The Beckham family's very public falling out — and the shock and awe impact of Brooklyn Beckham's explosive Instagram statement — just shows exactly what can happen when personal relationships and business interests collide.

Brooklyn's allegations were serious: that David and Victoria prioritised "Brand Beckham" over family, attempted to sabotage his marriage and pressured him to relinquish rights to his name.

Whether or not every claim stands up to scrutiny, the damage is done. Anyone who read that post is left wondering – who is telling the truth and when that happens, trust is gone.

Brooklyn's complaint that his parents prioritised the business over his wellbeing strikes at the heart of what makes a personal or family brand work.

Your brand is built on what people believe about you. You can't market aspirational values like family loyalty, while simultaneously being publicly accused of prioritising profit over your own son.

David and Victoria's initial response to what was an obvious family fall-out was silence. The first rule of crisis comms – don't make it worse.

Detail, detail, detail

The detail matters here too. Each new element that emerged — the wedding dress drama, the hijacked first dance, the birthday snub, the unfollowing on Instagram —made resolution harder, not easier.

What might have been resolved in private negotiation became a series of public grievances. The more people know about your internal conflicts, the harder it becomes to move past them and the more ammunition exists for future disputes. And more reputational damage.

Both sides also appear to have tried managing media coverage. Brooklyn directly, David and Victoria through their representatives. This created a kind of narrative arms race, with competing versions of events.

The harder both sides pushed to shape what people believed, the less credible both became. People instinctively sense when they're being managed and they respond by trusting neither party.

What happens next will matter more than what's already been said.

For businesses managing personal or family brands, the lessons are clear. The reputation risk isn't just in what you do — it's in the gap between what you claim to stand for and what you're seen to demonstrate. The Beckham situation shows what happens when that gap becomes public. And it shows that once internal conflict becomes external, you're no longer controlling your brand narrative. Your audience is.

You have to forgive even the most experienced and capable business people when they fail to understand where PR sits in the list of needs for their organisation.

It's something we have to explain time and again in various settings and it's not getting any easier to do because the lines between sales, marketing, advertising and public and media relations continue to blur, mainly due to technology.

Sell, sell, sell

For every commercial organisation everything comes down to selling, when all is said and done. Companies are established with growth as their very reason for being and their directors have a legal duty to work in the best interests of the company to make that happen.

This sets the priority for an organisation formulated this way and every action from that point needs to be a function of achieving profitable sales.

Public relations is absolutely a part of this, but its practitioners regularly find themselves facing demands for their work to tie directly to commercial outcomes.

While this is as it should be, it rarely proves to be as straightforward as it might be for the salesperson or marketer to achieve.

An advertising campaign can be measured either by hard numbers in digital tracking or matching the patterns of phone calls with a new creative campaign going live.

While this can sometimes be the result of PR activity (like a really strong, newsworthy story or a social post or campaign that hits the mark) the public relations toolbox also contains some very powerful tools that need to be used, but are much harder to track and quantify.

Show me the proof!

• Where on the graph does it show the £8m contract won because we engineered the CEO being on a particular panel with the perfect selection of peers and a totally targeted audience?
• How can we attribute that full pipeline of deals to the months of work to create goodwill in the community that made you the perfect partner for all of those similarly civic-minded customers?
• Unless the buyer who calls you because they saw you in the trade magazine tells you so, we'll never know that we just helped land the biggest deal of the year.

These are just a handful of the ways in which PR creates the conditions for the sale and, very often, the kind of work we do is laying the groundwork for the big outcomes that come from deep relationships, powerful evidence of capability and strong links to the community or the industry you're part of.

Creating the conditions for sales

The places a great PR team will put you, the doors they will get you through and the relationships they will create for you can often be the single most transformative activity for growing businesses. They make the difference between going under the radar or being the next most talked about thing.

How to capture and report these things is a constant source of conversation in the PR industry and it's in our own interest to keep finding and implementing as many ways as we can to evidence the impact we make on that all important bottom line.

It is, however, always likely to need enlightened and trusting leaders to understand and know how to interpret the ways in which reputation building is a key support to sales – its just the one with the longest tail.

