When politicians talk about AI is anyone listening?

When politicians talk about AI, is anyone listening? Innovation and regulation in the UK

In January of this year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer shared his plans to position the UK as an AI ‘superpower’.

As his fellow political and business leaders across the world grapple with the challenges that come with innovation, excitement for promised efficiencies mixes with questions regarding longer-term impacts.

How much has the Labour Government’s keen focus on this evolving technology influenced the conversation around artificial intelligence in the UK so far?

Our latest Vuelio report ‘When politicians talk about AI, is anyone listening: Innovation and regulation in the UK’ tracks the political, media, and public conversation to find out just how much influence our ruling party has on this topic.

Graph to show news and social volume around politics and AI

Using Vuelio Political and Media Monitoring; insight from the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service; and social listening, we examine:

  • How the AI conversation has grown in the UK press and on social media since the General Election of 2024
  • What journalists and broadcasters covering AI are most interested in reporting
  • Which politicians & parties are best at making their voices heard around AI
Campaign reporting for PRs

Best practice for campaign reports

Whether you’re launching a product, hosting an event, or raising organisational awareness, a campaign report is the best way to showcase the successes to stakeholders in an easy and digestible format. Measurement also helps teams to improve, compare strategies, and understand the true value of events and campaigns.

Campaign reporting isn’t only about evaluating what happened in the past, you can also use media analysis to support you before and during a campaign.

By following this framework for your campaign reporting, you’ll be able to:

  • Set meaningful KPIs and understand the media landscape (before)
  • Respond to the media and receive analytical support from a team of experts during a busy period (during)
  • Showcase your successes to stakeholders with insightful evaluation and a greater understanding of what worked well and what didn’t work to identify opportunities for future campaigns (after)

Before your campaign

Goals 

Before your new campaign begins, it’s time to set up clear goals and meaningful KPIs. This will help provide everyone with a clear direction of what is to be achieved and help with the future measurement of assessing the success of the campaign.

Consider the following:

  • Who do you want to target?
  • What message do you want to send, and what action do you want your audience to take?
  • Where does your target audience go to consume traditional media?
  • When is the best time to launch the campaign?

For example:

A mountaineering rescue charity may want to analyse its summer mountain safety campaign. They may want to target novice hikers with the key message to be prepared while hiking this summer. This charity have particular issues in the North of England,  so want to target local media in that region, during the summer heatwave.

SMART Goals

With goals in place, you can set realistic SMART KPIs that align with your overall campaign objectives (SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

For example:

The mountaineering charity would like to increase the volume of campaign coverage by appearing in 400 outlets between 5 June – 4 July.

Or, they would like to increase the amount of headline mentions from the previous year by 5%.

Using historical or Industry Data

Once you’ve established your campaign’s goals and KPIs, use data to establish benchmarks to ensure your targets are SMART. Effective comparisons could be to your competitors, yourself, or the industry, and without data, you’re basing decisions on nothing more than a gut feeling.

Using data allows you to:

  • Assess against industry standards or pre-determined goals
  • Track progress over time if you compare it against your own previous campaigns
  • Hold yourself accountable by setting measurable targets
  • Say no to ideas that have underperformed in the past

For instance, the mountaineering rescue charity may have run a similar campaign the previous year and found that they achieved coverage in 300 outlets and a key message penetration of 35%. It would be unrealistic to set a goal of 100% key message penetration if the previous year had a 35% penetration, so an organisation can use this information to set a realistic target against last year’s results.

Vuelio can support you during the pre-campaign period with analysis of competitors or previous campaigns that can allow you to identify opportunities and threats.

Choosing the right metrics

Deciding which metrics to include is important, as the campaign report needs to reflect your SMART goals in a simple way that stakeholders in the wider business can understand.

Base your metrics on what best demonstrates your SMART objectives. This is especially the case with sentiment and proactivity analysis. Unless your campaign is to combat a negative reputation, sentiment will generally be positive, and the campaign itself is proactive, so consider other metrics such as the following:

Campaign-Specific Messaging: Track whether your intended key messages are being portrayed in the media e.g. How much coverage was the key message ‘When hiking this summer, be prepared and take water’ featured in?

Calls-to-action: Analyse if the media has included your campaign actions e.g. Head to mountaineeringrescue.co.uk to find out more about hiking safely this summer.

