can be a social chameleon and fit in and even have fun in any situation. Is that a skill that you can teach or do you just have to find someone who's natively good at it?
Ashley Mann
I think it can definitely be taught in that we're not asking our spokespeople to never make a mistake, right? Actually, a lot of what we see engaging on media is when people have talked about mistakes or they flubbed something up and there's a recovery moment. You know, as humans, we engage with those types of things. So we're not expecting someone to be perfect when they go on the media.
What we are looking for is someone confident who lives and breathes the company, right?
If you feel really confident in what you're saying, and you know, you have experience to back you up, you can get through a lot of situations. It's when I think you come on and you're trying to portray yourself as someone else, or you're skirting around questions. That's when we see our spokespeople get into trouble is, is when they're trying to conceal something.
So if you have experience to back you up, you are generally a confident person, you enjoy being on media... I think that's something that's a little undervalued as somebody who actually has a good time going on and talking to people and holding conversations. You can be really successful even if you don't have a huge long history of doing media interviews or if you haven't really approached new media before. This is something that the industry, our spokespeople, the media itself, we're all learning in real time. So we feel like we're at the precipice of sort of what media is going to look like for the next 10 years. And so if you're engaging and willing to jump in, I think you can learn a lot.
Lizzy Harris
I think there's something to be said here too about, you know, I think there's a lot more training involved because there's the risk is higher, but we're never asking an executive to be disingenuous. I think when people get into trouble, it's when they're being dishonest or they're trying to force a narrative that they don't condone, that they don't believe in, or that isn't simply true.
You said something, you know, are we just expecting these spokespeople to be a chameleon? And in a way, yes, right? You have to be able to adapt and change your colors based on your environment.
But at the end of the day, a chameleon is still a lizard, right? So we're not asking it to be something that it's not.
We're simply asking it to be adaptable based on its surroundings. And I think that's totally doable.
Dusty Weis
You mentioned a moment ago, Lizzy, the importance of building out a database of people to whom you could reach out and send your pitches and the importance of being concise and precise in how you phrase those pitches. And that makes my heart smile because speaking as a podcaster myself, I could tell you that one of my biggest pet peeves is the terrible, awful, poorly-targeted, poorly-researched pitches that I get about potential podcast guests.
They are unrelenting as they are terrible.
And I am just so burned out on getting pitches from people who clearly have never even listened to my podcast. So how do you do podcast pitches the right way?
Lizzy Harris
You know, I think you hit the nail on the head in that it has to be researched and it has to be concise, but ultimately, Dusty, you're the one that's receiving these pitches, right? You obviously have an opinion on the things that drive you crazy, the things you really don't appreciate and things that would be an automatic no. You know, we have our theories, but... you're the host.
And so I guess I would turn that question on you on what really cuts through the noise of your inbox and gets you feeling like you really want to have this executive or this person as a guest. I think you're the keeper of that information. Ultimately, we just have a best guess.
Dusty Weis
Well, for $1,000, you can enroll in my 10-week course…
No, I think it, it very clearly comes down to usefulness to me. Bottom line up top.
I need something that is going to empower me to make my show better in this very instant.
This is more often than not a storytelling show. But I get podcast pitches all the time from people who are pitching me executives with “10 things that you need to know about SEO.”
And I'm sorry, it's just not what we do at Lead Balloon.
Lizzy Harris
Sure.
Dusty Weis
And when I get that pitch, I know instantly that you've never listened to my podcast.
Now, again, here we are. Your PR team needs to do 10 times as much with an even smaller staff than it used to have. But there needs to be some familiarity with the host and the content of the show that you're pitching. And there needs to be an immediate usefulness to the producer the editor or the one-person band who's producing the show.
Lizzy Harris
Yeah. And I think, you touched on it and you said there's so much more work to be done, but I'll put it this way. Think about a book that you really love and how many times did you read that book? Chances are probably once because you read it and now you know what it's about and you can talk about it.
I just think it's a shift of time. Instead of spending your time pitching a million people where hopefully 1% of them will bite, and then you'll get a couple of average opportunities that sort of convey your narrative in a way that's almost right.
I think you're shifting your time, you're shifting your energy into a more concerted manner where you're really researching these publications. You're also researching the reporter, what their tone is, what their take is, what really matters to them and what matters to their audience. You really should know every single thing about that person.
