WILL the use of Big Data in public relations and advertising render the skillsets of graduates irrelevant?
The news for those prosepctive students considering careers in public relations and advertising, but fearful that future job prospects could be wiped out by algorithms, is much better than you might have expected.
Media pieces on Big Data across all industries might well be filled with predictions about how it could transform professionals' lives and radically alter whole industries, but there are certain aspects of public relations and advertising which algorithmic alchemy simply cannot match.
Those who are concerned about their career prospects should remember that there are so many discrete applications in public relations and advertising for Big Data to be used upon first.
And there are some areas in industries like public relations and advertising, which rely heavily on instinct and a deep understanding of human emotions, where Big Data would appear doomed to fail to have an impact which could put people out of work.
As Alex Siracusa of PR Week says: "Storytelling will always be at the foundation of public relations. And data and analytics can supercharge our work." Storytelling will remain the absolute rock of public relations on which all else is built, and data will simply help the process of distributing stroytelling become more efficient. Those who aspire to become copywriters and creatives in public relations and advertising should therefore not worry that their skills are about to be superseded by algorithms and robotics.
Connecting with the wider public and specific consumers is a lot to do with innate understanding of human emotions, and this is an area where data simply won't match up.
For those creative minds who want to focus on actually building campaigns and advertising material from the ground up, the fact that data could help make strategies more accurate will take a lot of the guess work out of your role.
This could mean plenty more time to work on the actualy building blocks of campaigns, and less time worrying about whether those campaigns are reaching their targets. Data analysis and then acting on the conclusions could mean that public relations and advertising firms become extremely accurate in reaching their intended audience, freeing up humans to do work which is far more rewarding.
While datasets are potential gold mines of useful information for public relations companies and advertisers, one might wonder who is going to extract all of that information - who is going to do the mining for those nuggets of gold which will help so much to change public relations and advertising?
The answer is that humans' critical thinking abilities will be at the forefront in the challenge to use the huge amaount of data collected, by analysing it correctly.
So those thinking of working up to a career in public relations and advertising shouldn't rush out just yet to become data scientists. Data will become more and more important, just as the role of data is increasing in every industry.
But the creativity and human intuition which public relations and advertising rely so heavily upon at the very coundations of the industry will remain central to the whole process of looking after clients reputations and marketing their products.
This editorial was sponsored by Yasar University, to find out more about their courses take a look at their profile.
