The Research PR Couldn’t Afford Until AI – with Rich Gallagher

Somewhere along the way, PR research came to mean a survey reverse-engineered to confirm whatever the client had already decided to say. Real research, the slow and expensive kind, stayed with the academics, because nobody on the agency or client side had the hours. So what happens when the cost of doing it right collapses?

In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Rich Gallagher, Head of Comms Innovation at Brands2Life, whose answer to that question was to write the code himself. Each of his research reports started as something close to a dare — watch a month of business television, read every business-section story in three national papers, listen to a year of back catalog across 96 podcasts — and each came back with a number worth having, like the 12% of those shows actually built for the privately held companies his clients run.

That method is the easy part to admire and the wrong part to copy, and the conversation goes well past it. Rich and Dan get into why curiosity has always been the one non-negotiable trait in a good PR person, and why for the first time there’s something like a metric for it. They work through The Rise of Indie Journalism, Rich’s study of 32 tech journalists who walked away from traditional mastheads and took their audiences with them. They dig into why generative engine optimization is quietly making niche trade coverage more valuable than a one-line mention in a marquee outlet, and what media relations turns into when it stops being a tier-one scavenger hunt. Rich also shares the app his team built to score World Cup managers on how hard they lean on clichés, and the uncomfortable pattern it surfaced about losing coaches.

Listen in and hear about…

• Making AI watch a month of business television through closed captions
• The 96-show podcast audit and why only 12% were worth a pitch
• The Rise of Indie Journalism: 32 reporters, portable audiences, and the opportunity most brands are ignoring
• Why curiosity finally has something resembling a measurement
• How GEO is lifting niche and vertical media over marquee one-liners
• What clichés in a post-match press conference reveal about crisis response

Notable Quotes from Rich Gallagher

“You watch every single hour of market-day television on the three major business broadcast networks for a month? Like, no, of course not. That’s like a Geneva Convention violation to force someone to do that. But now we have tools. You can scrape the closed caption for the hearing impaired and effectively make the AI watch the show.” [07:16 → 08:01]

“The challenge is you can’t read everything all the time. But what if you could? And now that you have AI, you can. We can analyze all these things at a scale that doesn’t exist even inside a very big agency, where you can not only make sure you’re reading every single business section story that runs that quarter, but reading it with the same eyes.” [33:06 → 33:47]

“The most important thing for a successful PR person is curiosity. Really being genuinely interested in uncovering what’s special about what your clients do. And it’s kind of funny, because there’s never really been a good metric for curiosity, and now we have it.” [40:38 → 41:26]

“I don’t necessarily subscribe to ‘media relations is dead.’ But it kind of goes into a chrysalis and emerges as a beautiful butterfly every couple of years.” [52:46 → 53:27]

Resources and Links

Dan Nestle

• Lilypath | Website
• The Trending Communicator | Website
• Communications Trends from Trending Communicators | Dan Nestle’s Substack
• Dan Nestle | LinkedIn

Rich Gallagher

• Brands2Life | Website
• Rich Gallagher | LinkedIn
• Princeton Narrative Lab | Website
• Expected Cliche Tracker | Website

The Brands2Life Research Reports

• The Tech Podcast Opportunity for Privately Held Companies
• Breaking Through in Broadcast
• The Rise of Indie Journalism

Timestamps

0:00 Intro: real research and its counterfeit cousin

2:33 Two nerds, two girl dads, one Princeton zip code

4:16 The ADP employment report and data a company already had

5:33 Moat, ad spend, and the run-up to 2016

7:16 “Make the AI watch the show” — Breaking Through in Broadcast

10:51 Predictive analytics the hard way: 150 hours, then 30 seconds

13:04 Why the AI policy came before the research

15:16 Three newspapers, three paywalls, three automations

15:57 Testing whether the AI actually read it

17:28 Podcast transcripts and the wild west of captions

19:56 Claude Code, Cowork, and what changed

22:53 Thirty sub-agents that never lose their place

26:06 Where deep research helps and where it stops

29:09 The Tech Podcast Opportunity: 96 shows and the 12% that mattered

31:32 Where the questions come from in the first place

38:13 The human-in-the-loop sandwich

40:38 Curiosity as the differentiator — and finally a metric

43:19 The Rise of Indie Journalism: Substack, Ghost, and Beehiiv

46:20 Velvet Underground economics and portable audiences

49:00 Media relations, dying or molting

55:27 Why GEO makes vertical media solid gold

59:17 Authority when the entity is a person, not a website

1:01:46 The cliché tracker, hot IPO summer, and what’s next

1:05:04 Where to find Rich

(Notes co-created by Human Dan,Claude,Fireflies, andRiverside)

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