AI and PR: The Future of Media Engagement with Iskren Lilov, Muck Rack

Mike Maynard: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I'm Mike Maynard and today I'm joined by Iskran Lilof, who is from Muckrack. Welcome to the podcast, uh, Iskram.

Iskren Lilov: Thank you, Mike. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mike Maynard: It's great to have you on the podcast, Iskran. And I'm really interested to find out a bit more about Muckrack. But before we do that, what I'd really like to understand is a little bit about yourself and your career history. So can you explain a little bit about how your career developed and why you thought the right role for you would be Global Marketing Manager at Muckrack?

Iskren Lilov: Well, I've always tried to profile myself within B2B marketing and communications ever since, uh, I graduated from my university days in Amsterdam. I started work at ngo, which, uh, was called Reshaping Quirk back then. And uh, I, uh, led their marketing and communications department. After that I transferred to the cybersecurity sector. And um, pretty much by chance I ended up in the media intelligence industry. But you know that the best, um, solutions often happen by chance. Um, so I started, um, working at a company called rupoint, which was an Irish media, uh, intelligence company. Uh, I was their first dedicated marketing hire and I built a team around and we developed a globally recognized brand which was later acquired by Macrack. And that is how I am now joined. I have now joined the uh, Macrack team for, for me it's a, uh, really, really strong fit because I really enjoy being in the media intelligence industry, um, practicing marketing and communications for communicators. Since our audience is what I've always trained to be, uh, I understand what the audience wants and how to market to it. So that has been a really strong fit throughout my career. And that's why I've involved myself more in the industry now, uh, being the communication task force leader of Alpha, which is the association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication. And I also do have my own, uh, consultancy company which specializes in geo and marketing strategy. So I try to juggle a lot of, uh, things around marketing and communications.

Mike Maynard: That's awesome. There's so many things going on there. Um, I think, you know, we'll probably touch on some of those other roles as we go through the interview. But first let's focus down on Muckrack. Can you just explain to listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the product, what it does and how it helps your customers?

Iskren Lilov: So Muckrack is the AI communications platform which combines all sorts of workflows that communications and PR professionals might need. So it combines a monitoring solution with media, uh, intelligence and measurement of communication as well as a very robust journalist database, a press release distribution service, geo measurement and uh, ah, a bunch of other very um, nifty features who help communicators, uh, show the value of their work and um, work more effectively uh, in their day to day operations.

Mike Maynard: So that's quite a lot there. I mean before we go into a few more details, I think Muckrack is probably much better known in the US than it maybe is over in Europe. So can you explain why that is and uh, you know, also talk about whether you can actually help PR professionals in Europe?

Iskren Lilov: Yeah, of course. Well, I am aware that our brand is quite well recognized within the us however we are a, ah, global company. I am myself, um, located in Europe and I work from Europe. Um, we have a very strong presence on the uh, UK European market as well and globally have clients all over the world. So uh, while we are not maybe as well known outside of the US we still provide the same level of service to uh, our clients outside of it. And that's what my role as a global marketing manager is established to be, uh, to increase the brand awareness of our company outside the U.S. uh, and promote our growth on other markets.

Mike Maynard: Okay. And you know, as I understand it, basically Muckrack exists to help people communicate with the media and then monitor m their results. I mean how important is that today when we hear a lot about you know, for example customers going directly to AI, getting their answers there and not visiting uh, publications.

Iskren Lilov: I love that question, mainly because that is one of the most underrepresented, uh, conversations right now that PR should actually be the department that leads GEO and uh, AI discoverability. Because as we also discovered within our what is AI reading research that we did globally and those are uh, data that have just released in May of this year, uh, we found out that 99% of all AI citations and we prompted millions and millions of times across Cloud, ChatGPT and Gemini, 99% of those links were non paid media. And out of this non paid media about uh, 84% of them is earned media. So the other uh, percentage around 20% is owned media. But who owns earned and owned media within a company that is the communications and PR team and not really the marketing team. So GEO and SEO are fundamentally different in the way that citations and uh, ranking is being processed right now. LLMs care a lot more about um, the reputation of the media outlet that is citing you being first of all reputable for your industry. So niche uh, media outlets are very well positioned right now and also recent. So consistency, um, media outreach and earned media are very big drivers right now of AI visibility. And that is a uh, great opportunity for communications teams or PR teams within an organization to boost their value and their ROI for, for the organization.

