By Liz Tunheim Sheets, IPREX Marketing Chair and Chief Growth Officer at Tunheim
For years, global communications teams have worked toward consistency.
We want organizations to tell a coherent story across markets. We build common messaging, establish brand standards and try to make sure that whether someone encounters an organization in Minneapolis, Mexico City, Johannesburg or Mumbai, they understand essentially the same thing. I still believe in that discipline.
But AI is introducing an interesting complication.
Increasingly, people aren't discovering organizations by visiting their websites or reading a collection of search results. They're asking questions and receiving synthesized answers from AI-powered search and generative tools.
Those answers are assembled from an information environment that is anything but uniform.
The media outlets that establish credibility differ by country. So do relationships between journalists and sources, expectations about what constitutes news, the influence of trade versus mainstream media, language, cultural context and the ways organizations establish authority.
That raises a question I think global communicators need to spend more time discussing:
If AI is global, but the information ecosystems feeding it are local, what does a truly global communications strategy look like now?
I don't think the answer is simply translating more content or distributing the same story in more countries. And I don't think global consistency necessarily means communicating identically everywhere.
It may mean becoming much better at understanding what credibility looks like in each market and then building enough credible evidence across those markets that both people and the technologies they use can understand who you are. That's one of the reasons I'm particularly interested in the role of earned media.
We are learning a great deal about how AI systems find, interpret and synthesize information. An organization's owned content matters. But so does the broader information ecosystem around it: who is writing about the organization, where those stories appear, what subjects it is associated with and whether credible third parties reinforce the story the organization tells about itself.
For a global organization, that ecosystem becomes considerably more complicated. Fortunately, it also creates an opportunity.
As Marketing Chair of the IPREX global communications network, I get to work with communications professionals who understand their markets from the inside. Rather than assuming that a strategy developed in one country will translate neatly into another, we can borrow expertise from colleagues who understand how influence and credibility actually work locally.
On November 12, I'm going to explore this idea with three of my peers as part of Ragan Communications Week: Elzaan Rohde of Semaphore Communications in South Africa, Horacio Loyo Gris of Dextera Comunicación in Mexico and Naina Aggarwal Ahuja of Talking Point Communications in India.
I want to hear where the conventional wisdom about global media relations gets it wrong. I want to understand what journalists in their markets expect that outsiders often miss. And I especially want to explore what all of this means as AI becomes another intermediary between organizations and the people they need to reach.
The next era of global communications may require us to become simultaneously more global in our thinking and more local in how we establish credibility. That's a conversation worth having, and I hope you’ll join us.
