This week on EthicalVoices, Martina Quinn, the CEO of Alice PR and co-chair of the Ethics Board to the International Communications Consultancy Organization discusses:
- Can PR agencies embrace AI without compromising their values or contributing to the very problems they are trying to solve?
- What happens to trust in PR when unethical practitioners ignore professional standards and the entire industry gets blamed for their behavior?
- How to bring your whole team into AI decisions instead of imposing a strategy from the top down.
- Three principles for making hard ethical calls when the answer isn’t black and white
Why don’t you tell us more about yourself and your career?
I am from Ireland, as people can tell from my accent. I grew up on a farm in rural Ireland in Tipperary, in the middle of the country. I moved to Dublin for university, and I’ve lived in Dublin pretty much consistently ever since.
I didn’t start out in PR. I started out studying journalism, and that’s what my degree is in. I worked as a freelance journalist for a couple of years after graduating from university. I also worked with one of the biggest political parties in Ireland in an internal communications role. Then I found myself as communications manager in a charity and I loved that.
At the time I probably had a fairly cynical view of PR. I didn’t know a lot about the industry and like many people still do, I associated it a little bit with spin and with the sort of negative side of PR. But I realized when I was working in a charity that there were actually PR agencies out there that did really interesting work that really spoke to what I liked doing myself and that were focused on current affairs and seeking progressive change in society.
I began working in an agency like that, and I was there for nearly a decade. Then in 2015, I left, and I set up Alice. At Alice, we are a strategic communications agency, and we specialize in working with purpose-driven clients. Our clients tend to fall into three categories. Public sector and government agencies, charities, and then the third category is membership or representative bodies.
We do very little work with commercial clients. We really only work with commercial clients if it’s purpose driven. We work throughout Ireland, so Ireland North and South. We do a good bit of work in the UK and a small bit of work internationally. We have a team of just over 20 people now and our team is spread across Dublin, Belfast, the UK, and we’ve one colleague even based in Melbourne, Australia.
Within Ireland, what we’re known for is our work on big social justice campaigns on the progressive side of things. We worked on the milestone abortion referendum campaign here in our early years in Alice. We do a lot of work with the LGBTQ+ sector. We’ve managed a big gender equality campaign for several years.
We do lots of work on issues like anti-racism and integration and climate action. We’re currently working internationally on two major contracts that are focused on slavery reparations for the Caribbean region. We also do corporate work, but we’re probably not as known for that. But as I said, we work with membership representative bodies, so we work quite often with IBEC, which is the main business lobby group here in Ireland.
We work with the Construction Industry Federation. We work with an initiative called Ireland for Law, which is a government-backed initiative to promote Ireland as a leading destination for international legal services. We have a very nice mix of clients and nice variety in our work. I’ve gotten involved in more recent years in the International Communications Consultancy Organization.
I was the chair of the Public Relations Consultants Association here in Ireland for a few years, and as part of that role, I joined the board of ICCO, and I’m still on the board of ICCO representing Ireland. Earlier this year, they asked me to become co-chair of their ethics board, which has been a huge honor, and we’re currently in the midst of reinvigorating that board and setting out a new program of work for it.
What is the most difficult ethical challenge you ever confronted?
The most difficult ethical decision I’ve ever had to make has probably more to do with my business model and how we run Alice rather than with any individual client.
That’s not to say there haven’t been ethical dilemmas with clients. But, I set up Alice with a very clear focus, so we exist to work with organizations that are doing good in the world, that are trying to change the world in a positive way. So ethics and purpose aren’t add-ons for us – they’re at the very core of our business model, and we’re quite selective about who we work with. Not every organization that approaches us will meet those criteria. But for the ones that do, it’s brilliant. It means we get to work with really committed and inspiring clients who are doing brilliant work in Ireland and further afield.
But the sort of hardcore financial reality of that is that it also means that often our clients aren’t particularly rich. Charities and government agencies aren’t renowned for having massive budgets to spend on PR. And the charity sector in particular, tends to operate on shoestring budgets, and communications isn’t often a priority for service-driven organizations.
So that’s one side of the coin at Alice. On the other side of the coin, due to my own personal ethics and values, I believe it is essential to pay people fairly and to offer good working conditions and to ensure people have flexibility and freedom, that they can balance their work lives easily with their home life.
So we have a good pension program for our employees. We offer generous sick leave and holiday entitlements, and all of that is hugely important to me. But I think the dilemma that I have faced consistently since I started the company is how do we keep that focus on our core client base and purpose, but also not become hypocrites, that we’re not offering a good working environment for our own team and our own employees.
How do we earn enough money to make sure that we are profitable and paying and treating our employees really well? I wouldn’t say I’ve quite resolved that. It’s an ongoing challenge for the company and it’s something we talk about quite openly across the team as well, that we sometimes have debates or sometimes there’s a very juicy client dangled in front of us where you think, “Oh, is this when we sell out and all our financial problems are solved?” But so far we’ve resisted that temptation.