Mike Maynard: And that's really interesting because you know what I see is a lot of uh, teams involved in SEO are extremely focused on trying to grab that GEO world because they can see that their industry is being eaten by geo. Do you think that PR professionals have the same enthusiasm to get involved with geo? And if not, how can we fix it?

Iskren Lilov: I believe there is a lot of conversation around us right now and the main issue of why maybe PR has been historically more undervalued or PR practitioners or leaders have been uh, less vocal about how they want to lead certain processes and certain features within an organization is because marketing has always had the ease of roi, uh, metrics, um, which are very easy to get, very easy to, um, very reliable as well, um, because a um marketing leader could prove the ROI of their budget 10 times easier than a PR professional. So that's why we, and now I'm speaking from an AMEC perspective. As an industry body that does measurement and evaluation, we are trying to um, advocate and to educate PR and communication departments how to earn their seat at the table and how to claim their space in the GEO era. I definitely should not say that marketing should be outside of it because I am also a marketing person. Uh, so even from my point of view marketing should be involved within the conversation. However, it should not be the one leading the charge on the ger. It's always a collaborative effort. However, marketing and comm seem to historically have this battle ongoing between them of who is leading that department, uh, and especially in smaller uh, companies when that is the same department. In Julie, the emphasis that's put on comms is usually not as high as marking. So I would definitely advise any PR or comms professional who's listening to this right now, um, either search for amex, um, um, resources on the topic or to go to one of the many um, surveys such as macrack's, what is AI reading that can empirically prove that the PRN communication profession is the one who drives real tangible outcome in geo Visibility.

Mike Maynard: That's fascinating. I mean, there's a couple of things I'd love to ask to follow up on that. Really. I mean the first thing, let's talk about Muckrack as a product. I mean, how does Muckrack help with Geo? Does it have specific GEO features in it?

Iskren Lilov: Yep. So we have launched a product called Generative Pulse, which is a geo monitoring product, uh, in which um, teams can um, monitor um, various metrics along their GEO performance. But something as well that we need to talk when we speak about GEO measurement is that some people um, make a liking to it, to how, for example Google Ads or Google Search measures its outputs. But those are direct metrics that we get from Google from the source of the information. So that is easy to measure. For Jio, nobody has access, except of course OpenAI, anthropic or Google, nobody has been given direct access to, to what their search performance is. So what you can do and how you need to structure your measurement is first of all create a very custom methodology of which prompts you're going to monitor. So you need to know your audience very well. That's marketing 101, of course, and comms 101. And after that you need to ask yourself the question, what are my clients or audiences asking AI in order for me to monitor? Um, because you know that every AI answer is customized, means you will never have the same answer to the same question. So the thing that you can do is after outlining all of these prompts, you can ask those LLMs the same prompts millions of times or thousands of times every day. And you can measure, um, percentage change, you can measure a lot of different KPIs and statistics, but you never compare your measurement to, let's say a company on a different vertical because that's not an Apples to Apples comparison. And that is why it's very important that you rely on a solid tool that you can compare with previous data from the same tool. Because different tools also use different methodologies currently. And I'm um, not saying that one of them is wrong or right. I'm just saying that if you are relying on data, you need to be relying on the same data and you need to measure apples to apples.

Mike Maynard: That makes a lot of sense that the consistency of measurement, I mean, I'm interested. You know, GEO seems to have excited a lot of uh, professionals in the PR measurement sector because they see it as a way to establish value for pr. Do you think this is going to be one of the key metrics for PR value in the future or do you think that other metrics are going to exist? Because priority PR professionals have been trying for years to show their value and they still really struggle.

