Worst corp comms blunder: they paid to make it less valuable

I sat on this take for a couple of weeks to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Now I can confidently say:

OpenAI’s acquisition of the TBPN livestream is one of the worst self-inflicted blunders in corporate communications history.

And there’s an important lesson for you about the blind spot even brilliant business leaders can have around third-party credibility.

To be sure, TBPN is wildly successful at reaching a valuable audience – I wrote about that last May. More power to those guys for getting bought for “low hundreds of millions”!

And corporate-owned media can make sense. HubSpot buying biz newsletter The Hustle worked because the outlet could serve a broad business audience without constantly covering HubSpot or marketing software.

But TBPN’s core subject matter overlaps directly with OpenAI’s most obvious and sensitive interests. TBPN was already very tech-forward, AI-friendly . . . already interviewing OpenAI execs and covering OpenAI announcements.

And when they did so, their audience – the tech talent and investors OpenAI wants to reach – took it for granted that the coverage came because the news was significant.

But now OpenAI has ruined that. Any time the show covers anything related to AI, that super valuable audience will have a pesky little nagging feeling that the editorial slant is leaning toward the corporate overlord.

Of course, OpenAI declared that they will exert no editorial influence. Even if they actually don’t, it’s the perception that matters. The WSJ still carries immense weight in the business community, but not for matters related to its owner, the Murdoch family of businesses.

To sum this up, one day OpenAI enjoyed consistently favorable coverage from an outlet trusted by their most valuable target audience. And then they paid actual money to remove the “trusted” from that sentence.

The lesson for you

Executives often fail to distinguish reach from credibility. Yes, TBPN reaches the exact people OpenAI wants to reach. But so do billboards in the San Jose airport. The difference is the trust that the TBPN hosts have developed with their audience. OpenAI’s ownership makes that trust harder to preserve.

Never assume your executives get this distinction. Constantly remind them of the value of third-party credibility. Remind them why organic mentions, shares and coverage matter differently than paid and owned.

Trust beats reach.

Trusted reach beats both.