Where I work now (C+C) is also 100% purpose driven. I was at big multinational firms, and today I’m sleeping a whole lot better at night. We pay our folks a competitive wage, but they’re also gonna be able to look back with pride at what they do.
It actually makes recruitment a little bit easier because I think people come to us because they have a similar mindset and outlook on life, so everybody on the team sure, we all want a decent standard of living, but everybody on the team is motivated by something other than just financial reward.
What do you personally see as the key ethics challenge for today and tomorrow?
Across the communications industry more broadly, for me the biggest challenges ethically all come back to big tech. You can’t have any conversation about ethics these days without talking about generative AI and the impact that’s having on PR and on communications.
But I think what’s interesting there is it’s impacting both how we run our businesses, how agencies operate, and how our employees work. But also it’s impacting the practice of PR because it’s having a huge impact on how people consume information and how information is produced.
The growing use of generative AI has massive ethical considerations. It’s not good for the environment, it’s not really good for our brains, for the future of human creativity. It could wreak havoc in the future society if we see massive labor force layoffs.
The models have been built by stealing the work of creatives down through the years and most of the companies behind them have really terrible track records on ethics. So I have been really grappling with how we keep pace as an agency and as a business so that, we don’t fall behind competitively or even just in terms of what makes sense.
How do we do so in a way that remains true to all of our values? Any conversation about big tech and about technological changes in communications in the past 20 years, you can’t talk about that and not think about misinformation and disinformation and how polluted our information ecosystem has become.
And again, linked to that is plummeting levels of public trust and the fact that a lot of people now just don’t trust the traditional institutions of the media or government or even NGOs and charities. And I think as a PR professional, one of the things I struggle with a bit is that we’re part of the problem.
We’re using these tools every day. I feel a little bit like we have no choice sometimes but to use the tools while being really conscious of their flaws and being able to critique them. But we’re also relying on these flawed platforms to reach and to communicate with the audiences that we need to reach.
I am not a fan of social media. It enrages me that the companies running social media platforms have been allowed to do some of the stuff that they’ve done, where they’re publishing content to young people that is undeniably harmful. They’re facilitating sexual exploitation and violence, they’re manipulating news, they’re manipulating election results in some cases.
It is shocking that they can do those things with impunity. It makes me really angry, but at the same time, I’m using social media every day myself, not just in my work, in a personal capacity as well. So I definitely struggle with the sort of inherent hypocrisy there and also the fact that, I can’t imagine running a PR agency now without having to engage with that whole infrastructure.
How would it work? It’s like pretending the media don’t exist full stop. We have to deal with them, but it doesn’t sit very comfortably with me.
The things you highlight are things that concern me too. I’ve got some guidance coming out soon on how to balance the environmental impact of AI, because that’s one of the big challenges, as you mentioned.
But I also think, I’m such a pro-tech person, but disinformation, misinformation scare the heck out of me because the ability for people to make effective deep fakes and attack- so many companies still don’t have deep fakes as part of their crisis planning.
I think they need to.
In our client base, we’re also seeing the power of AI tools to really disrupt the work of progressive organizations, so particularly for our clients, say, in the LGBT sector or in migrant rights organizations where before, they always dealt in contentious issues and in a contested space, but now their opponents can use AI to, engineer and pile on in little to no time, and their teams get sucked into dealing with these sort of manufactured crises. So, there’s a really big impact for, I think, for civil society and for democracy at a much broader scale.
You mentioned one of the challenges you have is balancing the AI with realizing who you’re working with you may not like, but you need the benefits. What’s your counsel to organizations on how they should think about balancing their use of AI?
What we’ve tried to do internally in Alice, and it’s the same advice that I’m giving to clients, is to have honest conversations about it. Rather than just wholescale introducing, overnight here’s our AI adoption strategy, and here’s a whole suite of new tools and working processes for you all to adopt.
Instead, we’re teasing it out as a team. We started from an ethics standpoint. Actually, the very first group session we did on looking at how to use AI analysis was focused on the ethics behind it, and what were our comfort levels knowing what we know about the ethical question marks, so I’m encouraging clients to do the same. Don’t impose it upon your teams until they’ve had an opportunity to raise the questions themselves, and then collaboratively come to a point where it’s like, okay, we know it’s not good environmentally, but here’s how we manage that or how we offset it.
In Alice, thankfully, we all reached agreement on this very quickly and unanimously, we don’t want AI search to be our default. We don’t want to get so lazy that for the most basic things you’re using an AI search tool instead of just asking one of your colleagues or picking up a book and finding the answer or Googling it.
So, it’s to try and use it selectively to try and use it in ways that make sense for the business and for our bottom line, and that also do the least harm and give the best results to our clients. That’s a constantly moving test. We’re still working it out.
We just had a lunch and learn earlier this week helping people understand we had a good discussion of environmental impacts and what we as an agency are doing to mitigate them, what they can do, and it’s helping understand that.
