Whether we like it or not, our world is changing. When I started doing PR in the first decade of the 2000s, if you landed a TechCrunch article, your story went viral. Heck, that was even true when I publicized the social mobile app Yo in 2014. Yo became the most viral app of all time soon after it received a mere few articles in top-tier publications and one post on social media. But sadly, this is no longer the case. With the increasing popularity of social media platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, as well as the fact that more people are turning to podcasting and independent writing than ever before, today’s PR teams must monitor and hit more distribution channels than ever before, in order to effectively reach their target audiences.
It’s impossible for us PR professionals, aka humans, to continuously keep up with the ever-growing number of trends, news, and channels. It is my strong belief that we must embrace AI to help us so that we’re able to effectively do our jobs without slaving away and drowning in a sea of never-ending research work.
The PR tech gap: Why current tools fall short
As someone who has been in PR for the last two decades, I have used all the different PR platforms and databases out there. Some are better than others, but none of them are really great, and given today’s AI advancements, they are honestly quite disappointing. Contact details of journalists are often outdated, publications aren’t properly ranked. For example, most solutions rank Medium higher than The NY Times because its traffic is higher, even though it’s a blogging platform and not a publication. The underlying understanding and context are definitely missing. In addition to that, there are also only a handful of PR platforms in the market, their UI is clunky, information often outdated, and due to the lack of competition, they have no drive to truly advance their technology or introduce new, innovative features.
Not only is the tech not really good, but at the same time, these companies are also requesting exuberant amounts of money for subscriptions and locking PR teams in for a minimum of a year with an auto-renew clause written in the agreement in such small letters, that hardly no one notices, until it’s too late. I can’t help but feel screwed over by these large companies, and I am not the only one. Many of my PR colleagues are continuously complaining about these issues in various PR channels and social media groups. Just google it.
At the same time, none of us can afford to be without these software solutions when our competitors have them, and so we grudgingly pay the fees. PR solopreneurs gather in groups to be able to afford one account and share that account so they can stay in the game. Yet even after paying these platforms their high fees, I would still see my team slaving away for hours, if not days or weeks, trying to create a good media list for a story. This bothered me for years and It upset me more and more each year, as I saw AI disrupting so many other industries. It seemed ridiculous to me that the matching between a story and the journalists who might be interested in it, would prove so difficult, in an age where AI was flourishing. Take for example, the advertising industry, which harnesses the latest technology in order to be able to serve you a McDonalds ad after you just told your friend that you felt like eating a hamburger.
A PR pro's vision: Dazzle's founding story
Due to the fact that I specialize in tech PR, I have always been surrounded by tech entrepreneurs and the latest technologies, and I dreamt of a platform that could help us PR professionals come up with a list of journalists who were just right for our stories in minutes, as opposed to hours or days. I dreamt of a solution that would be interactive and smart, because it had the capability to collect all the data regarding specific topics, news and journalists, from all over the web, so you could ask it questions, just like you would your PR guru or mentor. Questions such as: “Who is the best person at TechCrunch to pitch this story to?” or “Can you provide me with three journalists who would be interested in this angle?” Or “What title should I use for this specific journalist?” Since no such solution existed, I set out to build it myself.
The year was 2022, and I came together with my co-founder, Dom, and a few brilliant engineers, product and growth experts, to form Dazzle. I brought my PR know-how from the last two decades, and they brought their tech and AI expertise. I explained the daily pain points that we PR folks go through, and asked them to come up with a technical solution to solve these. I honestly don’t think that a great platform for any industry can be built by someone who doesn't come from the space and understands the industry inside and out.
We all worked intensely to try to come up with the best platform to solve these problems that I described, however, unfortunately, the technology that was available back then, didn’t really permit for the platform I was envisioning. I wanted a software that you could interact with, and that took away the tedious work involved in the research and creation of curated media lists, so that we humans could free our minds to focus on what truly matters in PR - nurturing media relationships and ultimately getting top coverage. Isn’t this what PR has always really been about?
Reimagining PR workflows: Prioritize relationships over grunt work
By drowning ourselves in the first phase of the grunt work which can be easily done by AI and probably even better than by humans, we lose all our energy and leave ourselves little time for the most important phases of PR which consist of the second phase - building and nurturing our relationships with journalists, and the third phase - ensuring the coverage. All PR pros know that even after speaking with a journalist, it’s most certainly not guaranteed that s/he will cover. You need to earn their interest. This is why our profession is called Earned Media.
Current workflow of PR Teams:
- Phase 1 - 65%
- Phase 2 - 20%
- Phase 3 - 15%
Our platform would ensure that PR pros spent as little time as possible in phase one so that they could focus on phases two and three.
- Phase 1 - 20%
- Phase 2 - 50%
- Phase 3 - 30%
Dazzle: Bridging the gap between PR and journalists
Fast-forward to 2023. Chat GPT, Anthropic, and interactive UI emerge, and all of a sudden, a whole new set of possibilities emerge, enabling my vision to come to life. Together with my amazing team, we’ve built a platform that has AI baked in at its core, not just sprinkled. Dazzle truly acts as your co-pilot in action when you’re in your workflow so that you can achieve in minutes, what used to take hours, or even days (if not weeks).
As we’ve been building the product, we’ve spoken to hundreds of PR pros and listened to their issues and frustrations. The way their faces light up as I show them a demo and explain the vision behind Dazzle is exactly why I built this product. There’s no better feeling than hearing them say how happy they are after having waited so long for such a product.
Dazzle is not only great news for PR professionals. It’s also awesome news for journalists who are sick and tired of receiving pitches that have nothing to do with what they write about. The platform ensures that they are only sent pitches about stories they actually care about today. Not five years ago. That’s because Dazzle uses a variety of LLM models to perform real-time searches, giving PR pros the most timely and accurate results. I always say that Dazzle is as updated as the Web. Dazzle utliizes the information it finds on the Web in real-time and isn’t dependent on any database. It’s also the first and only chat-based AI platform. All these are key differentiators of Dazzle. More to come on Dazzle’s differentiators in the next blog post.
Dazzle keeps up with all the latest trends, distribution channels, journalists, podcasters, and more, so that PR pros don’t have to, enabling them to focus on relationship building and earning coverage. We do all the behind-the-scenes work so that PR pros can focus on what’s most important (and what AI can’t do): Cultivating relationships. In today’s age, there shouldn’t be any reason for PR folks to still be slaving away, manually trying to find details about journalists on the Web. Our vision for Dazzle is a big one. We’re starting here but we plan on adding many additional features in the near future. Our hope is that we make it possible for any PR pro, whether working alone or in a large team, to do the best job possible and focus on the things that only humans can do, while letting the AI do what it does best. This is the only way in which our industry will survive and flourish in an age of exponentially growing data.
