Building Brands and Navigating PR in Emerging Tech with Amy Jackson

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Welcome.

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This is the Public Relations Review Podcast, a program to discuss the many facets of public relations with seasoned professionals, educators, authors and others.

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Now here is your host, Peter Woolfolk.

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Welcome to the Public Relations Review Podcast and to all of our listeners all across America and around the world.

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Now this podcast has been ranked by Apple as one of the top 1% of podcasts worldwide, so let me say thank you to all of our guests and listeners for making this possible, and if you enjoy our podcast, please leave us a review.

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We certainly would like to hear from you.

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Now question Is your business a change agent in your industry?

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Yet you have meager media coverage to showcase your work.

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Well, my guest today has helped clients change.

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That Tail Splash has demonstrated their proven experience building a brand from scratch or elevating an existing one.

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They design PR strategies that can help their clients make a splash.

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Their success has proved positive that big change often has humble beginnings.

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Now today we'll be discussing several of their projects, including an electric vehicle charging issue and a deep fake detection that led to a hearing in the United States Senate.

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Now my guest has spent her career building and shaping brands during times of rapid change.

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She secured coverage in major media outlets leading up to acquisitions of Bebo and Mintcom and Mintcom, and she led LivingSocial's public relations efforts, bridging from Facebook Darling to local merchant Marketplace.

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Later, she took Silicon Valley journalists through a walk down memory lane for the Computer History Museum's reopening, and this led to coverage in the New York Times, wall Street Journal, bloomberg, businessweek, nbc and others.

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So joining me today from San Antonio, texas, is Amy Jackson, founder of CEO and Tail Splash.

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Amy, welcome to the podcast.

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Hi Peter, Thank you so much for having me.

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Well, look, let's just start off about asking the question how was it that you decided to call your company Tail Spl?

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that is one of my favorite questions to answer.

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So when I started the company, I was very inspired by founders sharing their stories of why they built their businesses, and so, as a lifelong fan of whales, I combined the concept of making a splash with telling your story.

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So the word tail is a pun, in that if you're referencing whales, they make these massive splashes with their tails, and if you've had the pleasure of seeing that in nature, it's an incredible sight and I think it's a good metaphor for what PR can do for businesses.

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But the word tale is spelled T-A-L-E because the way we make a splash for our clients is by helping them share their own stories and connect to the stories that journalists are writing.

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Well, now that certainly makes a lot of sense.

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So, look, let's start with.

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You've got some very interesting things here, and that's something we often come across on this program, particularly when it comes to issues like you've dealt with.

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So one of the things that you mentioned was that there was an electric the electric vehicle charging issue.

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Let's start with that.

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Give us a little bit of background on what that's about, what the problems were and how you went about resolving that.

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Absolutely so.

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There's a lot of activity within the climate and clean energy space, and so since Tail Slash has been around, we've had the pleasure of supporting clients in different ends of that spectrum.

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One of our first clients was in the business of predicting where electric vehicle charging infrastructure should go in different markets around the country, based on demand, based on charging capacity and pricing and all of those variables, and something that we did early on together was make sure that they were a resource for any journalists that were covering news around electric vehicle charging, and at the time we were coming out of the pandemic.

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So there was the Inflation Reduction Act, there was an infrastructure bill, and so we made sure to reach out to reporters that were covering those news cycles.

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And that's a practice that we do for any of our clients that have a point of view that's relevant for what's happening at the federal government level.

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And it's something where we had a moment where, during one of the State of the Union addresses, electric vehicle charging was discussed in the State of the Union, and so, rather than us just pitching an announcement that we had or news that we had for the company, we leveraged the timing of that State of the Union to reach out to reporters and acknowledge that that had just been mentioned in the address and here's a resource, here's some news and helped connect those dots for the reporters that we were pitching.

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Now, when you say that the electric vehicle charging issue was mentioned in a State of the Union address, did you then have any input on that, or was that something that just happened to happen and you took advantage of it?

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It happened to be mentioned because it was part of some active legislation that was underway, and so for us, it's not always about what we are driving or what we are creating, but it's about tapping into what the dialogue is that's happening at the national level, and so we saw an opportunity to reach out to reporters, because electric vehicle charging was such a timely topic and happened to be mentioned during the State of the Union.

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So now, once that they grabbed hold of that, what happened after that?

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When I say they grabbed hold, the reporters grabbed hold of that.

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What were their next steps and how did your organization benefit from what happened next?