But, as we’re talking about this and AI and ethics being so important, I was a little bit disappointed when I saw the ICCO report that only 84% of PR pros think the ethical adoption and use of AI is important. That’s still 16% of people that aren’t saying it’s important.
I know. But I feel like this about everything with ethics, and I’d say some colleagues are sick of hearing me go on about it.
You want to see 100% for all of those types of questions, Ethical practice is so crucial in our industry. We’re starting from a low base because people tend to be cynical about PR when they don’t know the industry, and they don’t know the commitment of professionals within it. So, if you do have one or two rogue agencies here or in any market, it really, it undermines credibility for all of us.
We’ve lived that in Ireland. We have a former politician who became a a sort of high-profile shock jock type broadcaster and he’s now doing PR consultancy. He was embroiled in really negative headlines recently because he was simultaneously advising election candidates on two different sides of an election.
His practice of communications was all not in keeping with best ethical standards, let’s say. That’s why public think PR is a dirty business. And, he’s not somebody who has ever engaged in any of the professional PR networking or accreditation opportunities that exist, but our industry gets tarnished as a result of one individual’s behavior.
Is there anything interesting in the ICCO report you wanted to highlight?
The main focus of my own involvement with ICCO at the moment is to get the ICCO ethics board up and running.
It has existed in different guises down through the years, but its activities had lulled a little bit in the past couple of years. So I am chairing the board with another woman, Shivani Gupta, who’s based in India. We just had our first meeting of the new membership in the past week, which was really exciting.
But we’re still looking for other members, and in particular, one of the things we want is to have a really good regional balance. We’re skewing a bit too Europe heavy at the moment. We have a good cross-section of European countries represented, but we’d like to see more there from Africa, from Asia, and from North America.
Our focus is to bring ethics more to life and to make it something more tangible for the members of ICCO and for the wider PR industry. It’s not just a tick box thing that you say, “Yeah, sure, we’re committed to ethics.” It’s more how can we live and breathe that and make it tangible for clients to really be able to distinguish if it matters to them what’s an ethical company and what’s not, or what’s an ethical practitioner and what’s not.
Also for younger career professionals coming up through the industry, that they can really see what does a ethical practice look like and what does it not. One of the points I wanted to make is in the context of my own career, I’ve been really privileged, because when you’re working with charities and public sector organizations, most of the time you have a good head start.
No matter what industry you’re in we all need to be operating to the highest ethical standards and building trust in our own profession, because trust is such a vulnerable commodity these days.
I talk about training ethical mind, and I love hearing what you are doing. It’s having the discussions. I love what ICCO is doing because the more you talk about it, the better trained you are, the more your clients know what to think, the more your staff knows what to think. It needs to be an ongoing conversation.
That’s why I say a lot of times I hate ethics month, because it makes ethics one month a year. Ethics is every day.
What is the best piece of ethics advice you were ever given?
I was mulling all of this over before talking to you today, and I was trying to think, have I gotten direct pieces of ethics advice? I’m sure I have, but, I couldn’t recall any specific instances. Instead, I think there’s a few basic principles that I try to remind myself of consistently.
These have obviously been taught to me along the way somewhere, but I can’t pinpoint the individuals.
At the most basic level, tell the truth and be transparent. Holding information back is really no different to lying. I don’t just advise my clients in that regard, I try to live that within my own business, that we have a very open and transparent and accountable culture for the team at all levels.
The other principle that I think always applies around ethics is that it’s very rarely black or white. That you can’t be absolutist in most scenarios. That usually there’s more than one side to the story or to the issue in question or multiple ways of approaching it in the right way.
Everybody has their own personal values feeding into the ethical decisions that they make as well. So what I feel is the right response in one scenario might be different to what you feel is the right response, might be different to what somebody else thinks. And I think we have to be willing to tease that out and potentially to compromise sometimes, or certainly to put ourselves in others’ shoes and be willing to see it from multiple different perspectives.
The last principle that I always employ myself and I’d encourage others to do the same, is to trust your gut. I feel that if something isn’t making you feel good or if it’s giving you a bit of an icky feeling or keeping you awake at night, that probably means it’s not compatible with your own values and with your own ethics.
Certainly any clients that brought me into that sort of territory, the first warning signs were just like that little twinge in your tummy that tells you, “Ugh, there’s something about this that isn’t making me feel comfortable.” Ultimately those engagements have ended up with me realizing this client isn’t the right fit for me or I’m not the right PR person for them,
I think looking at other people’s points of view is so essential. We also need to help people realize that there could be a very ethical people coming to very different conclusions. And then how do you understand what’s motivating them so you can impact that? It’s not that it’s the good guys and the bad guys. It could be three good guys all wanting to do different things for different reasons.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you wanted to highlight?
Just my constant mantra, please behave ethically to all of our clients. Let’s all just be good and nice and kind and make the world a bit better than we found it.
Listen to the full interview, with bonus content, here:
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