And then you can act on it. It's not like you're having to research the same reporter 50 times in a month.
You know, people do make moves, but ultimately at the end of the day, they're still the same person.
And so it's just upfront. It feels like a daunting task and like there's a lot more information and work required. But if your output is going to have higher quality and a higher caliber of opportunities, then in the end, you're still coming out in the positive. And so I just think, like I said, upfront, there's a lot more work to be done, but it's lasting.
Dusty Weis
Quality of the leads over the quantity. And I think that that cannot be repeated enough. Thank you for saying it.
Certainly, if podcasts are a new frontier in PR, then social media is the wild, wild west still and probably forever. How do you even start building out an influence campaign in that space when partnering with an influencer or getting an appearance on an influencer today could turn into that person being a Nazi tomorrow. Like, it's just, it's such a scary space to try to do anything in.
Ashley Mann
I think this is where we really emphasize the power of owned media. Social media has a lot of different components. Influencers are obviously one, but the first space that we ask our executive teams to tackle is really that owned media component.
So we play a lot on the LinkedIn space, obviously, and that's a great spot for business leaders to start their social media journey. But that's where we really want to emphasize spending some time, especially upfront. It helps with credibility. You can get your thoughts out in a clear and concise way. Obviously, those platforms are emphasizing video a lot more. So that gives you a little bit of practice before you get on your big podcast debut.
You're able to really engage with other people who are movers and shakers in the space, which I think is a big deal now. That networking component, I don't think could be understated.
You have the ability to develop your own audience on your own platform, and then maybe look into engaging with others once you have a better sense of the landscape. I think where you get into trouble is when somebody pulls a list of the top 25 influencers in XYZ vertical, and you're mass pitching them for engagements and collaborations, and then you get into kind of a risky space because a lot of them operate on different guardrails…
Dusty Weis
Or no guardrails whatsoever.
Lizzy Harris
Yeah.
Ashley Mann
Or no guardrails, right? That's kind of the new thing that we're seeing too.
Dusty Weis
Well, and I think there's something to that. And to your point, I have a friend in the trade association space. She's over the past five years built quite a reputation for herself as being someone who's kind of pioneered an approach to this influencer marketing space.
And one thing that she'll tell you is that as the PR person, as the pitching body, it's important and even encouraged to set guardrails, to make very clear communication to influencers that you're talking about partnering with what your expectations are for their conduct and their content going forward.
Certainly it's a two-way street and they have every right to make the same requests of you, but to define in very concrete terms and have paper signed that says you will not offend vast swaths of the general public if you are going to be an influencer who partners with us. And then as you said, to do the research to to dig back into the content library, but here yet again, more work.
Ashley Mann
It's really about where you're spending your time. Like Lizzy alluded to earlier, you know, we say that we probably send less pitches than any other agency in our space, but that's because we spend a lot of time researching. And as we kind of move into this new media landscape, that's where we found the most success.
And so I think if you're a company wanting to sort of dive into working with podcasts, working with, you know, authors that might have more niche audiences, the more background research and understanding you can gain before you even make that first outreach attempt, the more personable you can be, the more respectful, the more engaging, the better luck you're going to have at the end of the day.
Dusty Weis
You all at the Colab bill yourselves as the “anti-agency.” And I like that. That's a nice little piece of branding right there.
But I think we're starting to get at the heart here of perhaps what makes you an “anti-agency.”
Is it this sort of notion that we're going to turn traditional practices on their ear and focus on the quality over the quantity, send out fewer pitches, as you said, than any other agency. Is that what you mean by anti-agency?
Lizzy Harris
Yeah. And you know, Ashley and I have both worked on, both sides of this table, right? Like we've worked at agencies and we've also been on the client side hiring agencies. And I think things were done the same way for a really long time. And we both decided when we came together several years ago to build this, that we were going to take all of the good and none of the bad.
It's really bespoke in that way in that we do everything that matters to our clients and really nothing that doesn't, right? And I think that's probably how we view it. What do you think, Ash?
Ashley Mann
I would say that we're also easily bored and endlessly curious. So that's part of our strategy is really, what does media look like next year? We're not interested in doing things the same way as they've been done in the past, but we're learning and growing at the same rate that the media is changing, right? So that's where we're focused is what's next, you know?