Prominence: Assess not just the volume of coverage about the campaign, but also the quality – are you appearing in headlines or as passing mentions?

Target Media Analysis: If your goal is to gain attention from specific media outlets, a detailed analysis of these results is necessary, e.g. Mountaineering Rescue is targeting local charities in the North of England so have compiled a list of relevant outlets in the region. It’s worth utilising a media database, like Vuelio’s Media Database, if these are journalists you haven’t worked with before.

The Vuelio team can support you with choosing the correct metrics. The team also typically provides manually analysed metrics that will allow you to analyse bespoke campaign metrics such as campaign messages.

During the campaign

Establish a useful reporting framework

During the campaign, it is important to continuously assess progress with the use of snapshot reports. These reports can help your organisation showcase immediate success, or respond to media reactions that may not be favourable or in line with messaging.

While you may already produce a campaign report at the end of your campaigns, sometimes this can be time-consuming. Vuelio’s Insights team can provide support during busy campaign periods on an ad hoc and ongoing basis. Many of our clients enlist us to provide them with multiple campaign reports per year to utilise our expertise, while some clients require our services on an ad hoc basis.

After the campaign

Once the campaign has finished, it is time to assess if your organisation has met its KPIs. At its core, media measurement is a continuous improvement process.

It may also be useful to consider if any additional data sets would add value to your reporting. For example, it may be useful to understand if donations, sales, or website traffic increased during the campaign.

Finally, when your campaign has ended and all analysis has been completed, you can then use this report not just as a summary of your campaign but as a benchmark for future work.

Find out more about campaign reporting and how Vuelio can help here

Hold the homepage!

Hold the homepage! How scoops circulate through the modern media landscape

Good news can travel quickly across the variety of platforms that make up the modern media landscape, but bad news often spreads just as fast.

How and why do certain stories make the leap from news columns to widely-shared social posts? And what do organisations and their comms teams need to know to push the positive stories further, and address negative narratives?

Our latest report ‘Hold the homepage! How scoops circulate the modern media landscape’ tracks two major reputational crises from the last year to uncover the forces at play. Using data points from traditional and social media – alongside public statements from UK political heavy-hitters – we examine how news reports evolve as they travel through different platforms & audiences.

Download the report to explore:

  • How scandal can spread beyond publishing paywalls, impacting everything from regulation to brand reputation
  • The forces that propel journalistic scoops from traditional media platforms to social virality
  • How an evolving story can embroil brands, including competitors, in unexpected ways
How podcasts shared the story of water pollution

Listen up: News podcasts share the story of water pollution in the UK

Bad news has the ability to spread quickly in our hyper-connected modern world of multiple platforms. For PRs, this means more channels to monitor than ever before for signs of crisis… but it also provides extra ways to boost important stories, connecting audiences to vital information.

One crisis with far-reaching implications for the UK audience over the last few years has been polluted waterways. This issue was put to politicians in the run-up to our General Election this summer, discussed with frustration across social platforms, and covered by the media in print, online, and in podcasts.

To highlight the impact of the podcasting format as an increasingly useful way to connect with audiences, we tracked the story of water pollution in the UK, and internationally, across podcasts from 1 November 2021 to 29 September 2024.

So many podcasts… and for good reason

2022’s Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report on podcasting projected that the industry would generate $2 billion in revenue in 2023, and $4 billion by 2024. The prediction of podcasting’s emergence as a format for storytelling has proved right – not just among friendship groups sharing anecdotes on their sofas (of which there are many), but for publishers, too.

The Daily Telegraph’s political editor Ben Riley-Smith highlighted podcasts as ‘a huge booming area for news consumption’ when speaking on the changing political landscape in the UK in 2023, and other publishers and big media brands have capitalised on this in 2024:

‘It makes sense for publishers to be moving towards the podcast space,’ believes Reach Studio’s head of content Yara Silva, whose team launched The Division Bell podcast to coincide with the UK General Election, and the Euro Thrash vodcast for Euro 2024.

‘People are just busier and busier – it’s so easy to consume a podcast while you’re doing other things. Podcasts are only going to get bigger and more important to publishers’.

