PR Week: LIV Golf tees up pressing FARA questions for agencies

Caracal Founder + Chief Communications Strategist speaks with Ewan Larkin + PRWeek on how comms pros must define their agreements with foreign-owned clients as geopolitics + sports increasingly intertwine.

• Vendors must recognize geopolitics' increasing place in sports and devote resources to monitoring relevant factors, says Marc Ross, chief communications strategist at geopolitical business comms firm Caracal.

• “Sports is now becoming another battlefield for geopolitics, communications, and human rights. It’s no longer just about putting the ball in the back of the net, there are new stakeholders involved,” he adds.

• “Does any sports team or league that has foreign investors need to register?” Ross asks, referencing teams with foreign ownership such as the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets or English soccer team Manchester City. “As a communicator or a big PR firm, do I take these clients? There’s no guidance. It’s kind of the Wild West.”

Full article here.

Keynote: How to be a world-class geopolitical business communicator

Here is the audio and slide deck from my keynote presentation at the Virginia Leaders in Export Trade (VALET) spring meeting hosted by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.

My goal for this keynote was for attendees to understand how to capture information, utilize communications frameworks, and engage the media and other essential stakeholders, focusing on communications at the intersection of geopolitics and commerce.

VALET is a two-year international business acceleration program.

This award-winning program offers a powerful combination of capital resources provided by the Commonwealth of Virginia and professional services from expert private sector partners.

VALET program benefits include executive training, international sales plan development, educational events, and customized research.

The VALET program generates an average increase in international sales of 59% for participating companies and has helped over 350 Virginia companies since its inception.

-Marc

FT: Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’

A worthy article to read + insights I found compelling:

+ So if he had to invent a different term for artificial intelligence, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics

+ “There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

+ Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.”

+ "...the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”

Read the full article here.

-Marc