Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A number of commentators have weighed in over the last few weeks with their opinions on why ratings for the NFL on TV have fallen by double-digit percentages this season.

A few weeks ago, a 15% dropoff was reported. More recently, the decline was reported as 11% so far this fall. Whatever it is, or whatever it turns out to be by the time the season ends, the National Football League and its TV partners are not accustomed to double-digit audience declines.

Football was supposed to be the great constant of TV. Viewers of scripted prime-time shows going elsewhere lately? Don’t worry, they’ll come back for football. They always do. Or maybe not.

So what’s the problem? The commentators have pointed to a variety of factors – all of them valid and likely contributing, by degrees, to this viewership shortfall....

There are a few universal truths in online dating: most photos are carefully staged, most profiles are slightly puffed-up, and most people on them (and this is clearly fast-changing) are actually human.Until some unlucky Tinder users spotted Ava.

A company promoting the movie Ex Machina created a fake account, Ava, with a photo of the star of the movie. Ava is an AI in the film and presumably she wants to get down. Unsuspecting men and women swiped to make a match and Ava, in a cross between cheesy AI and Eliza, asked a few pertinent questions including “Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”

Normal users assumed they were talking to a human but they were actually talking to a bot. In the end, like the chatbots that now linger on near dead chat systems like AIM, Ava sent her suitors to an Instagram page where they found out that she was all a sham....

In the past few weeks, we’ve leaked a few data slides, but I think the misshapen pyramid below may be the most important of them all to radio. In the survey, we provide respondents with a long list of attributes, and ask them to tell us which ones are the main drivers behind why they tune in AM/FM stations....

Too often - and yet understandably - people outside of the PR profession ask what PR is all about. But explaining what it is does not mean that it answers the sometimes negative thinking behind the question in the first place. So here's a top 10 check list of What PR is Not.