For years, a major consumer brand kept PR on the back burner while newsrooms shrank and outlets merged around it. AI search has given earned media a new job. Customers now ask chatbots for recommendations, and those answers draw on third-party sources a brand can’t publish for itself. With creative now cheaper to produce, brands compete on what AI can’t generate for them, audience understanding and a reputation built beyond their own channels.
Kimberly Eberl is Founder and CEO of The Motion Agency, Chicago’s largest certified woman-owned marketing communications agency. She came up through PR at Weber Shandwick and Ogilvy, launched Motion as a solo freelance practice in 2006, and still keeps her Ogilvy termination letter framed on her desk. Twenty years later, the agency employs nearly 90 people across Chicago, Cincinnati, and Nashville. Across its consumer, healthcare, and B2B clients, the conversation Eberl hears most often starts with where AI belongs in a brand.
“We want to come off as authentic, but also be efficient. Efficiency is a magic word for clients nowadays, knowing what AI can do,” Eberl says. Motion’s creative teams feel that pull, too. AI makes it easier to produce more work, but audience feedback helps determine what’s worth making.
AI raises the stakes on authenticity
Eberl sees user-generated content, or work built to look like it, moving from social feeds into broadcast advertising, with fewer actors and celebrity spokespeople in the frame. The appeal is a voice that sounds like the audience instead of the brand. That voice becomes harder to protect as teams experiment with AI-generated creative that can be produced at volume and polished to the point of sounding like no one in particular.
AI can already imitate the phone-shot, real-customer look, so the style alone won’t carry much credibility for long. The consumer brand that rethought PR treats the comments under its posts as unpaid market research, watching which ideas people embrace and which they reject before deciding what to make next.
“The more brands can do that, truly listening and picking up on what people are allergic to or really gravitating toward, the better,” she says.
Consumer feedback works as real-time research
Eberl points to Cracker Barrel’s 2025 rebrand as a measure of how fast that signal now arrives. Criticism of the text-only logo spread online within days of its launch, drawing objections from customers and from political figures including President Trump. About a week later, the chain restored its Old Timer logo.
“If anything, brands are at an advantage right now, being able to get that immediate feedback and pivot. Years ago, it took a while until the sales numbers came in, and that’s when you’d realize, maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere,” she says.
Outrage is useful data, but the data still needs an editor. Eberl, whose team at Motion does a lot of packaging work, says a new logo or color palette can provoke complaints before customers warm to it. The challenge is distinguishing resistance to change from a misread of the audience. A viral thread can’t make that call for a brand. That still requires judgment, along with the willingness to sit through the comments while deciding what deserves a response.
PR finds a new role in AI discovery
PR spent years as the line item brands trimmed first. For the consumer brand Eberl works with, chatbots moved it back near the top of the list. “Now with the need to get in LLMs, PR is more important than it has been before, because we’re looking to show up on those chat searches, those OpenAI searches, those open source models,” Eberl says. “Even though everyone would love to be in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc, that need to be appearing in search engines is a trend that’s boomeranged.”
The shift could carry budget consequences. One forecast projects that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027 as more people adopt public LLMs in place of traditional search. Earned coverage gives brands third-party material that AI systems may draw on when generating answers. It’s one part of a broader visibility strategy, and no placement guarantees a citation.
Motion has felt the change in its own pipeline, where some prospective clients now arrive after asking ChatGPT for an agency recommendation instead of searching Google, and the team has turned that lesson outward to help clients improve their chances of appearing in AI-generated answers. For brands chasing the same visibility, Eberl recommends bringing in a specialist who tracks how the models surface information, whether that person works independently or inside an agency. The models move fast, and someone needs to be watching.
“The trend moves all the time, but it’s not going anywhere,” she says.
As creative production gets cheaper, brands must decide where to invest in audience understanding and independent credibility. Audience feedback can help teams decide what to make, while earned media can help a brand surface in AI-driven discovery. Neither works on autopilot. Both require ongoing attention as consumer behavior and search tools change.
“Some of that is a test to learn, and that will always be the case,” Eberl says. “You have to test and evolve and change it, pivot. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.”
