The State of PR & Marketing: Authenticity as A Way Forward

Antonio: 

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the state of public relations and this cultural shift we’re having in the media right now. What have you noticed in the way that celebrities and public figures are handling their public relations in this present moment?

Marlissa:

I feel like there’s this kind of weird juxtaposition going on when it comes to how people present publicly, specifically in the media…you do see more rhetoric around how people feel about other folks’ personal life choices and personal lifestyles, when for a while it was almost shunned [to] talk about these things. I think all of that is a testament to the change in overarching leadership and the way that leaders kind of operate – and that’s beginning to permeate not only through our [policy] and politics but…also in businesses now. I think that’s going to trickle down into our personal and more intimate interactions as well.

Antonio:

Yeah, I think this sort of political boomerang that’s coming back around is also the other side of the coin for our cultural moment. I am specifically thinking about public relations and sort of the publicity of everything. I was thinking about the Oscars race earlier this year. Karla Sofia Gascon, who was one of the [best actress frontrunners], from the Netflix movie Emilia Perez. She was embroiled in this controversy when her old tweets resurfaced, dating back as recent as 2022. Really sort of horrible things: racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic tweets, countless ones, which [consequently] tanked her Oscars campaign.

There were a lot of conversations about, “well, why didn’t her publicist go back and delete her tweets?” I think obviously that’s a great question, but I think that there is also a lot more to it than that. You know, if you don’t know something’s there, you’re not looking for it if someone is presenting a certain way to you.

Marlissa: 

There’s only so far back you’re going to look, but in the world of PR, I think we’re in this space now in [America] and really in the world where we know so many things are curated to get us to think and see things a certain way. I feel like we have a lot of conversations just in the general population about how we often feel like we’re being sold something and things are, you know, placed in and positioned a certain way…I think people are becoming more aware of salesmanship and sales culture and curation culture.

So I think honestly, it would be groundbreaking. It would be something really special if a PR team said, “you know what, we are going to paint a picture of a real person; a real brand in their history, their complexities and their awkwardness.”

I think one of the best brands of this that we tend to see is Issa Rae. The Awkward Black Girl thing where, you know, we kind of get to see that internal monologue through her work, these random thoughts that we all have, but we’re often afraid to admit to.

Everyone is trying to make sense of all of the moving pieces. So I would say maybe it’s time to stop presenting people in a way that you think they need to be presented and present them as who they are. Because we all know that there’s an audience for literally everything.

Antonio: 

We’re coming to the end of our time, but we talked about the attention economy and the ways that we in this [marketing & PR] space have to compete with all of these distractions.

How do we approach a client who wants to cut through the noise and instruct them on how to enter this space without completely just buying into all of these trends that can maybe become toxic or fleeting or die out quickly? How do we create a long-lasting thing that isn’t just a singular moment?

Marlissa: 

Yeah, I think it goes back to authenticity. Instead of attempting to make a client into what you think people want to see, figure out ways to tell that client’s story. All of us have an interesting story, right? And so yeah, that’s what I would say. Get to know your client, figure out who they really are, because then you’ll never run out of content. Let’s figure out how to make that part of our story, you know, and feed our audience that way. I think authenticity and creating emotional ties through that authenticity is going to be key for the future.

And I mean, again, especially as we see a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots, if you can show people that regular, working-class people with the same types of struggles [as them] are out here doing pretty cool things, I think that’s going to be a big win for any publicist or PR agency.