Dusty Weis
In your approach, how do you go at looking at the balance between traditional media and new media? Certainly the traditional media aren't going away. Certainly while their influence is waning, they still have tremendous influence. Do they still take precedence over podcasts and new media? Or are we flipping that script?
If we were maybe 75 % traditional media, 25 % new media before, are we going to more of a 60-40 or are we going 40-60 here? Where's the focus?
Ashley Mann
I think it depends on your strategy. The end product from engaging with the new media looks so vastly different from the end product when you engage with say like a traditional broadcast interview, like a CNBC or something.
These new media platforms are opt-in. It's like people who want to hear from you specifically about that specific topic, they're already sort of bought in into the conversation. Otherwise they wouldn't be on that platform to begin with.
And when you look at more of a traditional media outlet or say broadcast, you might be watching the news for 30 minutes before you get to that one teaser that was actually what you were interested in, right? So we really look at, okay, what is the end goal? What audience are we trying to reach? How do we want this to look at the end of the day and then sort of pick the platform that matches that?
I will say the majority of our clients that are coming into our doors are asking more for the podcasts. They want the substacks. They've heard about this on social media. They feel like they need to be involved. A lot of times they feel a little bit behind the ball already. What do we need to be doing to get all these places now?
And so there's a lot of education that's happening behind the scenes right now. But I do anticipate at least from my perspective that we'll see the emphasis on traditional media pull back a little bit, at least in the near term as people are starting to recognize that there's a lot of other places that they could and should be.
And whether or not it remains that way, I guess we'll see. Traditional media is gonna have to do something to sort of keep up.
Dusty Weis
Yeah, and just personally speaking here, as someone who was a news reporter for 10 years and felt like I was doing really important work doing that, then has since switched into this sort of different medium. I've got mixed feelings about that.
I mean, obviously as PR pros, we can look at the declining influence of traditional gatekeeper media and see some new opportunities there. But I think there are also drawbacks.
You know, what we do as PR pros doesn't happen in a vacuum. We're a part of a society. And in this society right now, spurred largely by some of these trends, we see disinformation and hate speech and the opacity of the algorithms that we try to game to get up there.
All those things put together, are we headed in a good direction and what needs to happen?
Lizzy Harris
Yeah, I think those things have always been here. I think we're just more aware of it now. You know, we're just headed in a direction where that's not going anywhere. They're obviously unequivocally bad things I think we can all agree on objectively.
But ultimately, if that's going to be a part of the playing field that we're all on, we just have to learn to work with it, work around it and understand, especially with AI…
Dusty Weis
That's a whole ‘nother mess. Yeah.
Ashley Mann
Yeah.
Lizzy Harris
It's a whole ‘nother mess! Because it's one thing if someone actually says or does something and it's another thing if it's completely fabricated, And that people can't tell the difference yet.
That technology is only gonna be more sophisticated. We're just headed in that direction, regardless of how you wanna look at it. And your strategy needs to address that and understand how to deal with it.
Dusty Weis
No, certainly I think that you're right. And a wise man once said with great power comes great responsibility. And I like to think that in this new media age now, there are a lot of people who are still coming to terms with the amount of power that they have suddenly thrust upon them. They don't have the training or the background to perhaps respect that power for what it is.
Maybe they have not learned the responsibility that comes with that.
And I just hope that for the good of society, these new found powerful people begin to respect that power and begin to wield it responsibly. But that is a much, much bigger problem than we are called upon to solve as PR practitioners. And I do think that the work that you're doing at the Colab is good stuff. This has been a great conversation and I've appreciated it greatly.
Ashley Mann and Lizzy Harris, co-founders and partners at the Colab. Thank you so much for joining us here on Light Balloon.
Lizzy Harris
Thanks for having us.
Ashley Mann
Thanks, Dusty.
Dusty Weis
Thank you for tuning in.
Here on Lead Balloon, we tell stories of strategic communicators working on the cutting edge and sharing the lessons they've learned. So we hope to see you back in this feed again sometime soon. Make sure to follow us in your favorite podcast app.
Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, podcampmedia.com.
Music for this episode by Famous Cats, sound engineering by Matt Covarrubias, and dialogue editing by Emily Kaysinger.
Until the next time folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.