The media landscape is changing. This company is injecting AI into the conversation
The media landscape is changing. This company is injecting AI into the conversation
Dazzle is an AI-based PR chatbot to help teams identify journalists, podcasters, and media outlets to tell the best stories.
Media outlets' prestige and authority on news and information is changing, with journalists and PR professionals scrambling to tell the best stories to the most relevant audiences. As content consumption continues to fragment and audiences divide along ideological or technological lines, new tools are developing to change the rules of the rat race.
One such company is Dazzle, co-founded by public relations veteran Ayelet Noff, which provides PR professionals with the information they need to craft personalized pitches and foster meaningful relationships. Relying on various LLM models and search engines, PR professionals can now find timely and accurate results and end the archaic practice of manmade data inputting into Excel spreadsheets with outdated information.
“In the last few years, I’ve seen AI disrupting so many other industries in such significant ways. And yet in the PR industry, it felt like we remained stagnant,” said Noff, who is also the CEO and Founder of the PR agency SlicedBrand. “We weren't being innovative… What frustrated me was the fact that I saw my team spending hours, if not days or weeks, creating a media list. I feel that in an age where the distribution channels we have are increasing and where we have more podcasts and more publications, it's just going to become worse.”
Noff is and is herself a contributor to publications such as TechCrunch, Cointelegraph, Nasdaq, Forbes, and Mashable. She was also the host of 'Startups Around the World' on Israel’s i24 News Channel. Dazzle was technically founded in 2022 but is going live for professionals now.
In recent years companies and clients have been seeking ways to spread their message outside of the pathways of traditional journalism. Low-budget podcasters can carry as much weight as large corporations when it comes to conveying a message or telling a story - so much so that even American presidential candidates are expected to enter the space. In addition to that, many journalists are operating independent platforms such as Substack or X to make sure their reporting is distributed outside of traditional media outlets.
Dazzle operates in the space to use AI not as a content generation tool but as a research assistant to make sure that PR placements are as accurate as possible and in front of the right eyes and eyes.
“The number of channels that you are going to have to monitor and keep abreast of because is so many because journalists are just taking their own direction and starting their own thing as opposed to centralized publications,” Noff added, citing how the appeal of the coveted TechCrunch placement has dwindled in recent years. “I think moving forward, definitely in PR, we need to be looking at different distribution channels and targeted channels - not necessarily the ones that have the most traffic, but the ones that are most targeted for your target audience.”
Dazzle is priced at $175 per month for an annual subscription granting access to Dazz, an AI-powered chat assistant, journalist profiles, smart media lists, and instant recommendations. It is not backed by any investor to avoid having a VC ‘come in and disrupt the vision’. The hope is that with the use of AI, PR professionals can spend less time building lists and more time fostering relationships with relevant journalists and content creators. That way, they can remain one step ahead of the ever-changing media landscape.
“I do think that there needs to be some sort of correction in the relations between journalists and PR pros, and I hope that we can bring that about,” she concluded. “Journalists and PR pros have always had a love-hate relationship, but at the end of the day, we need each other.”