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So we believe that every time we do that for reporters, we are showing them that we can help make their life easier when they're on deadline, and so it's not always something that's going to immediately turn into an opportunity, but the more you do that, the more journalists will start to see you as a resource, and we had a situation where, months later, a CNBC reporter was finally writing a story about the realities of building out electric vehicle charging infrastructure and was ready to talk to her client, and then they got this great story in CNBC, and so it's not always something that you're going to see happen immediately.

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It often takes going back to these same journalists again and again, but showing them that you are trying to make that connection and be helpful will go a much longer way than just making it about you and what you have to announce.

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Now, were there any other issues or benefits that accrued to you later on, Because you had taken advantage of the EV charging issue and got some exposure to that?

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Did you benefit from that opportunity later on down the road elsewhere?

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We did.

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Yeah, we've had reporters respond to pitches that we've sent months later and have something that they're working on that they need help with, and so that the same kind of timeline played out in another situation where they had responded to a pitch that we had sent and were looking for a source to connect to, and so I like to think of pitches that we're sending to journalists as something that is searchable in their inbox at a later date.

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And so that was the case, for I believe it was Insider was the publication in that instance?

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Now, how about the automobile manufacturers?

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Had they looked at some of the work that you've done?

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Had any of them reached out to you for any additional assistance in some way?

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Not yet, but we are open to those calls if they are interested in working with us.

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What we have seen is that, as a result of having success with one client in the climate solution, having success with one client in the climate solution climate tech space, We've now since worked with several in different parts of the ecosystem.

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So we've worked with a client that is helping utilities accelerate their innovation to meet their decarbonization goals.

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We've worked with a company that's creating renewable natural gas from dairy manure.

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We've worked with a company that's creating renewable natural gas from dairy manure.

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We've worked with companies that are using AI to predict risks and threats around extreme weather events for investors and banks and financial institutions.

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So you know, one opportunity can lead to others that maybe are tackling the problem from a different angle.

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Let's talk a little bit about that, because these are some brand new areas, if you will.

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I mean, they're right up in the front of the things that are beginning to grow right now.

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So can you talk a little bit about how you're going to go about getting engaged with these companies that, as you said, are looking at AI and other sort of areas?

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How do you get engaged with them and how do you develop or research the background to move forward, to help them accomplish their goals?

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Yeah, it's really interesting how we connect with companies that are looking for PR strategy and support.

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Sometimes we connect with clients, like we did in the very early days.

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The two examples that I'm sharing today came from an investor that I knew and conducted a PR workshop for his portfolio company, and so we love partnering with investors that have clients that have a need to get their news out there, whether it's their fundraise news or they're launching the brand for the first time.

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In another instance, we were connected with a client because they had a role in a Netflix documentary and they used their AI technology to recreate Andy Warhol's voice, and so they had some exciting opportunities come their way as a result of working with the filmmaker and Netflix on this documentary series, and so that was the beginning of that relationship.

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Is they just needed support to be part of this news?

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And, you know, fast forward, two years later, we're now working together on deepfake detection and legislation around that.

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Well, since you brought that up, let's talk a little bit more about that, because that right now, as you perhaps know, that is a massive issue, particularly as we sit here and we're actually going through a presidential campaign.

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That is a major concern for everybody that there'll be too many things that appear to be real that are really not.

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So jump in on that and let's talk about how you help your clients and deep fake detection.

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How do you work with that?

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Yeah, so this is a really interesting journey.

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You know, I mentioned the Netflix documentary that they were part of, because they work with entertainment companies to use AI in a responsible way for the creation of content.

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And then what basically happened is, over the course of 2023, when ChatGPT became a mainstream news story, this company was a resource for journalists that were trying to make sense of what's happening with voice AI.

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Is this something we need to be concerned about?

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Do we need to regulate it?

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How do we regulate it?

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And, at the same time, the company was working through their own deepfake detection tools.

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They had always had something that was open source and available for everybody.

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They had had strong ethics in place from the very beginning of the company, and so they just built upon that with different technology, like watermarking and other detection tools.

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And so, basically because of that, when a senator reached out to them to get more information about how we can develop AI tools responsibly and ensure that customers are using these tools responsibly, we helped them respond to those requests from various senators and, as a result of doing that for several months, of providing a lot of information, being a resource in a very similar way that we do with journalists.

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They were invited to participate in a Senate hearing earlier this year.

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Well, let me say, having worked on Capitol Hill myself, it is quite an accomplishment, awesome recognition, to be invited to testify in front of what I'll call a congressional hearing, because they have them on both the House and Senate sides to testify at a congressional hearing, because it certainly says something about how you are being perceived, to be able to be a guest and do that sort of thing.