In the meantime, we'll gladly carry on educating everyone who wants to understand our somewhat dark art and how it can help them achieve that ultimate business aim – growth.

For those who need to reach specific people with their messages (which includes all of our clients) the world is shifting under everyone's feet.

In our experience of the last 20 years, to 'Google' something has been like going to do the 'Hoovering' – it's as synonymous with finding out as that brand was to vacuuming. It feels so normal to say it.

But just like 'Tweeting' your thoughts used to be a thing, that everyday activity is changing right before our eyes, in a jarring way.

Answer engines, not search engines

I don't know about you, but I already turn first to an 'answer engine', rather than a search engine. I go to an AI that is primed to process what I'm asking it, weigh the best sources for an answer and then present me with everything I need to satisfy my query and probably to get on and solve the thing I was stuck on, often in a very useful step-by-step fashion.

If you're not doing that already, you will be soon, I promise – it's just a button away ('AI mode') in Google now. It makes the old Google (and Bing, but who uses that, right?) approach look like something out of the 1980s.

It gets you straight to the point with the (theoretically) best possible answer instead of first having to scroll past the adverts and paid links only to click on the result that had the best SEO instead of the best information. That's the AI future I was looking for.

Be wary of motivations

Of course the risks and rewards intrinsic in this new landscape are huuuuuge. Is the answer you're getting always going to be the best one? Right now, it generally is pretty good, but when everyone cottons on, the battle for those eyeballs and clicks is going to be the new Wild West.

In fact, there's plenty of evidence it's already happening. One expert speaking at an event I attended recently explained about the return of the dreaded white-on-white text on web pages. This is content created to be hidden from human eyes, but readable by machines – a dodgy practice from the bad old days of SEO that's making a return in a bid to spam large language models with false information.

It's amazing how quick humans can be to use good things badly.

The service providers of AI search will need to decide whether they prioritise information quality over income (or even ideology). Nothing is more certain than that some will favour the latter – either of them.

This is the new reality. The question business owners have to ask themselves is how they are going to address it?

Authenticity is everything now

We have strategies, research and understanding of how to make our clients the trusted sources that will be taken seriously and more likely to be referenced by these 'answer engines', but it's going to take a pivot in the production and sharing of information. Not everyone will be able to take part because they are going to need authority and recognition of themselves as experts in order to be valued in this new ecosystem.

That almost feels strange to say when we know that AI can very easily just make things up – "hallucination" in the optimistic parlance of San Francisco technologists…

We'll go into this more in future posts (sign up to our newsletter below if you want us to keep you in the loop on our learnings in this and related areas).

But, if you thought getting ranked on the first page of Google was hard, being one of a handful of trusted sources for an AI answer engine that wants its output to be credible is going to be gold dust.

You'd better be top of your game and, crucially, ready to prove it, if you don't want to vanish from sight as the tectonic search plates shift.

Knowing where to turn to capitalise on a technical landscape that’s evolving at breakneck speed is enough to send your head into a spin.

One of my responsibilities at Be Bold Media is managing our tech stack. There are fundamental bits of software that underpin the core of our work — like the project management platform I introduced to groans many years ago, which I’d now be pulled apart for removing.

Over time, we’ve added apps to monitor resources, collate and report on data, manage social content, and even automate elements of bookkeeping (though you still can’t beat an excellent human bookkeeper — and we have one of those!).

AI tools: promise and peril

The capabilities emerging in the AI era are on another level — or at least they will be. This isn’t another commentary on AI hype, but more of a cautionary tale.

We’re all in favour of embracing tools, especially when they’re focused on doing a particular job well. We’re not yet in an era where you can ask an AI to do a general task and expect expert-level results across the board. Yet.

While we try to figure out what’s genuinely useful and what’s just another marketing ploy — or an excuse to mark up costs by adding ‘AI’ to a product name — we’re heading into a major shake-out.

The shake-out begins

Lots of clever services have emerged, right at the frontier of what’s possible. Some filled gaps that the bigger, more cumbersome (and in an AI world, that’s a relative term!) players couldn’t yet plug with confidence. Others were trying to be the next Microsoft or OpenAI, racing for first-mover advantage.