Iskren Lilov: Yeah, I mean it's probably the most obvious metric right now that you can rely on to quickly show your value. Obviously there are very well prepared and uh, um, well knowledged, uh, teams who can measure their outcome, uh, in a bunch of metrics. Like we are media intelligence company so we advise a lot of our clients on how to measure, how to make sensible measurement methodologies and choose the right KPIs for them. Uh, but I think GEO is the metric that uh, the board understands and that's always been a crucial issue to translate the results cons ROI to the language of the board. That's why metrics such as AVES have existed for a long time. Even though AMEC has created the pledge against AVs and AVs are not a metric that you should um, be tracking. Uh, however, it is a metric that has a dollar sign next to it. And the board loves to hear that, uh, the money is going up, we have a $5 trillion which you know, obviously is uh, not a realistic thing. But what we also need to be very aware of when we create our GEO measurement strategy is we shouldn't fall into the trap of GEO readability becoming the next impression metric, or what we call atomic, a vanity metric. Um, I'll call Jim McNamara. Professor Jim McNamara, I have a really favorite quote that I always used that impressions are not the number of people you've impressed. That is very relevant to GEO visibility as well, because impressions in isolation tell you nothing. Geovisibility in isolation tell you nothing. Because okay, you have surfaced in those answers, but maybe you are one of the five companies that surfaced those answers. Did your uh, audience actually make an action after you surfaced in this answer or did they ignore you? Uh, and there are a lot of metrics that you can connect to GEO visibility and then you can make a lot more of an educated measurement methodology which makes a lot for a lot more rigorous way to display roi.

Mike Maynard: That makes a lot of sense. So I mean, I'm interested just building on this measurement side, um, if you were talking to a new Muckrack customer, what are the sort of things you advise people to either do or to change to get better measurement?

Iskren Lilov: Well, first of all, measurement starts before your campaign starts. That is probably the most important thing that many teams have not yet implemented in their workflows. Uh, and AMEC again has a really good resource which is Called the Integrated Evaluation Framework. This is a free resource on the AMEC website, which is an interactive tool, step by step guides you through all the questions that you need to ask yourself before you run your campaign that will then inform what and how you measure. Because I'm a very big proponent of uh, the fact that me and you can never measure the same things because we need to be aware of what the organization needs to be measured and uh, how to customize our measurement methodologies. So starting with the measurement M methodology before you run any campaign is my number one advice for everyone. And then on a more practical side of how you measure the outcomes, uh, and the impact as well is again, don't rely on vanity metrics and try to associate different KPIs and different metrics with one another rather than watch numbers go up or down in isolation of others. So try to make relationships between the data points. That is how you find insights, which is what you need in order to make decisions later.

Mike Maynard: I love that and I particularly love the discussion around like setting your goals at the start. I mean so often when I see, you know, some PR campaigns, quite often it's like a car journey and people have literally jumped in the car, they've started driving and then somebody says, have we arrived? And actually nobody knows where they're going. And so, you know, people say, well we've driven for an hour, we must be there. And it's a crazy situation where some PR professionals really do seem to do that. And I get there's internal pressures at companies and uh, maybe that's a good thing to follow up. Have you seen ways that PR professionals have been much stronger in the way they present the need for strategy and planning at the start to get good metrics rather than just being pressured. We've got to run this campaign because this division wants one.

Iskren Lilov: Yeah. Well, this should start from the top. So this is um, about company, uh, philosophy. It's about company culture and about communications culture. So uh, obviously there are amazing communication leaders who have either implemented the amount principles or simply know this and practice this in their own ideologies of how to run the team. Uh, and those are the ones that receive a lot of success either at agency or in house level. But I'll particularly focus on the in house communication role because usually those leaders are under the most pressure from boards, from financial teams, especially because it's quite difficult to explain all of this measurement, um, ideology to a cfo, for example. And obviously they are the people who determine your budget or that you are asking for a budget increase. So again, there are many, many good resources on the AMEC website on how to do that. But a lot of the issues come to purely human issues. For example, egos, company cultures who do not reward, uh, a leader coming out and saying, I don't know, I need to learn. That's, that's one of the worst possible company cultures to have when it comes to measurement, um, ideologies. Because you need to be open to constantly learn, even as a leader, even as a cmo, as a cco. And people below you or in your team need to be able to see you as a leader who wants to learn and who is approachable for new ideas. So that's what one of the key pressures are, especially in big enterprise companies.

Mike Maynard: I think that's great advice. I love that. Um, let's pivot a bit and go back to how Muckrack helps people engage with the media and engage with journalists. Can you talk a little bit about how the tool would help PR pros find the right journalists? And particularly I'm interested because everyone's talking about AI. Is AI actually changing the way that, um, PR professionals reach out to journalists?

