A manifesto for human thought leadership and PR ROI

Written by Simpatico PR

Posted on 2025-06-05

PR agencies like every other arm of marketing face an AI choice. Either they enable their people to continue to think and be creative on behalf of clients or they let AI tools do most of the thinking for them.

This is not to say AI tools will not be valuable and important. But that over-reliance on content automation, will result in a tsunami of vanilla B2B content. We can already see the direction of travel on LinkedIn. And, as AI takes over from SEO, if you go down that road, your reputation will sink.

At Simpatico PR we know which direction is the right one. We have always put thought leadership creation as a means to achieve high quality earned media exposure – media coverage at the heart of what we do.

As respected media industry journalist Omar Oakes put it recently: “AI is the hair dye of content marketing - you can always tell!” 

And in his article in The Media Leader on the subject he said: "Most marketing content today is forgettable. AI just makes it faster and dumber".

There seems to be a groundswell of concern about the saturation of social and owned channels with bland content no one really reads. Performance Marketing World called out the confusion between earned media and owned channels in this piece.

A manifesto for human thought leadership and B2B PR ROI

We believe:

• Emerging businesses and established players with teams that are prepared to challenge orthodoxies in their industries, will always perform more strongly if they take these ideas to market.

• True influence is gained through quality earned media and journalism.

• Human created ideas will always win more eyeballs and nudge your marketing and PR harder than AI.

• Technical B2B business propositions can learn from consumer PR and marketing.

• B2B PR agencies should become an extension of their clients - respected as equals who add value through creativity, knowledge and honest advice.

In short, now more than ever, investing in human thinking equals better B2B marketing ROI.

Find out more about our B2B PR agency approach to thought leadership and B2B marketing at www.simpaticopr.co.uk.