‘Understanding tech & data can take PR professionals from listening to the driving seat’

While most creative people struggle with the balancing the right brain and left brain concepts, ultimately ceding to their creative impulses, founder of digital communications agency MediaValueWorks Rachana Chowdhary believes that striking this balance with the help of technology and data can help PR professionals move from the listening seat to the driving seat. 

At the recently held IPRCCC, Chowdhary shared her thoughts on building resilient relations in the AI age. She started her PR and digital communications agency in 2013 and a sister concern in the United States of America in 2020. 

Over the last couple of decades, there's been a sea change in how people communicate, mainly owing to the technological developments through the years, she said. “This transformation is reflected in our media, communication strategies and methods. It is imperative that we need to understand the emerging trends and evolve strategies that will allow us to go to the next level of growth,” said Dr Chowdhary.

In their communication with their consumers, companies need to reconcile with both the technological and human connection. According to her, the challenges in this regard include the increased polarisation in the society, ethical debates and mental health of consumers on the human side of things and deepfakes, data privacy and information overload on the technological side. “Besides all of these, constant adaptation keeping in tune with the technological advances is continuing to be a challenge in its own sense,” she said. 

The same evolution of communication, added Chaudhary, also presents opportunities in the form of niche marketing, targeted messaging and leveraging data-driven strategies. Going forward, we will also have to embrace emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality and blockchains, she insisted. 

Big data will enable us to have hyper personalisation in each communication with consumers, she said. This messaging is where we bring in our skill sets to create multifaceted marketing campaigns, she added. 

“As creative people, we feel like understanding data and emerging technologies is not for us. We always have our left brains fight with our left brains over this. However, understanding emerging technology empowers people in the business of communication through solutions driven by technology,” said Dr Chowdhary. 

Considering that the future of communications would be AI-driven, she suggests PR people to upskill themselves in terms of technology. This, she believes, will be the game changer that will take communications professionals from the listening table to the driving seat.