The importance of news podcasts to audiences is also clear when tracking mentions of the format on X since 2021:

Mentions of news podcasts reached a zenith on X in June 2023 as the industry ‘boomed’, and it continues to be a source of discussion on social media. It’s now a firmly established format to turn to for news, with listeners/viewers no longer posting about a ‘podcast’, but specific shows, namechecking where they heard about certain topics.

Examining mentions of the two biggest podcasts in the UK – The Rest is Politics, which launched in March 2022, and The News Agents, launched in August 2022 – proves podcasting’s utility as a news source. Peaks occur around key events in the news cycle – the obvious example being the UK General Election causing a spike in mentions for both podcasts this summer.

The News Agents X post

Podcasts aren’t just for entertainment – they are also turned to by the public as a way to stay informed on events happening around the world, as well as closer to home.

How podcasts reached audiences with reports of water pollution

Water pollution is an issue faced across the world to varying degrees – tracking related news shows a firm focus on the topic in UK and US regions especially. Following mentions also shows how these stories reached further audiences with publisher-affiliated podcasts.

UK media outlets including BBC News and The Guardian have an outsized impact on the global conversation. Their influence on ‘greener’ socially progressive conversations is to be expected within their UK base, but this international dominance is surprising… Until the impact of their podcast brand extensions is considered. Both outlets reported on water pollution, and then took up the story in their podcasts to share extra information and delve deeper into the specifics. By contrast, US and Australian outlets like The Washington Post or ABC Australia produced a significant amount of written content, but did not fully utilise their podcast channels.

X post about BBC Indepth on water pollution

The ‘boom’ of podcasting as a format for news reporting isn’t just the result of a faddish focus within the publishing industry – audiences are listening (and watching, when there is accompanying video). PR and comms teams tasked with raising awareness by securing coverage in the press should expand their focus to aural formats alongside the traditional written word – important stories can reach audiences across every platform out there to engage with.

For connecting with podcasts relevant to your brand or niche, try Vuelio’s Podcast Monitoring – providing access to 65k podcasts as well as insight into audience sentiment and emerging trends within the world of audio content.

Not sure which platform is right for your next campaign? Check out the benefits of each social media platform – and how Vuelio can help you make the most of them – in this blog post.

Empowering communities through advocacy campaigns

When legislation changes are likely to impact entire communities, how can comms teams create campaigns that resonate with the public and decision-makers?

Our recent webinar Empowering communities through advocacy campaigns highlights important campaigns that have made change in Parliament, and sparked progress for people who feel unheard.

Featuring on the panel are the Commission for Victims and Survivors for Northern Ireland’s head of communications and PR Alana Fisher as well as the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s PR manager Gorki Duhra and local campaigns manager Lindsay Coyle.

 

Fill in the form below to check out our webinar and learn 👇

  • How to create campaigns that make a difference, from stakeholder mapping to creating messages that resonate
  • How to influence government policy
  • Which strategies pay off when time, and resource, is limited

Reputation management: How PR and comms can maintain trust in an AI-assisted future

 

Nearly half of UK businesses with less than 500 employees are unprepared for potential reputational crises arising from the use of AI, says new study. 

 

We teamed up with international market research company Danebury Research for our report, Reputation management: How PR and comms can maintain trust in an AI-assisted future, which examines how PRs and the media are adjusting to the use of artificial intelligence in their work.

 

Based on 300 interviews with business decision makers working across Financial Services, Utilities, Pharma, Media, Retail, and Transport sectors, our research found that fears regarding the impacts of brand reputational issues are significant. This highlights the urgent need for upskilling teams in order to keep up with advances.

 

Download the full report below to learn:

  • Why AI-enabled individuals pose a huge threat to organisational reputation
  • Which industries are most receptive to the technological advances
  • How comms teams can benefit from AI both as creators and communicators

Medical misinformation: How PR can stop the spread

 

Misinformation has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and continues its dangerous influence. Particularly dangerous – its negative impact on public health.


In this white paper, Medical misinformation: How PR can stop the spread, expertise and advice for communicating vital – sometimes lifesaving – information with the public comes from PRs working in the health, medical and pharmaceutical sector itself, both in-house at trusted brands and on behalf of clients.


With the fight against fake news on, effective PR and comms can help connect audiences with the information they need and curb the spread of damaging misinformation.


Download the full white paper by filling in the form below.