Now — and it feels like this has only started in the last few weeks — we’re seeing the leading edge of consolidation. My inbox is filling with “the next stage in our journey” emails from startups acquired by big players who don’t have time to wait for their own developers to build new products.

At the other end of the spectrum are the plucky adventurers whose domain names now deliver only a 404 error because the money or enthusiasm ran out.

The illusion of easy innovation

Great ideas emerge looking like the next big thing, only for someone else to come up with an even better alternative within days.

And while we’re heading into this new wild frontier, we need to be on the lookout for emperors in new clothes. The ability to build a professional-looking product that solves an immediate problem — and launch it in days rather than months or years — is now in far more people’s hands.

With the right tools, you can whip up a beautiful-looking interface backed by full coding and databases, even if you’re not a designer, developer or DB admin. You can ostensibly do things that each of those professionals would have taken years to perfect.

I know because I’ve done it. A proof of concept and a working minimum viable product can be achieved in a matter of hours. You can link it to a payment system (even if you’ve never done that before) and be taking money from people in a jiffy for something that, on the surface, does what you’ve told them it will do.

Risks for SMEs without IT support

However, as a customer, that doesn’t make the thing you’ve just paid for a guaranteed long-term bet. When it tries to scale — without expertise and experience behind it — it could very well break. It might not be built on best security practices or protect your data like an enterprise-grade product would.

It could solve one problem today, only to give you the biggest headache of your life tomorrow. It might have been built by a 14-year-old with a £25-a-month budget.

Large organisations with IT teams won’t face this problem. They have robust policies, expert leadership and processes for assessing suppliers and doing due diligence.

But SMEs — running on tight budgets and small teams, often without a dedicated IT function — might be tempted by the next great thing, only to find it wasn’t ready for prime time and has repercussions for them, their staff and, crucially, their customers.

A cautious path forward

The answer? Ease your way into the brave new world. Use suppliers you recognise until the newcomers become recognised themselves.

It’s not very sexy. It’s not “move fast and break things”. But that’s not where most of us non-billionaires are in our business journey.

Final thoughts: stay sharp, stay safe

This is still wild west territory when it comes to the change AI is bringing — and the cowboys are roaming the land.

Few businesses can afford to ignore this shift, because it will change everything. But keeping a sharp eye out for the charlatans while you dip your toes into the possibilities will stand you in good stead to keep up, stay safe — and avoid having to keep your head on a swivel for the next few years.

Four client catch-ups in one day today at UK Metals Expo – The Leading Event for the Entire Metals Supply Chain!

Loved Thomas Papageorgiou’s straight-forward take on why we need to look beyond definitions for ‘green steel’ if we’re going to have a truly sustainable metals sector.

Stomana Industry and Metal Agencies Ltd leading the way here with impactful R&D and great to catch up briefly with George Drakos and Gautam Kapoor too!

Bridgnorth Aluminium Ltd’s Adrian Musgrave joined Nadine Bloxsome’s Aluminium Federation (ALFED) panel as a
packed audience heard about its new Aluminium Alliance.

As Adrian said, there’s only one aluminium rolling mill left in the UK and only one smelter – now is absolutely the time the sector needs to come together to make its case. Some excellent input from Dr Mark Jones, Dr. Dinesh Thirunavukkarasu and Airbus’ Ian Jeffries.

Did manage to sort a bossy photocall with the Bridgnorth team and good to see the company had again brought their apprentices to the expo – great chance for them to learn about the industry they’re starting out in.

Jennifer Hughes brought real world insight into a great discussion on automation at the innovation theatre, recognising the importance Transicon Limited places ROI for metals sector companies (and other businesses!) Good advice from Mark Weymouth🏭📈 and Mike Wilson too – start small and de-risk the process.

And last, but absolutely not least, an impromptu cuppa with our oldest (meant in a nice way Wayne Carter and Richard Hilton 😉) client, Fabweld Steel Products Ltd.

FSP invested in a partnership with Be Bold Media weeks after we launched. Now nearly 15 years later, we’re still working together which I hope is testament to them and us!