Iskren Lilov: Um, I would say that AI facilitates the way that PR professionals, uh, reach out. Not really change, because the good old press release is still a, uh, very reliable, um, solution. And also pitching journalists has never changed. Uh, you still need to have a personal relationship, you still need to provide what they're looking for. But the one advantage that we have at Muckrack is that, um, when we started, when the company was started back in 16 years ago, uh, it started as a, uh, solution for journalists to journalists themselves created their own profiles in it. And Muckrack is free for journalists forever. So we have a very, um, dedicated audience of journalists, we have very nice rapport with them, and journalists themselves verify their profiles. So our journalist database is quite robust in that way, and it allows for our PR clients in that way to create more valuable relationships through the platform. And of course, we have AI features who help, uh, our clients either write or identify the right journalist to pitch. But also, um, one of the main perks of Generative Post as well is that it shows you which journalists have been cited most for your topics and your prompts that you have entered so you can directly reach out to them. And, uh, we monitor a lot about not just the, uh, sources that are being featured, but also the individual authors and journalists that AI prefers.

Mike Maynard: And as AI helps people to actually create this outreach, do you see it eliminating PR executive Roles who are traditionally the ones doing those kind of day to day outreach. Or do you think there'll always be a human element involved?

Iskren Lilov: I think that it wouldn't eliminate, it will eliminate the lazy and the bad ones for sure. Or even like the, the people who just don't really um, who just send the press release and expect that they get coverage. Because still media relations is a very human to human experience. It's a lot about your relationship, building a relationship with the journalists, a personal relationship. That's why you see such strong PR people who have built those relationship over years at different companies, different agencies still being the people who are the most influential in the space. Because those personal relationships are the ones that uh, help your pitch turn into an article. One of the very big and first mistake that a PR person can do is to think that their news is important because it is important to their organization. Journalists care about what's important for them, for their audiences. How does this move your audience? It may be a really big company change. You have appointed a new CEO or you have made a really big push with something uh, in your product. However, does that really translate to an interesting story for the audience of this journalist? Because that is what journalists are evaluated against. So you need to be a good partner to journalists and a good partner creates a great personal relationship. So that's why I think that AI might help PR professionals remember all of these things that for example, I um, talk about this with this journalist or I have visited this journalist a few times at their um, office. But it wouldn't replace the personal aspect of creating the relationship. And then um, having this two way discussion around bitches, that makes a lot of sense.

Mike Maynard: I think that's very reassuring for anybody in the industry who's not one of the lazy people. You mentioned Iskrin, this has been really interesting. Before I let you go, there's three questions we'd like to ask everybody. The first one is, I think, you know, the obvious question. We're seeing a lot of change, particularly with the introduction of AI technology. But what do you think the biggest change in uh, B2B marketing is going to be over the next, say three to five years. Wow.

Iskren Lilov: Well, lots of big things coming. However, I would say again, GEO has to be one of the key ways that we will change our own industry. Because AI LLMs have now become a stakeholder. They are a separate audience that we need to cater for and a lot more teams will uh, take a lot more time to cater from this audience.

Mike Maynard: That's great. I love that thought that AI is now a stakeholder. That's fantastic. Um, the next question we'd like to know is, um, about advice you've been given. So what is the best marketing advice that's ever been given to you?

Iskren Lilov: The best marketing advice ever was that marketing is one of the easiest jobs in the world because it requires only two skills. It requires pure logic and human empathy because you connect with your audience and then it's logical to figure out what they want and to serve it to them.

Mike Maynard: I love it. That's simple. And I mean, you've given some optimistic comments about the future of, uh, you know, people entering PR if they're motivated. But in general, if you were talking to a young person who was looking to enter marketing as a career, maybe a graduate, what one piece of advice would you give them to help them be successful?

Iskren Lilov: I think I would reiterate the advice that I got. In a way, don't overcomplicate it. So start with human creativity and then, uh, everything else happens easier after that. Don't overcomplicate the way that you think about marketing. It is simply a human to human communication.

Mike Maynard: Perfect. That's great. What a wonderful way to, uh, um, end the discussion. I'm sure people will be interested in contacting you and almost certainly finding out more about Muckrack. So what's the best way for people to get hold of you if they'd like more information?

Iskren Lilov: Well, I'm quite a public person, so it's very easy to contact me. My LinkedIn is Iskren Liwov, as is my name. So uh, feel free to shoot me a message there. My macrack email is iskrenacrag.com so it couldn't be easier than that. And I'll uh, be happy to answer any questions that the audience might have.

Mike Maynard: That's amazing. Iskren, thank you so much for being a guest on B2B marketing technology. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on itunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website@napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn. Mhm.