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So I'd say kudos to having your clients be invited to do that.

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Thank you sort of thing.

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So I'd say kudos to having your clients be and be invited to do that, thank you.

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We definitely understood the serious nature of participating and because you always see the headlines of one thing you know kind of go off the rails in these hearings.

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So you know we always prepare for like the most extreme scenario.

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But we were very pleased with the outcome and it actually led to legislation.

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So the no Fakes Act came out about a month ago.

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Now that deepfake issues or deepfake concerns are pretty much well known, have you had any ideas to how people can go about helping themselves or helping themselves identify what is deepfake because of?

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There's some tools that perhaps you're aware of.

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Yeah, so Resemble AI does have tools that are available for anyone to go on the website and use, and so that's one method is to actually like, if you have an audio clip that you can run through their system, you can certainly do it that way.

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And then the founder and CEO of Resemble AI has also shared other ways to kind of vet things.

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If you're like on a call, on a Zoom call, there's questions that you can ask to kind of gut check if this is a real situation and reporters are pretty fast to catch more high-profile situations and they're using tools like Resemble AI to verify the authenticity of voices.

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So there's news sources you can check out, there's tools like Resemble AI that you can check out, and then there's questions that you can be asking just if it's a, you know, live phone call situation now we've talked about two of your um, actually, I think, very, very different clients that you worked with the ev situation and the deep pig situation.

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do you have any other clients that uh, in a different arena, so to speak, that you've helped uh get some elevation and exposure as a result of your work?

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Yes, we work with a lot of clients across technology, healthcare, lifestyle and within lifestyle.

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That's very broad, so that can be everything from like innovative, sustainable fashion brands to accessories that were created by somebody that's an influencer on TikTok.

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So we love to be at the center of innovation, change and things that are happening at the national level in terms of having a conversation.

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So that could be about creating products more sustainably, like we do with a company that's creating, you know, ultimately leggings and activewear that doesn't rely on plastic, to a situation where a software company has helped healthcare marketers use tools in a way that is respectful of HIPAA compliance and privacy.

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We've helped clients raise or announce their fundraising in like the retail space, for example, from the founder of Chubbies has launched a new brand and got some coverage around that launch, and so there's endless examples and I'm always happy to share and kind of explain how these things came to be in more detail if anybody wants to reach out to me and have that conversation.

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Well, now that you mentioned that, in the event that they are interested, why don't you tell them now exactly how they can reach out to you?

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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We are at tailsplashcom, p-a-l-e, slash, and we are the same on our social channels.

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So if you go to LinkedIn, instagram or even on TikTok or on YouTube, you can find us there and easily schedule time to have a conversation about what's working, what you haven't tried yet as far as PR goes, and there's also a really nice marriage between PR and social media.

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So when you get media coverage and you share it on your social media channels, that automatically builds trust and credibility, whether it's your customers, potential partners, investors, and so we always encourage our clients and companies that we're reaching to leverage PR activities in your social media channels and vice versa.

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Well, amy, you've helped us understand a lot of what you do, how you go about it and the benefits that you bring to a lot of these new firms and helping them get some exposure and maybe changing the way some things are done or need to be done.

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Is there anything that you think we have maybe missed today?

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The only thing that I haven't talked about is what helps our clients connect with reporters during these like very active news cycles, and we are big fans of using technology to do that, and so, whether it's, you know, keeping a close eye on stories that are being written and reaching out to those reporters to offer our clients as a resource, or using platforms that, thanks to things like AI and technology, are making it very easy for journalists to reach out to PR professionals and say, hey, I need a source, I'm on deadline, do you have somebody?

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So we're big fans of using technology to make those connections happen.

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Well, let me say thank you so very, very much, amy.

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You certainly have enlightened me, as well as our listeners, to some of the work that you do, and we want to continue.

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Have you continue with the success that you're having, and we hope that perhaps your being on this podcast will add to that success.

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Thank you, Peter.

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I really appreciate the time and congratulations on all the success you've had with the podcast.

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Well, thank you so much, Amy, and to my guests, we certainly thank you.

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And to my listeners, let me say thank you again for listening, and we certainly do appreciate the fact that we have grown.

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Because you do listen, you do inspire others to listen as well and, again, share this information with your colleagues and listen to the next edition of the Public Relations Review Podcast.

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This podcast is produced by Communication Strategies, an award-winning public relations and public affairs firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Thank you for joining us.