Biggest take-away for me today? Collaboration and partnerships are important. The relationships behind them even more so.

I think the communications industry must be rubbish at communicating.

What else could be the explanation for so many leaders of UK SMEs still seeing communications strategy as something you do only when you can afford it or at certain inflection points for your organisation?

Strategic communicators are often the last ones allowed into the boardroom and the first ones out of the door when times get tough.

Still so often the conversation around the communications function in organisations of all types is around:

• how little can we get away with spending? OR
• who can we give the job to in addition to their main duties? OR
• if we can't directly measure it, do we need it?

Enlightened business leaders usually get it. Often they're the best trained ones who've done the professional learning about what is and is not crucial to business growth.

Encouragingly, one of my colleagues came back from a meeting recently in which a senior advisor from another industry told the shared client that they absolutely had to have us in the room from the start and through every detail of a major project that was getting under way. That's hugely refreshing, because too often practitioners in our field just a brief after the decisions are made – and then it's too late for us to shape them to be successful in the first place.

What should the PR industry do?

The folks who struggle to value the comms function tend to be, in my now quite extensive experience, those who are subject matter experts and can't really grasp another specialist subject that is outside their remit or experience. Not universally, but more often than not.

These are the people our own industry should be working on. The trouble is we're not collectively good at advocating for ourselves. We talk to each other about techniques and technologies (we're actually quite good at sharing internally) but we don't have an industry-wide approach to educating other business leaders on why communicating effectively and strategically is essential at every stage of the life of their business.

Sales needs PR too

When I say to some that communications is everything, because without a position and a message you don't have an audience to sell to, they will point to their sales function as the crucial bit.

I'll pull a bit more hair out before delivering my (often sceptically received) riposte that those sales people need more to work with than just trying to convince people that your product or service is the cheapest/newest/fastest.

How many sales are you missing by not having:
– your prospects warmed up through prior knowledge of your brand?
– positive name recognition?
– empathy among like-minded firms?
– a strong positioning in the community?
– a body of trusted, third-party coverage of you?

Communications is not sales. Doesn't want to be. Never will be. But your sales people will always thank you for effective comms which make their job easier and their success rate (and maybe bonuses…) higher.

The cost of undervaluing comms

The positives also come from avoiding the negatives. Great communicators spot and fix (or at least polish) your weaknesses and then build secure foundations that you will see the benefits of over years, not weeks or months, and through trends and downturns and other setbacks.

So my plea, in a bid to do my small part in fixing my industry's self-communication problem, is to encourage business owners and managers to take a few minutes to think about:
– how they're perceived by their customers, staff (internal communications really matters) and suppliers
– whether they're making the most of the genuine strengths of their business
– whether they're getting the credit for their authenticity, care for their people and community-mindedness

The only business function that can change and improve these things is expertly curated communication. Nothing else. That's not nice to have – it's essential.

Tell-tale signs that your precious time is being taken up by AI-generated LinkedIn posts
which are pretending to be 'thought leadership' content,
masquerading as adding value to your network,
based on a set of pre-defined key messages,
to achieve commercial aims
as part of a marketing strategy:

📷 Use of a s**t stock image
‼️ Oxford commas
😡 A bit of an opinion but not enough to offend
#️⃣ #️⃣ Overuse of hashtags (best practice is 3-5 but if using for reach, don't bother as it doesn't work like that)
#️⃣ Two word hashtags with capital letters in the middle hashtag#giveAway
🚀 Appropriate emoji to poster's company
📉 Engagement and impressions will be okay and then really poor

I've not posted on here for a while as increasingly I find I'm fighting against a swathe of AI rubbish. If you want to build profile and brand, be human.

Be personable. Be authentic.

People do business with people.

Most people don't like to have their time wasted reading absolute guff.

And no-one wants to do business with time-wasters.

And for clarity, absolutely we use AI at Be Bold Media. We would be stupid not to embrace the opportunity it brings and our business is growing on the back of it.

But using it for content to build personal reach which converts into relationship building? Good luck and keep an eye on the metrics.

If you've a real, non-AI view, on what you're seeing on the feed, shout up.

