Accelerating Digital PR Campaigns with AI

Legal sign-off slowing your PR campaign down? Or wondering whether an idea will actually land with the press? At Propellernet, we’ve built internal AI tools to solve both problems – speeding up approvals and sharpening our campaign thinking before we pitch.

At our recent AI Summit, I shared how we’re using AI not just to speed up PR workflows, but to make our campaigns smarter and more impactful from the start. From internal tools like Carin – our AI legal consultant – to Sandbox, which stress-tests campaign ideas against media personas, we’re reimagining the early stages of ideation and sign-off. These tools have already helped reduce the time between idea to launch, refine ideas in real-time, and boost the chances of landing high-value coverage. What might seem like small innovations are actually unlocking significant time and creative potential across our digital PR process.

Why We Built Carin: An AI Legal Consultant for PR

We created Carin to help solve a recurring challenge: getting legal approval on digital PR ideas without weeks of delay. We tested Carin on one of our past campaigns, which involved a nationwide treasure hunt. Users solved clues, entered coordinates into the What3Words app, and were directed to a physical location where they could dig up a set of keys to win a Fiat 500. It was creative, fun, and gained strong press coverage.

Our client was fully on board with the idea. But for larger brands with more red tape, it would’ve raised some red flags and could easily have been delayed by a lot of back-and-forth with a legal team.

When we ran the concept through Carin, it immediately highlighted factors such as health and safety risks around digging and crowd control, permissions required for using private land, GDPR concerns and user data collection, and prize draw and gambling regulations.

That feedback all came instantly rather than after weeks of legal review. When we’re dealing with large brands, being able to address all of those concerns up-front can reduce friction and save a significant amount of time.

It’s a small intervention, but the potential time saving is huge. And beyond that, it helps us assess the real-world viability of our ideas much earlier in the process.

From Idea to Coverage: Introducing Sandbox

We also presented Sandbox. While Carin helps with legal and compliance, Sandbox helps us improve ideas based on editorial fit.

Sandbox is an internal tool we’re still beta testing. It allows us to run campaign concepts through simulated media personas – AI representations of real publications like The Sun, The Independent, or The New York Times.

Here’s how it works:

• The tool uses AI to generate a persona for each publication we add (and we can manually edit these personas too)
• We put in a detailed breakdown of a PR campaign idea
• We choose the publications we want to test it against
• Sandbox uses AI to stress test the idea against each publication

It uses previous examples of coverage, tone of voice, and publication preferences to give us a percentage likelihood – and more importantly, it gives us a rationale for why it’s scored it the way it has.

It also gives tailored suggestions to increase the chance of success. It lets our consultants tweak and iterate on the idea, and gives them a fast feedback loop so they can refine their campaigns before they pitch them out.

Why This Matters

Neither of these tools are showy or overly complex. But they’re making a real difference with Carin helping us avoid weeks in legal limbo and Sandbox helping us refine ideas before they leave the room.

Together, they make us faster, smarter, and more effective – helping us launch better campaigns with a higher chance of success.

Conclusion

AI doesn’t need to replace creativity, it just needs to support it. Tools like Carin and Sandbox are helping us streamline approvals, reduce risks, and creatively tailor campaigns that resonate with both media and audiences. In PR, timing is everything, and these tools are helping us deliver stronger, smarter campaigns, faster.

Want to future-proof your PR strategy? Let’s chat about how AI can accelerate your next campaign. Get in touch!