PODCAST: The credibility problem

An investigation into public affairs this month examined CT Group, a lobbying consultancy with a £40 million turnover, co-founded by election strategist Lynton Crosby. The exchange under scrutiny is presented as being between Gavin Stollar, who, it is claimed, heads the firm’s real estate division, and a freelance journalist, over an article about the Building Safety Regulator, introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire.

According to a video that is alleged to be a recording of the exchange, the journalist was offered two options: write the piece with no payment and full editorial independence, or accept one hundred pounds in exchange for the lobbyists present having a say in the finished copy. It is alleged that the piece was intended to argue, on behalf of a property client, that the regulator was worsening the UK’s housing shortage.

Deakin, who co-chairs the CIPR’s Public Affairs Committee, found the sum almost as telling as the offer itself. “If you are going to bribe a journalist, at least offer a decent amount,” he joked. A firm with a forty-million-pound turnover can find more than one hundred pounds down the back of the sofa, which could be interpreted to mean that the payment was never really about the money.

Farnell-Smith, Stone Junction’s brand and communications manager, saw less room for debate on the subject of paying journalists, without offering her opinion on whether the payment or offer had taken place. “If you pay someone, it’s fraud to the reader,” she said. “They think that is independent, well researched journalism, and it isn’t.”

CT Group disputes the account. In a statement, the firm said the events had been “deliberately mischaracterised,” and that it had never engaged or paid the journalist, who it said had pursued the firm for work over more than six months.

Richard Stone was cautious about drawing a firm conclusion between the two versions. “We actually don’t know what’s gone on, and I don’t think anyone does at this point,” he said.

Peter Apps, the freelance journalist at the centre of the recording, has since written about the exchange himself. Lobbying is not inherently a problem, he argued, but “it is critical that this must be transparent.”

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) condemned the practice of paying journalists for editorial publicly. Its chief executive, Alastair McCapra, called it “an attack on the ethics of journalism, public relations,” and said it undermined democracy more broadly.

Deakin pointed out that UK lobbying rules mostly catch agencies working on behalf of external clients. Scrutiny of cases like this one falls mainly to professional bodies such as the CIPR and the PRCA, since statute leaves much of the sector self-policed. A firm that sits outside both bodies answers to neither, which limits how much a statement like McCapra’s can actually change.

The same month brought reporting on a different kind of relabelling, this time from inside PR agencies themselves. Communications executives said clients in low-tech industries, or those running conventional automation rather than generative AI, were increasingly demanding to be pitched to journalists as AI specialists.

Imran Ariff, a media strategist at the London agency Fight or Flight, said brands can “drink their own Kool-Aid” about their own capability, and end up overselling what the technology actually does.

The examples pretty concrete. A shoe company was said to have pivoted toward buying AI processing hardware, and press releases arrived describing AI-powered basketball hoops and AI-powered lasers pitched as protecting women on crowded underground platforms.

One pitch for a handheld scanner used to map building floor plans turned out to be, by one account director’s own description, little more than conventional automation with a new label attached. The same source estimated that roughly half the AI-related stories they send out are ones they would rather not send.

Farnell-Smith has watched this particular costume change before. “We have seen this kind of movement before, years and years ago, where companies were coming out and saying we are disruptive, but actually nothing was changing,” she said.

Deakin framed the wider habit as a question of misrepresentation as much as marketing. Presenting a business as something it is not, even under commercial pressure, carries the same reputational risk whether the subject is technology or anything else.

Stone put the question underneath that trend more directly. “Is there any business value at all in positioning a business as an AI business when it is simply not an AI business?” he asked.

For most of the businesses stretching to make the claim, the honest answer is no. The label borrows credibility it has not earned yet, and borrowed credibility tends to come due.

Fear explains some of that pressure as much as ambition does. A business that stays quiet about AI risks looking like it has been left behind, whatever it actually does with the technology day to day.

But it’s not just describing automation as AI that’s hitting hard, it’s also describing people as subhuman. Standard Chartered’s chief executive, Bill Winters, apologised this month after describing staff facing AI-related job cuts as “lower-value human capital” during a briefing about plans to remove roughly 8,000 back-office roles. “For that I am sorry,” he wrote on LinkedIn a few days later.

A report published this month by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) found that ninety-nine per cent of UK advertisers are now engaging with Gen AI, though only 40 per cent are actively deploying it. The rest describe themselves as still exploring or experimenting, and experimenting has become the single most common answer, at 39 per cent, up from 27 per cent a year earlier.

Farnell-Smith thinks that label says suggests that the measurement process is confused. “I genuinely think that people are saying they’re in the experimental stage because they don’t know how to report or find the results of what they’re doing,” she said.

The report also points to a rung further up the ladder. The share of firms in the more advanced launching, scaling or pioneering phase rose sharply from nine per cent in April 2024 to 41 per cent in July 2025, then held flat through the first half of this year. Just five per cent of marketers expect Gen AI to create new roles or opportunities at all.

Stone made a related point about how loosely the word gets used in the first place. “Everything you do on AI is research in some way,” he said. “You come up with a problem, you use it to solve that problem, and you define it as research.”

Efficiency remains the dominant goal behind most of that activity. 76 per cent of ISBA members now name it as their primary objective for Gen AI, up from 65 per cent last year, while the share prioritising effectiveness fell from 35 per cent to 24 per cent over the same period.

The gap shows up in the results. Firms that lead with effectiveness are twice as likely to report a significant business impact, and almost three quarters see at least a moderate one, against half of the firms chasing efficiency alone.

Nick Louisson, ISBA’s director of agency services, called the space between use and impact “one of the most interesting” parts of the findings. The industry has spent a lot of time asking how AI can make marketing faster, he said, when the more useful question is how it can make marketing better.

Deakin drew the same red line the report does, between using AI for efficiency and using it for effectiveness and noted that marketers already use the technology more than most other functions.

A jar of jam that secretly changes its recipe still says jam on the front. The three stories above turn on the same phrase: what’s on the label survives a lot longer than what’s inside it.

All three stories, along with the disagreements that didn’t make it into this piece, get a proper airing on the latest episode of Stone Junction’s podcast, This is PR, with Richard Stone, Martin Deakin and Lorna Farnell-Smith.

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