Real video of real me attempting to drink real wine from something traditional I can't remember the name of, in Barcelona last month for the algorithm.

(With no apology to those fed up with the Oxford comma debate or the personal video content on what they deem should be a protected professional LinkedIn platform 😉 ).

One of the greatest pleasures in my job is to support companies and organisations run by people I really like.

Not every business owner can say that. Quite simply, some might not know all their customers or their clients. Or want to!

But we do. At Be Bold Media, we get to know them really well.

It's what makes the PR partnership work.

When you get under the skin of a business and get to know and like the people running them, it's a privilege. It absolutely drives us to do better and better to get the results we know they deserve.

So with that in mind, meet the fab Heidi Vaughan and Joe Collison from CES.

Lovely people with a great team – formerly Collison Electrical Services but now up and running with their successful hashtag#poweredbyces brand, fast becoming the go-to specialist for commercial-scale solar PV/renewable projects in this region and way beyond.

For my construction/built environment network, CES's ethical stance, accreditations, apprenticeships and hashtag#goodbusiness approach, make them a perfect partner for public sector projects where social value in the supply chain counts.

For my manufacturing contacts, many of whom are accessing funding support through UKSPF schemes such as the Business Energy Advice Service programme, to deliver on net zero ambitions – CES also have innovative solutions to grid capacity issues and battery storage.

There's a link in the comments to some CES case studies so you can see their impressive projects, technical know-how and the impact they are delivering for their own clients.

Thanks for the breakfast meeting Heidi and Joe, Sophie Savage and I very much enjoyed the catch-up and the planning ahead. (And all the holiday, dogs, branded baby-gro chat too.)

Fear can cause people to react in some funny ways — almost always negative.

There are huge question marks over artificial intelligence (AI):

• How clever will it become?
• Is it going to be dangerous?
• Is it just the latest tech flash in the pan?

For some, these questions boil down to:

• How is it going to harm me?
• How on earth am I going to keep up?
• Is it even worth my time to go more deeply into it?

But here’s the one thing we can say with absolute certainty: **this genie is out of the bottle**. And putting your head in the sand is going to hurt you — badly.

The communications industry must lead, not lag

Many in our business of strategic communications are understandably wary of the downsides. But there are also a growing number who are fully embracing the possibilities — or at least dabbling in how they might harness AI tools for PR, media relations and content creation.

I was horrified recently by a comment from someone in our industry who posted in the most disparaging terms about the current capabilities of AI — as if trying to wish it away. All they succeeded in doing was highlighting their absolute terror at becoming obsolete.

To be fair, this person wasn’t the principal of their business, so they may have less control over their current situation. But their attitude will only speed their irrelevance to the industry if it doesn’t become more enlightened.

AI isn’t replacing us — it’s enhancing us

Can AI do our job right now? No, not by a long margin. But that’s not to say it isn’t already transforming our profession.

The AI-backed tools we’re using at Be Bold are making us better, faster, more creative and more valuable to our clients than ever before. And no — that doesn’t mean flooding channels with AI-generated content. Quite the opposite, in fact (but more on that another time).

How we’re using AI at Be Bold

We’re sharing what we learn with our clients because we work with businesses that are switched on to growth. They know that staying still is not an option — whether they move forward at pace or with caution depends on their circumstances, but forward is the only direction.

We’re all in with AI. Every day, we’re:

• Pushing the boundaries of what it can do
• Testing new models and tools
• Training and refining them
• Educating our team and our clients

This technology is going to change your life. It probably already has — even if you can’t see it yet.

Advice for business leaders and communicators

My advice? Don’t panic and hide. But equally, don’t dive in without taking the time to properly understand what you’re dealing with.

Open your mind. Educate yourself. Start experimenting — even if it’s just a little.

Because this is only going in one direction.

As the popular (and very accurate) phrase goes: AI is currently the worst it’s ever going to be.

Over to you

I’d love to hear from others in the communications industry. Are you embracing AI? Dabbling? Avoiding it altogether?

The people I’ve been in the room with lately seem to be all-in — but maybe that’s because we’re self-selecting as forward-lookers…